stock phrases which deceive nobody, such
as "the most for the money," "the cheapest in the market," etc., what
is said about the goods to be sold is not in the least overdrawn. I
have taken the pains to go over the advertising columns of the leading
papers and periodicals of New York during the month of February, and,
with the exception of a few medical, financial, and perhaps real-estate
advertisements, I could find absolutely nothing that on the face of it
seemed fraudulent, and very little that was misleading. The advertisers
have at last come to realize that for the long run, whatever the rule
may be for the short run, it does not pay to overstate the qualities of
their merchandise. You can now order your purchases by mail from the
advertising pages of any reputable publication about as safely as over
the counter of a store. At all events the phenomenal growth of the
mail-order houses and their sales through advertising, lend strength to
this opinion. On the 15th of March, 1909, a single Chicago mail-order
house sent to the Post Office six million catalogues, weighing four
hundred and fifty tons, and all were to be distributed within a week.

Many periodicals now claim that they will not take advertisements that
look fraudulent or even misleading. Some papers, like the London
"Times," have a guaranteed list of advertisements which they have
investigated and vouch for, though naturally the advertisers have to
pay extra for the guarantee.

"The Sunday School Times" printed, several weeks ago, a long list of
secular papers that were "going dry," as so many of our Southern
states. The fact that our best periodicals no longer accept liquor
advertisements is another one of the encouraging signs of the coming of
the new journalism.

The vigorous fight that "The Ladies' Home Journal" and "Collier's"
waged against the patent-medicine concerns is too fresh in the public
memory to need recounting here. The two pictures printed cheek by jowl
in "The Ladies' Home Journal,"--one, of the tombstone above the mortal
remains of Lydia E. Pinkham, whose inscription showed that she had been
dead since 1883, and the other an advertisement representing Lydia in
1905, sitting in her laboratory at Lynn, Massachusetts, engrossed in
assuaging the sufferings of ailing womanhood,--these are eloquent of
the type of fraud perpetrated through the press upon a gullible public.

Similarly, in the negro papers the favorite advertisements are thos