art, and which, on account of its
cheapness and attractiveness, has made possible literally thousands
of pictured publications that never could have existed before.

Fourth. The growing diffusion of education throughout the country. Our
high schools, to say nothing of our colleges and universities, alone
graduate 125,000 pupils a year,--all of them fit objects of solicitude
to the newsdealer and subscription-agent.

Fifth. The use of wood pulp in the manufacture of paper, by which the
largest item in the cost of production has been greatly diminished.

Sixth. The phenomenal growth of advertising.

I shall not attempt to amplify the first five of these causes
responsible for the unparalleled growth of periodical literature. But
the sixth I shall discuss at some length, for advertising is by all
odds the greatest factor in the case.

In olden times the dailies carried only a very little advertising--a
few legal notices, an appeal for the return of a strayed cow, or a
house for sale. It is only within the past fifty years that advertising
as a means of bringing together the producer and consumer began. And,
curiously enough, the men who first began to appreciate the immense
selling-power that lay in the printed advertisement were "makers" or
"fakirs," of patent medicines. The beginning of modern advertising is
in fact synchronous with the beginnings of the patent-medicine
business.

Even magazine advertising, which is now the most profitable and
efficacious of all kinds, did not originate until February, 1860, when
"The Atlantic Monthly" printed its first "ad." "Harper's" was founded
simply as a medium for selling the books issued from the Franklin
Square House, and all advertisements from outsiders were declined.
George P. Rowell, the dean of advertising agents, in his amusing
autobiography, tells how Harper & Brothers in the early seventies
refused an offer of $18,000 from the Howe Sewing Machine Company for a
year's use of the last page of the magazine; and Mr. Rowell adds that
he had this information from a member of the firm, of whose veracity he
had no doubt, though at the same sitting he heard Mr. Harper tell
another man about the peculiarities of that section of Long Island
where the Harpers originated, assuring him the ague prevailed there to
such an extent that all his ancestors had quinine put into their graves
to keep the corpses from shaking the sand off.

Before the Civil War it is said that the large