the newspaper and the bill-board
to the drummer, the diplomatic representative and the commercial
missionary.

Every year saw some new invention that increased the product per man,
the development of some new advertising device, the conquest of some new
territory or the delimitation of some new "sphere of influence," and the
revelation of some new possibility in the covetousness of man. Profits
rose to new heights and accumulating dividends clamoured for new
opportunities for investment. Competition tended to cut down returns,
therefore labour was more and more sustained through diminished wages
and laws that savagely prevented any concerted effort towards
self-defense. Improvements in agricultural processes and the application
of machinery and steam power, together with bulk-production and
scientific localization of crops, threw great quantities of
farm-labourers out of work and drove them into the industrial towns,
while advances in medical science and in sanitation raised the
proportion of births to deaths and soon provided a surplus of potential
labour so that the operation of the "law of supply and demand," extolled
by a new philosophy and enforced by the new "representative" or
democratic and parliamentary government, resulted in an unfailing supply
of cheap labour paid wages just beyond the limit of starvation.

At last there came evidences that the limit had been reached; the whole
world had been opened up and pre-empted, labour was beginning to demand
and even get more adequate wages, competition, once hailed as "the life
of trade" was becoming so fierce that dividends were dwindling.
Something had to be done and in self-defense industries began to
coalesce in enormous "trusts" and "combines" and monopolies.
Capitalization of millions now ran into billions, finance became
international in its scope and gargantuan in its proportions and
ominousness, advertising grew from its original simplicity and naivete
into a vast industry based on all that the most ingenious professors
could tell of applied psychology, subsidizing artists, poets, men of
letters, employing armies of men along a hundred different lines,
expending millions annually in its operations, making the modern
newspaper possible, and ultimately developing the whole system of
propaganda which has now become the one great determining factor in the
making of public opinion.

When the twentieth century opened, that industrialism which had begun
just a