reatened in all
others where industrial civilization is prevalent. With this has grown
up an artificially stimulated covetousness for a thousand futile
luxuries, and a standard of living that presupposes a thousand
non-essentials as basic necessities. Production for profit, not use,
excess production due to machinery, efficient organization, and surplus
of labour, together with the necessity for marketing the product at a
profit, have produced a state of things where at least one-half the
available labour in the country is engaged in the production and sale of
articles which are not necessary to physical, intellectual or spiritual
life, while of the remainder, hardly more than a half is employed in
production, the others are devoting themselves to distribution and to
the war of competition through advertising and the capturing of trade by
ingenious and capable salesmen. It is a significant fact that two of the
greatest industries in the United States are the making of automobiles
and moving pictures.

It is probably true to say that of the potential labour in the United
States, about one-fourth is producing those things which are physically,
intellectually and spiritually necessary; the remaining three-fourths
are essentially non-producers: they must, however, be housed, fed,
clothed, and amused, and the cost of this support is added to the cost
of the necessities of life. The reason for the present high cost of
living lies possibly here.

Lest I be misunderstood, let me say here that under the head of
necessities of life I do not mean a new model automobile each year,
moving pictures, mechanical substitutes for music or any other art, and
the thousand catch-trade devices that appear each year for the purpose
of filching business from another or establishing a new desire in the
already over-crowded imaginations of an over-stimulated populace.
Particularly do I not mean advertising in any sense in which it is now
understood and practised. If, as I believe to be the case, production
for profit, rather than for use, the reversal of the ancient doctrine
that the demand must produce the supply, in favour of the doctrine that
the supply must foster the demand, is the foundation of our economic
error and our industrial ills, then it follows that advertising as it is
now carried on by billboards, circulars and newspapers, by drummers,
solicitors and consular agents, falls in the same condemnation, for
except by its offices th