e system could not have succeeded or continue to
function. It is bad in itself as the support and strength of a bad
institution, but its guilt does not stop here. So plausible is it, so
essential to the very existence of the contemporary regime, so knit up
with all the commonest affairs of life, so powerful in its organization
and broad in its operations, it has poisoned, and continues to poison,
the minds of men so that the headlong process of losing all sense of
comparative values is accelerated, while every instinctive effort at
recovery and readjustment is nullified. How far this process has gone
may be illustrated by two instances. It is only a few months ago that a
most respected clergyman publicly declared that missionaries were the
greatest and most efficient asset to trade because they were unofficial
commercial agents who opened up new and savage countries to Western
commerce through advertising commodities of which the natives had never
heard, and arousing in them a sense of acquisitiveness that meant more
wealth and business for trade and manufacture, which should support
foreign missions on this ground at least. More recently the head of an
advertising concern in New York is reported to have said: "It is
principally through advertising that we have arrived at the high degree
of civilization which this age enjoys, for advertising has taught us the
use of books and how to furnish our homes with the thousand and one
comforts that add so materially to our physical and intellectual
well-being. The future of the world depends on advertising. Advertising
is the salvation of civilization, for civilization cannot outlive
advertising a century."

It is tempting to linger over such a delectable morsel as this, for even
if it is only the absurd and irresponsible output of one poor, foolish
man, it does express more or less what industrial civilization holds to
be true, though few would avow their faith so whole-heartedly. The
statement was made as propaganda, and propaganda is merely advertising
in its most insidious and dangerous form. The thing revealed its
possibilities during the war, but the black discredit that was then very
justly attached to it could not prevail against its manifest potency,
and it is now universally used after the most comprehensive and
frequently unscrupulous fashion, with results that can only be perilous
in the extreme. The type and calibre of mind that has now been released
from long bonda