. They will
not be affected by advertisements, any more than the priests and
peasants of the Middle Ages would have been affected by advertisements.
Only a very soft-headed, sentimental, and rather servile generation of
men could possibly be affected by advertisements at all. People who are
a little more hard-headed, humorous, and intellectually independent, see
the rather simple joke; and are not impressed by this or any other form
of self-praise. Almost any other men in almost any other age would have
seen the joke. If you had said to a man in the Stone Age, 'Ugg says Ugg
makes the best stone hatchets,' he would have perceived a lack of
detachment and disinterestedness about the testimonial. If you had said
to a medieval peasant, 'Robert the Bowyer proclaims, with three blasts
of a horn, that he makes good bows,' the peasant would have said, 'Well,
of course he does,' and thought about something more important. It is
only among people whose minds have been weakened by a sort of mesmerism
that so transparent a trick as that of advertisement could ever have
been tried at all. And if ever we have again, as for other reasons I
cannot but hope we shall, a more democratic distribution of property and
a more agricultural basis of national life, it would seem at first sight
only too likely that all this beautiful superstition will perish, and
the fairyland of Broadway with all its varied rainbows fade away. For
such people the Seventh Heaven Cigar, like the nineteenth-century city,
will have ended in smoke. And even the smoke of it will have vanished.

But the next stage of reflection brings us back to the peasant looking
at the lights of Broadway. It is not true to say in the strict sense
that the peasant has never seen such things before. The truth is that he
has seen them on a much smaller scale, but for a much larger purpose.
Peasants also have their ritual and ornament, but it is to adorn more
real things. Apart from our first fancy about the peasant who could not
read, there is no doubt about what would be apparent to a peasant who
could read, and who could understand. For him also fire is sacred, for
him also colour is symbolic. But where he sets up a candle to light the
little shrine of St. Joseph, he finds it takes twelve hundred candles to
light the Seventh Heaven Cigar. He is used to the colours in church
windows showing red for martyrs or blue for madonnas; but here he can
only conclude that all the colours of the