med patiently to pay an equal amount for his quarter page,
whether it is on the left half or the right, on the lower or on the
upper part of the page. The experiment demonstrated that the words on
the upper right-hand quarter had about twice the memory value of those
on the lower left. The advertiser who is accustomed to spend for his
insertion on the lower left the same sum as for that on the upper
right throws half his expenditure away. He reaches only half of the
customers, or takes only half a grasp of those whom he reaches. This
case, which can be easily demonstrated by careful experiments, is
typical of the tremendous waste which goes on in the budget of the
advertising community. And yet the advertiser would not like to act
like the poet who sings his song not caring whose heart he will stir.

As long as the psychologist is only aware of an inexcusable waste of
means by lack of careful research into the psychological reactions of
the reader, he may leave the matter to the business circles which have
to suffer by their carelessness. But this economic wrong may coincide
with cultural values in other fields, and the social significance of
the problem may thus become accentuated. A problem of this double
import, economic and cultural at the same time, to-day faces
publishers, advertisers, and readers. It is of recent origin, but it
has grown so rapidly and taken such important dimensions that at
present it overshadows all other debatable questions in the realm of
propaganda. The movement to which we refer is the innovation of mixing
reading matter and advertisements on the same page. In the good old
times a monthly magazine like _McClure's_ or the _American_ or the
_Metropolitan_ or the _Cosmopolitan_ showed an arrangement which
allowed a double interpretation. One interpretation, the idealistic
one, was that the magazine consisted of articles and stories in solid
unity, which formed the bulk of the issue. In front of this content,
and after it, pages with advertisements were attached. The other
interpretation, which suggested itself to the less ambitious reader,
was that the magazine consisted of a heap of entertaining
advertisement pages, between which the reading matter was sandwiched.
But in any case there was nowhere mutual interference. The articles
stood alone, and the automobiles, crackers, cameras, and other wares
stood alone, too. All this has been completely changed in the last two
or three years. With a f