produced by the others. These causes are fashion (as it affects manufacture); inventions and discoveries; changing habits (sometimes but not always created by the inventions and discoveries, and sometimes even by the fashions); and the responsiveness of the public mind, due to the cumulative effect of advertising. These are powerful in their influence on business, not in themselves, but in the universality of their adoption. It is unimportant economically what a few people do, but when the entire populace does it the results are registered automatically in a thousand factories.

Fashion has ever been a wayward hussy. Fortunes have been spent in the vain attempt to dictate to her, or to control her, or even to forecast her. The first important advertising I worked on was for a skirt binding, a tough, durable strip of cloth bound to the hems of dresses to protect them from the pavement. The brief-skirted flappers of to-day probably do not know that such a product ever existed. Twenty-five years ago many factories made it; its advertising was abundant; it was apparently an abiding industry. It disappeared gradually. Its makers had time to experiment with other products, to adjust their machines to making something else, and to adjust their sales to a new market. Not so to-day. If the trailing skirt had lingered on to the post-war period, it would be in keeping with the high-speed temper of this era to have made the two-foot jump in a single season.

Involved somehow with fashion, and frequently mistaken for it, is a similar influence, best described as a craze or a fad, which also produces concerted action from millions. Raccoon coats, soft collars, the Charleston, 'So's your old man,' Helen Wills skeleton caps, crossword puzzles, Mah Jongg, 'Valencia,' compacts, stickers on the wind

shield, are called fashions only by a popular misuse of the word. On the other hand, such crazes are not to be confused with habits, which are a more complicated department of social and economic investigation. Prohibition, the eight-hour work day, installment buying, greater frankness toward sex, have all created new sets of habits which have their effects on business. The present indifference to money, to the cost of things, fewer appeals to thrift, greater emphasis on gratification, the logical result of abundant money, shorter hours, the five-day week, higher wages, and the utter disappearance of the old-time price levels for staples, have changed the entire selling appeal of many products.

Invention and discovery hardly need comment. We contemplate with sangfroid a new one every day. Hardly has the radio become practicable when the air is crowded, and there is dispute over wave lengths.

'See the airplane,' said a father of my acquaintance to his ten-year-old daughter the other day, with the wonder of a generation which has seen the birth of flying.

'No, Father,' replied the child of a new era, 'that is a hydroplane.'

Have you noticed the pictures of the new heaters, looking more like phonograph cabinets than furnaces, being tended by paterfamilias in full dress and white gloves? As the advertisements say, 'the cellar has a future.' Arthur D. Little, industrial chemist, observes:

The fuel industries are in an extraordinary state of flux, and many revolutionary developments are impending. The use of powdered coal is rapidly extending. Lowmaking headway. We are coming slowly temperature carbonization is steadily. but certainly to an artificial anthracite and we may confidently look to coal for a proportion of our motor spirit. Cheap oxygen

is almost here, and when it comes there will be profound changes in combustion methods and in metallurgical practice, and these will require new refractories.

And while the chemist looks at the fuel of the future we have already seen the old familiar cellar, freed from coal and ashes, added to the living rooms of the house by means of the oil burner. The coal wagon disappears in the offing, following the ice wagon over the hill to oblivion.

The three forces, then, which are injecting into the conduct of business a new hazard are fashion, new ideas, and changing habits; but what makes them formidable is the speed with which they spread and the unanimity with which they are adopted. Advertising is responsible for both the speed and the unanimity. The continuing body of advertising has produced a receptive state of mind. Advertising is accessory before the fact as well as after. It has created a public, almost coextensive with the population of the country, that reveals an amazing willingness to adopt anything, or, to put it more emphatically, a determination not to be left behind a sort of mad scramble to have, do, and be whatever is popular at the moment. The individualist is apt to be lonely.

The manufacturer, whatever he may make, however basic and staple, however well entrenched in the homes of the country, can no longer settle down and let things take their course. He must now hold himself ready to act and act quickly, interpret the signs, anticipate the new attitude of the public, analyze each new invention or discovery for its effects, immediate or ultimate, on his own business. He must sleep like a fireman, fully dressed, ready to dash out at a moment's notice. The silk manufacturers are all watching rayon, that strange new silklike fabric

that a German chemist made out of cotton. The telephone company's experimental laboratory has led the van in experiments with radio, anticipating each new discovery. What if some development of wireless should render fifty thousand miles of wire and poles so much scrap material? When war conditions taught tire makers that lamp black was a better ingredient of rubber than zinc oxide, and the public took kindly to black tires, the zinc people turned their energies to paint and developed another market. The Victor Talking Machine Company did not at first take the radio seriously, with the result that it passed a dividend for the first time in its history. But its readjustment was magnificent. It promptly developed a greatly improved instrument, on a new principle, and last year declared a greatly improved dividend.

The smooth-shaven face has come to be the accepted type of the American business man. Beards are the badge of radicals, savants, and artists. The safety razor has made us a nation of self-shavers, and around this habit have grown up many industries making and selling such accessories as shaving creams, lotions, and talcum powders. The soap has seen four successive reincarnations, as cake used with a mug and as stick, powder, and cream, and now we have preparations that do away with soap. Think what an upheaval would be caused in many businesses if the nation decided to tarry in Jericho and let its beards grow. Such a change of habit is not so improbable as many we have seen happen. The minute whiskers in front of the ears, the earmarks formerly of the bishop and the butler, affected by Rudolph Valentino have inspired emulation on the part of a number of would-be sheiks. At least one manufacturer pretends to be fearful of such a throwback, and has started a backfire. For a year

the advertisements of Colgate and Company have been illustrated with pictures from old photograph albums, showing the hirsute adornments of the gay nineties and holding them up to ridicule. Advertising to create new habits is common, but here is an example of the use of advertising to forestall and prevent the return of a habit which would deprive many products of a market.

Hand-to-mouth buying was an emergency practice adopted during the deflation period following the war. Retailers bought only enough goods to supply their immediate needs, to avoid being caught by falling prices. The contemptuous term applied to it reveals that it was looked upon as a temporary device, a makeshift, to keep the machinery running. Instead, it has won its place as sound merchandising. The goods now remain on the wholesaler's shelves or in the manufacturer's warehouse until they are actually needed for retail sale. The dealer carries less stock, needs less room, ties up less capital, and actually does a larger business in a shop the size of a sitting room (and furnished very much like one) than he used to do in the old-fashioned store, a long, narrow room about twenty-five by one hundred feet, with counters on both sides and shelves and bins behind the counters from floor to ceiling filled with goods, some of which had stood there until they had become veritable antiques. The modern retailer buys only what he knows he can sell, and buys it shortly before he sells it, smaller quantities at more frequent intervals. Production and consumption are brought closer together. The manufacturer is more acutely conscious of his real customer our old friend, the ultimate consumer. He measures his sales by what the public has actually bought, not by what his salesmen have succeeded in loading the dealer

up with. Thus greater elasticity is given to the machinery for making and selling goods. This is one more instance of the alert condition of business. It is traveling light, ready to change its course on short notice. It increases speed, but it equally increases control -eighty horsepower, but four-wheel brakes.

The purpose of national advertising is to bring the maker and the user of goods together, to make them better acquainted, so that the maker will know better what the user wants and the user will have more confidence in the goods because he knows their maker. Hand-to-mouth buying now shortens the time between the factory and the home. The manufacturer is in a position to learn quickly what his customer wants and act promptly on what he learns. Some slack has been taken up, belts shortened, bolts tightened, and the vast machine that is the nation's business does more with less clutter and lost motion.

A glance should be given to the men who hold the purse strings. Behind business is the banker who one way or another furnishes the money to finance it. For years the banker had thought of business in terms of production. He loaned money to build factories, buy equipment, extend physical property. Now and then some adventurous soul would ask for a loan to buy advertising, and the banker would be shocked at such frivolity. Along came installment selling. About everything is now sold on the deferred payment plan. Installment selling means that bankers are now financing consumption, willynilly, and must perforce take an interest in consumption, which includes a better understanding of advertising, by which consumption is maintained.

This contact with advertising is humanizing the banks. Bankers learn from manufacturers something more

than the value of advertising. They have come out from behind their marble counters and bronze grilles with a new conception of what a bank may be to a community. They have gotten over their fear of losing dignity, and have found that there is no loss of dignity involved in telling people in words they understand that a bank is just as useful and friendly an institution as a department store. Many years ago an advertising man talked to the board of directors of a bank. He told them that banks seemed cold and forbidding to the average man; that when a bank published an advertisement it was a formal statement, couched in language no human being used; that its technical terms were unintelligible to multitudes who none the less qualified to be customers; and that a great opportunity was offered that financial institution which first laid aside the dignity which hedged a bank and fended off the public. He suggested that this bank do what many of the most conservative banks have done since talk to its customers as a man would talk with another, explaining and defining the terms it used, and radiate a sort of friendly and inviting atmosphere. In reply the president said he believed that it was all true. 'But,' he said, 'we could not do any thing like that, even though it would probably increase the business of the bank and widen its sphere of influence, because if we did other banks would laugh at us.' To-day the laugh is on those banks so oblivious of the time in which they live that they continue to conduct their business as though dealing with a bank were compulsory, like dealing with the post office.

Not only do banks use the methods of getting closer to the people that have proved successful in more homely businesses, but bankers are transferring their interest from making goods

to selling them. They are acquiring businesses that have been created by advertising with the intention of increasing them by the same means. They are trading in that most tangible of assets, good will. When bankers become receivers of a business, they no longer lop off the advertising expenditure as a necessary retrenchment. One of the first announcements by the bankers who are reorganizing the Chicago, Milwaukee and St. Paul into the Chicago, Milwaukee and Pacific is of a million-dollar appropriation to advertise the new name, an action that would have been inconceivable a dozen years ago.

IV

Such is a hasty and imperfect catalogue of the new forces which are impinging on an old established business order and making a kaleidoscope every turn of which groups the old fragments in new and fascinating patterns. These are some of the things the advertising man sees when he looks at his world. He finds new problems added to and superimposed upon old ones. To the ordinary man-sized job of selling an established product in an established market have been added two other problems: what to do with an established product when its established market dries up, and how to present to the public a new idea the acceptance of which demands sloughing off old groups of habits and acquiring a new set in their stead, as the housewife is being weaned from lard to a shortening that is both liquid and vegetable. It is like going from simple arithmetic to differential calculus. Instead of dealing with tangible digits, we must reckon with x, an unknown quantity raised to the nth power. The advertising man is expected to find the answer. More and more in this complicated

modern business world the manufacturer is turning to him for advice; for prophecy almost, as Belshazzar turned to Daniel. And the advertising man must interpret what the hand is writing on the wall, or be thrown to the lions.

The fluid condition of business, the possibilities it offers of new combinations, the promptness with which the public accepts and applies everything offered to it, from filling stations to nonfiction books, creating a new social structure as it drifts from camp to camp in its flivver, but making a best seller of a book about philosophy, - invite and tempt the new type of advertising man. Advertising in its narrow sense is but the door through which he enters a world where anything may happen, and no dream seems too fantastic to be realized. No wonder all the sad young men are deserting literature to become advertising experts.

Consider the discussion that has gone on for years about those periods of depression known as hard times. It was believed that they were inevitable, that business moved in cycles, that the pendulum must swing back, that action must produce reaction. Yet it has been realized for a long time that such periods are due to states of mind, when for some mysterious reason everyone becomes apprehensive, stops buying, ceases to act as one who believes in the continuance of prosperity. The thought spreads from mind to mind, weak businesses fail, banks call their loans, sales fall off, and everybody gives and receives the impression that business is not good and it is not.

To-day the most pessimistic cannot ignore the signs of prosperity. The business world is saying, 'Every day and in every way business is growing better,' and paying to say it. At the close of 1926, Cyrus Curtis employed a

page advertisement in numerous newspapers to announce that more space has been booked for 1927 in his three publications than ever before in their history. A manufacturer has stated that he will spend in advertising, this year, the stupendous appropriation of twenty-five million dollars. Such incidents as these are more than indices of prosperity. They are guaranties that prosperity will be produced. They are causes rather than effects, but they reflect the belief of men who back their belief with their money, and by so doing make their belief come true. We have realized at last that prosperity is not merely wealth, or goods, or high wages. It is money in action, exchanged for goods. Securing prosperity by advertising for it is at least as certain as securing any other concerted action by the same means. When everybody is pessimistic, business is bad. When everybody is optimistic, business is good. Business continues to be good as long as people think it is. If they can be made to continue to think it is, as they have been made to think they want motor cars or silk stockings, then business cycles of alternating good and bad times are as obsolete as bicycles.

The new type of manufacturer will find the advertising man armed for the new adventure of business. Far from being dismayed by the changing aspects of industrial life, he realizes that the commercial world has become the field of high emprise, having something of the appeal of knight-errantry and something of the appeal of the Spanish Main, retaining the best features of both. The necessary work of making and selling things, formerly looked upon as both sordid and humdrum, is acquiring a glamour of romance. Up to very recent years the mercantile world was despised, even by those who belonged to it. In the past those who made things were artisans and those