The desire to advertise his foods as the most inviting, and the necessity of making those foods live up to their advertising, had spurred him on until housewives in those former times had the same confidence in foods bearing well known names that they had in those prepared by their own hands.

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Interesting is the case of the vacuum-cleaner, a substitute for the broom, which was coming into fairly common use at the beginning of the present century. Suppose that in this present day, with its primitive distributing and merchandising methods, an inventor should produce a similar device. The vacuum-cleaner, it must be explained to a generation which has seen them only in museums, is radically different from a broom. It removed the dirt and dust by suction applied through a miniature revolving-fan operated by a small motor. No housewife used to a broom could imagine what this new device was for unless it was explained to her. It did not look like a broom, and yet it was the modern scientific evolution of the broom. Also it cost more than several dozen brooms. Thus it would be necessary to teach her not only the actual advantages, but, further, that the more expensive device was an economic investment not merely because it lasted longer than many brooms, but because it saved health and strength and labor.

If we could imagine a manufacturer to-day so indifferent to these insuperable difficulties as to go ahead and make up a few, and further a retailer in some way learning of it and buying one and putting it in his store, there was no possible means by which a housewife

could possibly happen to buy one. The whole process would fail for lack of the two educational factors of advertising and selling. The advertising would have explained the idea to the woman and created a desire for the vacuum-cleaner, and the salesman would have told the dealer about it, and especially made the dealer understand that the women would buy them, if he put them in his stock, on account of the preliminary educational work that the advertising had done. as a matter of fact, no genius is so foolish as to waste any time trying to invent a vacuum-cleaner or any other such device. such device. He has enough to do trying to assemble the elementary articles that are necessary for food, clothing, and shelter.

But,

For while we are talking about vacuum-cleaners, vacuum-cleaners, many housewives are sweeping their floors with brooms or besoms made by rudely binding together a bundle of twigs, producing an implement like that with which green keepers used to sweep worm casts from the putting-greens in the days when many people played an expensive and foolish game known as golf. And others use turkey and goose wings for hearth brushes. More and more homemade and primitive devices are being used in housekeeping and in the practice of such arts and industries as do not depend on a large distribution for success.

The amount of work the modern housewife does in the course of her day is greatly increased over that which tradition says was her grandmother's lot. Many of her utensils are made by her husband; others are fashioned by the local tinsmith or wood-worker. Her clothes, and those of her husband and children, are all

made by local tailors or dressmakers or by her own hands, as the readymade garments now for sale at the few stores are of such limited range in sizes, styles, and materials, and at such high prices, as to be prohibitive for any but the well-to-do. In some homes there are not only spinningwheels, but looms, and even the wool is raised on the place and passes through all the stages from raw material to finished garments under the same pair of hands. The shoes are made by the cobbler from leather tanned by the local tanner, and some are actually home-made and have wooden soles.

Those who do not raise their own wheat buy flour of the farmers who have taken their grain to the local miller to be ground, and the picturesque custom of taking toll has been reëstablished. Each city, town, and village is tending toward becoming absolutely self-contained and selfsupporting, as in the Middle Ages. The food that a town consumes is raised in the fields roundabout, and raw materials for various manufactures as far as possible.

We still have steam and electricity, and the railroads carry such freight as is available under such limited opportunities of finding out about anything; but the railroads are greatly reduced, miles of track have rusted out and disappeared, and a much smaller equipment is sufficient to take care of the freight and passenger traffic that now exists. The first great blow to the railroads was the loss at one stroke of the mileage of the traveling salesmen, which averaged one hundred million miles a week. People travel little for pleasure now. They do not know where to go. Some have motor

cars, made and assembled by hand. The ownership of such a magnificent vehicle is, of course, confined to the very rich, just as was the private railroad car in former times.

The most serious feature of the situation appears to be that things have not yet run their course. It seems that a civilization must either go forward or backward. Intolerable as is the present state of living, social economists believe that the debacle has only just begun, and that the inability to advertise or sell anything will ultimately result in turning these United States back to the social and economic condition of England in the time of Richard the Lion-Hearted, as so vividly described in the opening of "Ivanhoe," where Gurth and Wamba hold their discussion about AngloSaxon swine and Norman French pork. Even now in the small and remote towns of this country the poverty is very great, and families are living in rudely constructed houses without a single convenience. Every bit of food, wearing apparel, and every implement they use, and all the furniture in their houses, have been fashioned by their own not very skilful hands. They have no money, no means of earning money, and there is very little they could buy with it if they had it. In some of these families a story is told of an evening around the hearth that has been handed down until it has become a tradition, how their great-greatgrandmother had a house furnished with the most unbelievably wonderful things. It was said that she had an instrument in her home that would render perfectly any piece of music, even vocal; that she had another machine which would play on the piano (few have even pianos now); she could

freeze ice in the box where she kept her provisions, and it was always cool in there (better than hanging things down the well); that when she wanted heat, she merely turned a valve, for her house was heated with steam carried to every room by pipes, and when she wanted hot water she turned it on from a tap; she could toast a bit of bread or make coffee or boil an egg by thrusting a plug in the wall; she cleaned her floors by pushing about a device that licked up the dust and dirt; she had a stove so perfect that you just put the cake or bread in the oven and set a pointer, and when it was baked, the stove turned itself off; she kept all her supplies in a cabinet of white enameled metal, with a shelf or pocket or bin for every ingredient and every utensil used in cooking, and these ingredients came from the store in boxes and tins, sealed up tight, in just the right quantity with full directions for making printed on the outside; she had flat-irons that would heat themselves, and ironing-boards that folded up and disappeared in the wall, a machine that would wash the clothes, and another that would wash the dishes (they had more clothes and more dishes in those wonderful days) and all kinds of soaps, powdered and flaked, for making quick suds, and beautifully shaped and scented and tinted and pure for the hands (so much better than the soft soap mother boiled in the kettle, which chapped your hands); and there were all sorts of delightful powders and perfumes and pastes and creams for the hands and face and hair and teeth and skin, so that it was really a pleasure to make oneself look beautiful.

These, of course, are the legends of the small towns, which have in the

course of eighty years become absolutely primitive as far as the machinery and furniture of civilization are concerned. In the large cities it is still possible for people of means to have made up specially and to order such things as kitchen cabinets, phonographs, ographs, vacuum-cleaners, fireless cookers, sewing-machines, gas-ranges, hot-water heaters, and other old-time conveniences, very much as their ancestors used to have made reproductions of old highboys and court cupboards. There are a number of small manufacturers who make a specialty of such work, and their names and addresses can be learned by diligent inquiry. Indeed, many of the well-to-do have some of the comforts and conveniences that the poor had in 1920.

Societies for psychical research and other learned scientific and economic bodies and many independent investigators have sought diligently for the cause of the strange inhibition of advertising and selling which has rested like a pall over civilization for eight decades, but the greatest public interest centers around an offer of a prize of five hundred thousand dollars, which is a larger amount of money in our days than it used to be. This vast award is offered by one of the wealthiest men of the country. He inherited his wealth from an ancestor who amassed it by the manufacture and sale of a self-propelled vehicle which had great popularity eighty years ago, and so large was the amount he inherited that despite the general decay of prosperity he has retained what for these days is a large fortune. The prize is offered to any one who will invent or devise a practical and satisfactory substitute for advertising and selling.

A

TRADITION persists that Bath was founded eight hundred and ninety years before the time of Christ and in this wise. A certain man named Bladud, "the great-grandson of Venus," was once heir-apparent to the British throne, which in those days was no better than a great boulder out of Stonehenge. And he fell sick of leprosy, cherished then by fashion like our blood pressure and hardened arteries. He was banished from the court and wandered to Somerset, where he fell to be a swineherd. And now, having given his leprosy to his pigs, he observed them plunging into a hot stream hard by the sty. He ceased his "coo-baa" for a closer look. On the farther bank his pigs were wallowing out, whole and clean. Whereat he broke the Celtic custom and straightway took a bath himself. And was cured. All this, I fancy, happened on a Saturday. So he founded a city, took to himself a beautiful wife, became King of England, and the father of old Lear, in the most approved method of fairy-tales. Later he journeyed to the East, practised magic, and met the distinguished men of the Old Testament. "He had many fast friends, and among the fastest" was the prophet Elijah.

A gesture of a thousand years, and then the Romans came to England and built a village at these baths, with a

magnificence of structure that shows how solidly their civilization sat upon the island. This is constantly a surprise to the uninitiate. He thinks of Roman occupation, remembering it in Cæsar's wars, as military, as a force that moved across the land and drove the natives to subjection. For him the Romans built bridges only for their marching armies, and dug nothing but trenches for defense. For him it is a race of soldiers, of men with sword and pike. And consequently he neglects the centuries of establishment, the flow of peaceful arts, the routine of easy life, the structures built for luxury and pleasure, the long generations that tilled the soil and housed themselves in cities until they grew native to the country and knew no other home than England.

A gentleman of Bath or York or Lincoln, if he were so lucky as to visit Rome, went almost like an American who goes to London. He had no need to hang his head as a raw provincial; for he had his baths, his palaces and public walks, arcades against the sun and rain, his monuments to emperors, his massive buildings to administer the Roman law. Some of this has been unearthed, but it is likely that much more lies hidden and covered by the modern pavements. It was only a few years ago, at London, that a Roman boat was found in the mud of the

Thames, while workmen were excavating for a large abutment of the county hall; and similar Roman relics will be found in any ancient English city that shall choose to dig. And so, here at Bath, we may see their masonry, the steps and tessellation, the piping made of lead that served as conduit to their pools, the stone of statuary and ornament that was set up when the Cæsars ruled the seven hills and all the world beside. One may sit in fancy on a marble bench with a gentleman in toga, or sweat with him in his sudarium. He may thrust his head through an opening of the wall and see the water steaming from the earth as once it bubbled up for a Roman governor, as once in older days it flowed hot for Bladud's pigs. For a thousand centuries nature has stoked the furnace and set its kettle on for ailing and soiled humanity.

Roman Bath was not a great city, like York or Colchester or Lincoln, yet its yield of Roman vestige is the greatest of all. This is explained by its distance from the older centers of population, where there was greater destruction of the old to supply new needs, and by the enduring stone that is native to the district. The remains of Bath, moreover, are bedded deep and permit a city to be built on top; and thus they have been preserved for future excavation. There was a Roman wall around the town, although its course is only guessed, and the foundations of the gates will be undiscovered until some later spade digs them up.

But Bath, as now we know it best, is a city of the eighteenth century. It had some glimmerings of importance in the days of Charles II, who paid it a visit and drank the "killibeate,"

which must then have had a "strong flavour o' warm flat-irons," as it had later to Sam Weller, who attended Mr. Pickwick; but Pepys mentions it as a somewhat colorless city of second-rate importance, scanty company, and primitive pleasures. "And by and by

," he writes, "much company come; very fine ladies; and the manner pretty enough, only methinks it cannot be clean to go so many bodies together in the same water. Carried away wrapped in a sheet, and in a chair home; and there one after another thus carried (I staying above two hours in the water) home to bed, sweating for an hour. And by and by comes musick to play to me, extraordinary good as ever I heard at London almost any where: 5s."

But it was in the year 1702, when Queen Anne came to take the waters, that the fortunes of Bath really rose. A procession of townsfolk, alive to this great honor, went forth on horseback, with horns and garlands, to the limits of the county to bring in with fitting pageantry their dumpy queen. And from that time forth the city was a place of fashion and set about to build itself to a fit accommodation.

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The real history of Bath is coincident with Beau Nash, and nearly every one has read his life, written by Oliver Goldsmith. Nash was born at Swansea in 1674, of a family of modest means, and having been rusticated from Oxford for some intrigue, he bought a commission in the army. Presently he tired of its lace and buttons, sold his commission, and entered the Temple to study law, supplying his needs then, as in later years, by the fortunes of the gaming