tion but upon the motor nerve of his attention so that he will act-these men shall be the designers and the builders of the world. Through their power of organizing and fertilizing and multiplying attention they shall lift up their visions before the lives of men, and through the machines, and through the millionaires, and through the crowds they shall spawn their wills upon the earth.

V

THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF AN "AD"

The same controlling principle will be found to apply to all of us-to any man who in a small way or a large way wants to make things happen.

The art of making things happen seems to be first the art of having an idea or event-vision.

Then it is the art of getting ourselves so that we can express the idea.

Then it is the art of getting other people to express it.

One stumbles along. Gradually one discovers certain principles and tries to apply them. I can only speak for myself, but when I began in dead earnest to try to get other people in their various ways to express my ideas with me, I found that the only way to get other people to express my ideas was to try to see if I could express theirs. They would not listen to mine until I showed that I understood theirs. And they would not notice that I understood theirs until they saw I had been of some real service to them and had really expressed them for them. As a matter of fact, they would not probably listen to my ideas at all until they found I could express their ideas for them a little better and more usefully than they could.

Then I noticed that most of the men in this country are business men and have business methods and habits of thought.

I noticed that as a class business men were not much given to expressing their ideas in words.

I observed that as a result of this there had risen up rather suddenly a large new class of men in America, a whole great

new profession of men who were devoting their entire lives to the art of expressing business men's ideas for them.

These men were called advertising men.

I became curious about advertising men. I began reading their works.

Truth seems to prefer to come sideways, to take a peek at one in strange, out-of-the-way places.

People have a theory that advertising is not to be taken very seriously, but if the best advertisement in Collier's Weekly for the year 1915 could write itself up and tell the story of its young life, or, rather, the innumerable little personal adventures it had in the minds of ninety million people, as it went out through the nation-if it could tell how it got a grip on the man who wrote and made him write it, and if it could tell how it got a grip on the rest of us when we read it, or why it did, or how it did not and why; if it could tell what it got out of our pockets during 1915 or what it made up our minds to allow it to take out in 1916-I do not believe there would be a business man or a salesman in the United States who would not be deeply and personally interested in the story. Or any other man. Everything we are all doing or trying to do turns on what would be in the autobiography of a good advertisement if it could speak up.

Everything all authors are trying to do—all poets, prophets, painters and singers, dreaming for the world—turns on what people would learn from one full, colossal autobiography of one national advertisement that could write itself up.

VI

WHAT READING ADVERTISEMENTS IS LIKE

I did not take the advertisements in the big magazines seriously, all at once. I fell into the way of reading them as most people do, perhaps, for awhile, in a kind of half-superior way. It struck me as being amusing. Reading the advertising department of a great magazine is a little like strolling up and down the Midway Plaisance at the Chicago Fair. You just go on and on. Nobody is saying anything of course, out loud. Just all these firms waving their arms, flourishing a little, and attracting attention to their gates.

I soon found that I was beginning to read advertisements a little more gravely. I cut in a little deeper with my attention— did not look at them quite so often just as one more idle fellow human being going by. I did not realize it at the time, but slowly I began to look up at it, at this great national broadside of bargains all these dear anxious people were offering me, in a kind of national way. Perhaps it all meant something-something about us, and about our people, and our nation, and about what we really care for, and what we are really like, and what we might be coming to.

I grew still more serious. I began going into the advertising department of a great magazine and sitting down all alone like an audience and watching it, profoundly and strangely absorbedthis vast, immeasurable pantomime of business-this silent tussle of the trusts to feed the people, to build their houses for them, to put out chairs for them to sit in, mattresses for them to sleep on, telling them what to read and what to play and how to work and how to be good and happy

It does not seem always like a mere pantomime to me now, but it did then, and at first.

About this time I had occasion to look over a file of old newspapers with the general idea of seeing what people in Boston seventy years ago were like. I discovered that while Boston did her best and bravest in her editorials in that day, and in her literary articles, and struggled together as many interesting things that had happened to people as she could get, and put them carefully in the news columns, the news or the things that happened to them told what the people were like, only a very little, and the articles, the things that they thought about the news, hardly told what they were like at all; but there was hardly anything about them that could not be found out by reading the advertisements of those old Boston people: their motives and likes and dislikes and points of view, the inner history, the dramatic truth-the truth as they were acting it out-the naked life were all in the advertising columns.

And I noticed, too, that when I was reading the news I skipped some very important things (of course news had to be important to get into Boston papers), and through all their learned ideas and their ideas about their ideas and all their Boston State of Mind I skipped.

If I had been asked beforehand, I would have said that their advertisements would do to read probably, and would be interesting, but I would not have believed that I would find as I looked over paper after paper that the live, lovable, human better souls of those old Bostonians-their spirits, their hope and joy, and their religion and their art, would best be looked up by going vulgarly, as one might say, up and down those columns like streets of their buying and selling, and seeing how they spent their money or how somebody hoped that they would-and why they hoped that they would.

But this is the way it was. And then I began reading our own advertisemen's still more seriously. The next time I took up