that this policy, with a nation like Germany, will not work. Germany of all nations, the nation that has tried to befuddle other nations with the best and biggest hip-pocket peace the world has ever known, is not going to be deceived by little modest raw imitations of shrapnel and sweetness, by a young unworldly amateur nation like ours across a sea three thousand miles away.

The more we coo with our hands on our hip pockets, the less Germany will believe in us and the less she believes in us, the more she will arm against us.

We will announce to Germany that we will spend a hundred million dollars in Germany alone on specific localized treatment and removal of the causes that make Germans hate and fear us. We will spend another hundred million dollars on specific localized treatment and removal in America of our American fears of Germany. As it would save Germany from having a stupendous navy bill just for us, Germany might gladly join in and add a hundred million dollars more to be spent on removing our fear of Germany.

If we spend two hundred million dollars in keeping ahead of Germany in war preparedness, Germany will spend more to eep ahead of us, and we will both spend more and more every year and so on forever. If we spend two hundred million dollars on removing the fear which is the cause of war preparedness, there will be less fear every year and less money would have to be spent every year in both nations on being afraid and on scared people.

In each nation the days of its military neurasthenics, of its epaulet invalids and of its little panic of shooting-sickness would soon be over.

An army and navy appropriation means an ascending ratio of expense. An advertising appropriation means an automatic descending ratio of expense.

The way to oppose people is to contradict them and the way to contradict them is not only to say what is opposite to what

they are saying, but to say it in so opposite a way from the way they expected we would say it that they will listen.

From the point of view of psychology, to say nothing of history warm and bleeding all about us, hip-pocket peace is not the way just now for America to arrest and hold the attention of the world.

My argument is grounded in psychology and in the specific nature of advertising. In an artificial situation the first law of arresting attention is to pick out the most inevitable, the most obvious, natural, simple thing to say and to do and then say it and do it with the most colossal unexpectedness.

The first secret of making, getting and holding attention is the courage to be one's self.

This is as true of a nation of ninety million men as it is of

one man.

II

STILL OTHERS

When some new thing happens and I begin to say some disagreeable that is, of course, some essentially scared thing about the Germans and about this German human nature we all keep guessing on, and that we are all being censored out of, way over there under its lonely private Baltic Sea, I find myself thinking of the Germans vaguely and in the third person. A little later when the little touch of humanness and of ordinary reasonableness I have in me after all about people, begins setting in, I find myself falling into a tone of direct personal expostulation and saying You to Germans about the things I am told they are doing. I stake off carefully in my mind the Prussian military staff and let them remain carefully in the third person and say You to the German people. I have made up my mind to take an attitude toward them which they and I both, when we are over the fear and secrecy and panic of suspicion that go with war, will be glad.

Here is one of my sample illusions and a sample of the way this thinking in three dimensions, in three persons, and finally working around to the First Person Plural, comes out.

"With joyful pride we look upon this latest exploit of our navy," the Cologne Volkszeitung says in speaking of the Lusitania.

I had the usual natural feelings on reading over these words about the Germans and their rejoicing over the Lusitania.

How do I know that they rejoiced even now! If when the Volkszeitung published this statement all that they had heard was the sinking of the ship, and if they did not know twelve

hundred non-combatants went down with her (as Americans we did not at first), and if when they did know they were appalled by it, I would forgive them. And if they knew I did not know that they did not know, when I wrote these words above, they would forgive me.

Well, for my part, except for driving in and getting Germany not to do it again, I think I ought to take the words back, or hold them in suspense. They may be one more illustration of how it works to believe and act on anything one hears until afterward and until the thing is ripe. It is only making all over again the mistake England made about Germany and that Germany made about England, that the moment they heard, they judged with guns.

It is the cause of the whole war-judging with guns, arguing and thinking things out with dreadnoughts and opening up subjects with shrapnel.

Anyone can see how much easier it is for me to take back these words I have just written or to let them wait than it is for Germany to give back to England five hundred thousand dead men with apologies and compliments.

Here is another sample illusion I have tried to work through in three persons.

When I first heard what we know of Germany's spy system, and realized that she had been peering about for years in other countries among the busy unconscious innocent modernminded peoples, going daily about their affairs, my whole attitude toward our modern world and toward human nature swerved about in a week. The little innocent island of Monhegan where I was writing was reeking with rumours of German spies. I almost half believed them. I found everywhere I went all this big innocent busy world about me agog with a new and sudden fear.

Is the world the kind of world the German General Staff has

A

LOOK IV

FEAR-SURGERY

FTER the country has got Mr. Roosevelt to notice Mr.
Rockefeller and how he makes advertising work, perhaps

the next best thing for the country to do will be to be specific and direct with the Colonel, pick out some one specific fear that Colonel Roosevelt daily has himself and advertise it out of him. When the Colonel has actually seen with his own eyes a daily fear of his own being bodily removed by advertising, he will begin to believe perhaps in what can be done to advertise away the fears and illusions and causes of war in other people.

If America, instead of spending on Colonel Roosevelt's fear of Germany the two or three hundred million dollars he is hoping to get us to spend on it, would spend say one hundred million · dollars in collecting and placing before Colonel Roosevelt the facts about the powers and about the intentions of the German people which would keep him from being afraid of Germany, and if America would then proceed to spend another hundred million dollars among the Germans which would remove illusions and keep the Germans from being afraid of Colonel Roosevelt and afraid of us, Colonel Roosevelt's fever of preparedness would soon most gracefully and even gratefully subside. Colonel Roosevelt would be as ready for an advertising and dramatizing program as anyone. He is not a bad advertising man in his way when he believes in it or when he sits down and thinks a minute what he wants to advertise, nor is he a bad dramatist when he has decided on his idea to dramatize.