; that you
are liable to arthritis, blood-poisoning, catarrh, colitis, calvity,
constipation, consumption, diarrhoea, diabetes, dysmenorrhoea, epilepsy,
eczema, fatty degeneration, gout, goitre, gastritis, headache,
haemorrhage, hysteria, hypertrophy, idiocy, indigestion, jaundice,
lockjaw, melancholia, neuralgia, ophthalmia, phthisis, quinsey,
rheumatism, rickets, sciatica, syphilis, tonsilitis, tic doloureux, and
so on to the end of the alphabet and back again to the beginning. Never
and nowhere shall you forget that you are a trading animal, buying in
the cheapest and selling in the dearest market. Never shall you forget
that nothing matters--nothing in the whole universe--except the
maintenance and extension of industry; that beauty, peace, harmony are
not commercial values, and cannot be allowed for a moment to stand in
the way of the advance of trade; that nothing, in short, matters except
wealth, and that there is no wealth except money in the pocket.
This--did it ever occur to you--is the real public education every
country is giving, on every hoarding and sky-sign, to its citizens of
every age, at every moment of their lives. And that being so, is it not
a little ironical that children should be taught for half an hour in
school to read a poem of Wordsworth or a play of Shakespeare, when for
the rest of the twenty-four hours there is being photographed on their
minds the ubiquitous literature of Owbridge and of Carter?

But of course advertisement cannot be interfered with! It is the
life-blood of the nation. All traders, all politicians, all journalists
say so. They sometimes add that it is really, to an unprejudiced spirit,
beautiful and elevating. Thus only this morning I came across an article
in a leading New York newspaper, which remarks that: "The individual
advertisement is commonly in good taste, both in legend and in
illustration. Many are positively beautiful; and, as a wit has truly
said, the cereal advertisements in the magazines are far more
interesting than the serial stories." This latter statement I can easily
believe; but when I read the former there flitted across my mind a
picture of a lady lightly clad reclining asleep against an open window,
a full moon rising in the distance over a lake, with the legend
attached, "Cascarella--it works while you sleep."

The article from which I have quoted is interesting not only as
illustrating the diversity of taste, but as indicating the high degree