people's insides at all. The
entire paper will be as free from either greyness or offensive stupidity
in its advertisement columns as the shop windows in Bond Street to-day,
and for much the same reason,--because the people who go that way do not
want that sort of thing.

It has been supposed that, since the real income of the newspaper is
derived from advertisements, large advertisers will combine in the
future to own papers confined to the advertisements of their specific
wares. Some such monopoly is already attempted; several publishing firms
own or partially own a number of provincial papers, which they adorn
with strange "Book Chat" columns conspicuously deficient in their
information; and a well-known cycle tyre firm supplies "Cycling" columns
that are mere pedestals for the Head-of-King-Charles make of tyre. Many
quack firms publish and give away annual almanacks replete with
economical illustrations, offensive details, and bad jokes. But I
venture to think, in spite of such phenomena, that these suggestions and
attempts are made with a certain disregard of the essential conditions
of sound advertisement. Sound advertisement consists in perpetual
alertness and newness, in appearance in new places and in new aspects,
in the constant access to fresh minds. The devotion of a newspaper to
the interest of one particular make of a commodity or group of
commodities will inevitably rob its advertisement department of most of
its interest for the habitual readers of the paper. That is to say, the
newspaper will fail in what is one of the chief attractions of a good
newspaper. Moreover, such a devotion will react upon all the other
matter in the paper, because the editor will need to be constantly alert
to exclude seditious reflections upon the Health-Extract-of-Horse-Flesh
or Saved-by-Boiling-Jam. His sense of this relation will taint his
self-respect and make him a less capable editor than a man whose sole
affair is to keep his paper interesting. To these more interesting rival
papers the excluded competitor will be driven, and the reader will
follow in his wake. There is little more wisdom in the proprietor of an
article in popular demand buying or creating a newspaper to contain all
his advertisements than in his buying a coal pit for the same purpose.
Such a privacy of advertisement will never work, I think, on a large
scale; it is probably at or near its maximum development now, and this
anticipation of the advertise