re
withdrawn from every newspaper in the city. The newspapers went on
publishing all the news of the city except news as to what people could
buy in department stores, and waited. They made no counter-move of any
kind, and said nothing and seven days slipped past. They held to the
claim that the service they performed in connecting the great stores
with the people of the city was a real service, that it represented
market value which could be proved and paid for. They kept on for
another week publishing for the people all the news of the city except
the news as to how they could spend their money. They wondered how long
it would take the great shops with acres of things to sell to see how it
would work not to let anybody know what the things were.

The great shops tried other ways of letting people know. They tried
handbills, a huge helpless patter of them over all the city. They used
billboards, and posted huge lists of items for people to stop and read
in the streets, if they wanted to, while they rushed by. For three whole
weeks they held on tight to the idea that the newspapers were striking
employees of department stores. One would have thought that they would
have seen that the newspapers were the representatives of the
people--almost the homes of the people--and that it would pay to treat
them respectfully. One would have thought they would have seen that if
they wanted space in the homes of the people--places at their very
breakfast tables--space that the newspapers had earned and acquired
there, they would have to pay their share of what it had cost the
newspapers to get it.

One would have thought that the department shops would have seen that
the more they could make the newspapers prosper, the more influence the
newspapers would have in the homes of the people, and the more business
they could get through them. But it was not until the shopowners had
come down and gazed day after day on the big, white, lonely floors of
their shops that they saw the truth. Crowds stayed away, and proved it
to them. Namely: a store, if it uses a great newspaper, instead of
having a few feet of show windows on a street for people to walk by,
gets practically miles of show windows for people--in their own
houses--sells its goods almost any morning to the people--to a whole
city--before anybody gets up from breakfast--has its duties as well as
its rights.

Of course, when the shopkeepers really saw that this was what the
news