edging and hitching had
set in, and was fast becoming in America an American trait, and fixing
itself by daily repetition upon the imagination of the people.

The shopping of a country is, on the whole, from a psychologist's point
of view, the most spiritual energy, the most irrevocable, most
implacable meter there can ever be of the religion a country really has.

There was no clergyman in America who could have made the slightest
impression on this great national list or trend of always getting things
for less than they were worth--this rut of never doing as one would be
done by. What was there that could be done with an obstinate, pervasive,
unceasing habit of the people like this?

What was there that could be done to touch the imagination of the crowd?

Six thousand women a day were going in and out of A.T. Stewart's great
store on Broadway at that time. A.T. Stewart announced to New York
suddenly in huge letters one day, that from that day forward there
should be one price for everything sold in his store, and that that
price would be paid for it by everybody.

A.T. Stewart's store was the largest, most successful, original, and
most closely watched store in America.

The six thousand women became one thousand.

Then two thousand. Some of them had found that they finished their
shopping sooner; the better class of women, those whose time was worth
the most, and whose custom was the largest, gradually found they did not
want to shop anywhere else. The two thousand became three thousand, four
thousand, six thousand, ten thousand, twelve thousand.

Other department stores wanted the twelve thousand to come to them. They
announced the one price.

Hardware stores did it. Groceries announced one price. Then everybody.

Not all the clergymen in America, preaching every Sunday for months,
could have done very much in the way of seriously touching the
imagination of the crowd on the moral unworthiness, the intellectual
degradation, the national danger of picking out the one thing that
nearly all the people all do, and had to do, all day, every day, and
making that thing mean, incompetent, and small. No one had thought out
what it would lead to, and how monstrous and absurd it was and would
always be to have a nation have all its people taking every little thing
all day, every day, that they were buying, or that they were
selling--taking a spool of thread, for instance--and packing it, or
packing their action wi