he article or it may require long and skillful presentation of
the matter. All this is still economic. But it requires only a step to
carry us across the line. Next the enthusiastic advertiser strives to make
someone want that which he does not need. As may be seen, the line here is
difficult to determine, but this sort of advertising is surely not
economic. So long as the thing not needed is not really injurious,
however, the advertising cannot be called illegitimate. It is simply
uneconomic. The world would be better off without it, but we may look for
its abolition only to the increase of good judgment and intelligence among
consumers. When an attempt however, is made to cause a man to want
something that is really injurious, then the act becomes illegitimate and
should be prevented. Another class of illegitimate advertising is that
which would be perfectly allowable if it were truthful and becomes
objectionable only because its representations are false. It may be
ostensibly of any of the types noted above.

As we have already noted, the material objects distributed by the
librarian are valued not for their physical characteristics but for a
different reason altogether, the fact that they contain stored ideas.
Ideas which, according to some, are merely the relative positions of
material particles in the brain, and which are indisputably accompanied
and conditioned by such positions, here subsist in the form of peculiar
and visible arrangements of particles of printer's ink upon paper, which
are capable under certain conditions of generating in the human brain
ideas precisely similar to those that gave them birth. And although the
book cannot think for itself, but must merely preserve the idea intrusted
to it, without change, it is vastly superior in stability to the brain
that gave it birth, so that thousands of years after that brain has
mouldered into dust it is capable of reproducing the original ideas in a
second brain where they may germinate and bear fruit. How familiar all
this is, and yet how perennially wonderful! The miracle of it is
sufficient excuse for this digression.

Now books, beside this modern form of distribution by loan, are widely
distributed commercially both by loan and by sale, and especially in the
latter form advertisement is now very extensively used in connection with
the distribution. In fact we have all the different types specified
above--economic, uneconomic and illegitimate, both th