r in mind also that this monstrous disease
affects not merely the idlers and their menials, its poison penetrates
the whole social body. Beneath the hundred thousand women of the elite
are a million middle-class women, miserable because they are not of the
elite, and trying to appear of it in public; and beneath them, in turn,
are five million farmers' wives reading 'fashion papers' and trimming
bonnets, and shop-girls and serving-maids selling themselves into
brothels for cheap jewelry and imitation seal-skin robes. And then
consider that, added to this competition in display, you have, like
oil on the flames, a whole system of competition in selling! You have
manufacturers contriving tens of thousands of catchpenny devices,
storekeepers displaying them, and newspapers and magazines filled up
with advertisements of them!"

"And don't forget the wastes of fraud," put in young Fisher.

"When one comes to the ultra-modern profession of advertising,"
responded Schliemann--"the science of persuading people to buy what they
do not want--he is in the very center of the ghastly charnel house
of capitalist destructiveness, and he scarcely knows which of a dozen
horrors to point out first. But consider the waste in time and energy
incidental to making ten thousand varieties of a thing for purposes
of ostentation and snobbishness, where one variety would do for use!
Consider all the waste incidental to the manufacture of cheap qualities
of goods, of goods made to sell and deceive the ignorant; consider the
wastes of adulteration,--the shoddy clothing, the cotton blankets, the
unstable tenements, the ground-cork life-preservers, the adulterated
milk, the aniline soda water, the potato-flour sausages--"

"And consider the moral aspects of the thing," put in the ex-preacher.

"Precisely," said Schliemann; "the low knavery and the ferocious cruelty
incidental to them, the plotting and the lying and the bribing, the
blustering and bragging, the screaming egotism, the hurrying and
worrying. Of course, imitation and adulteration are the essence of
competition--they are but another form of the phrase 'to buy in the
cheapest market and sell in the dearest.' A government official has
stated that the nation suffers a loss of a billion and a quarter dollars
a year through adulterated foods; which means, of course, not only
materials wasted that might have been useful outside of the human
stomach, but doctors and nurses for people who woul