Page:The Science of Advertising (1910).djvu/16

12 Obviously from the primitive condition where there is no specialization and everyone supplies merely his own need, no one can have a surplus to advertise. There cannot be even a market. Exchange and sale must be the barest barter between chance individuals. And even when specialization commenced so that markets developed—a market being a place where a man who learned to do one thing well enough to make a surplus to exchange for someone's else surplus of the thing he learned to make—unless speed became a requisite of the transaction, there would be little advertising impulse.

The market as a vehicle of distribution prior to a century ago has seemed to me often to be similar to what the sea was then. To get a package to a consumer, as to get a cargo to port, the first must be floated upon the market, the second put upon the sea. The present competition is to get both to the destination as soon as possible.

But once it seems not to have mattered greatly how long goods placed upon the market took getting to the consumer or how long cargoes took getting to port or how safely or surely either arrived there.

Men put their products upon the market and resignedly consigned them to the god of good luck very much as they sent their ships to sea