Page:The Science of Advertising (1910).djvu/32

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It seems very radical indeed to imply here that the rapidity of our progress as a nation is determined very largely by the efficiency and effectiveness of our advertising. But it is true. It is taught by every school of sociology that individuals, communities and races are progressive according as they acquire new needs—as they learn to make things and to use them. We call that nation which needs and uses the most as the most progressed. And from that point the insufficiency of our advertising, more than anything else, must slow the progress of America as it shows the progress of all other countries in direct proportion as they are, like America, confessedly and flagrantly behind in the use of their products—as the complete and universal use falls short of the possibility to produce.

When production was so small, and today wherever production is so impeded industrially that there is a place and use waiting for everything that can be produced, then and there advertising is needless. But when and where—and here and now—a people yearly produce a multitude of things which have no sufficiently general use awaiting them and when the people can