Page:The Science of Advertising (1910).djvu/35

Rh But when our great machine shops, our systematized factories and machine production developed suddenly, almost without warning, a great flood of very good and very cheap products in a quantity and at a price available for almost all surged upon the market. A thousand new things, a thousand old things made in better ways, were suddenly offered to the millions. But the millions were not prepared to take.

The centuries and centuries of waiting upon the feeble hand tools had established a habit of mind which was very deeply inbred.

In a moment the machine could overthrow the industrial traditions of the race—but the economic and the social?

In a moment the industrial revolution put before the millions those thousand things which had never before been in their reach; but it was to require almost an economic and social revolution to make them reach. The very workmen making the products, which now became so cheap that they were available, did not want them. For too many centuries the "people" had been forced and accustomed to consider the refinements and even the simple luxuries of life as for the use only of the few.

The restrictive traditions of the old times cannot be better illustrated than by the old