Page:The Science of Advertising (1910).djvu/36

32 Laws. These laws, once prevalent throughout Europe, regulated even the clothing, personal possessions and habits of the "people." They prescribed that servants, merchants and artificers should have, for instance, only one meal of flesh or fish in the day and that their other food should consist of milk, butter and cheese. Later laws forbade pies and baked meats to all under the rank of baron. And such legal enactments furnish only very incomplete evidence of the ways into which the lower and middle classes were schooled to want but little.

For then the interests of the upper classes in control lay in causing the masses to want but little, as the profits of the controlling classes today lie in leading them now to want much. For now we have the supplies for a high standard of living—not for the few only but for all. And to sell today's increasing supplies we cannot sell only to the classes who have already adopted the high standard of living but must make the "people" now adopt a new standard high enough to consume our increasing supplies.

As suddenly and as rapidly as a manufacturer can produce new and better articles cheaply he must somehow include them into a standard of living which will embrace enough people to exhaust his supply. And if enough people have not reached the standard of living which requires his articles, he must lift them there. He must