Page:The Science of Advertising (1910).djvu/52

48 brought in not only a steady surplus of goods with a consequent necessity for accelerating the speed of selling; but it also required a great and rapid increasing of the area over which the specialized product must be sold—a great lengthening of the distance between the producer and the consumer.

When the big modern plant and distributing agents as convenient intermediaries first came in and put the producer physically out of touch with the consumer, a lessening of care and responsibility upon the part of the producer was almost inevitable.

When Mary Jones who put up peaches and pickles for sale for her neighbors who could step about easily and complain to her personally, changed to the great, machine driven, efficient-corporated and unpersonal—often anonymous—pickling and preserving plant hundreds of miles away, the moral separation between the producer and the consumer became almost as great as the physical—and almost as inevitable.

When Brown the butcher who killed his beef in his barn under his neighboring customers' eyes was supplanted by the big central packing houses in Chicago because his methods were wasteful and inefficient, the very concentration and mechanical perfection of the new slaughters and butchers, removed them from touch and immediate responsibility to the eaters of meat. When