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52 willing to dare a little deeper degradation of his product as long as the public could be still kept ignorant, might displace him at any time as the progressive cheapening became a sufficient allurement to the dealers who—consciously or unconsciously—were already handling degraded goods.

The poor business of scaling quality to price was bad for us, the consumers; but what had already begun to change great sections of the business, was that it was worse for the manufacturers. Many saw truly that to make their business stable and profitable for themselves, they must in the long run be directly and finally responsible to us, the consumers. They reached for us, therefore. Instead of manufacturing now for the men who were merely to sell their products again a few bold pioneers dared in wholesale to consciously and immediately consider, at the expense of the dealer if necessary, us—the eaters of their foods. They began to manufacture and to appeal to us—they advertised.

This far from means that all or even the great proportion of unadvertised goods are inferior; it is meant to be as far from stating that all advertised goods are the best. This means merely to trace and define tendencies and their causes. And having found a notorious and confessed tendency