stated thus: It is standardisation by a low standard.
Consider, as I say, that example of advertisement which I took merely for the sake of argument, though I could give a great many others. The first thing that strikes one about it is the space occupied, the insensibility to the idea of size. The spaces that are now occupied by an advertisement of some highly dubious wine or some practically poisonous quack medicine are large enough to have been the shrines of gods or great saints, to have been a place for the emblazonment of great national coats-of-arms, to have held the proclamations of Napoleon or of the French Revolution, to have been used for a hundred striking and dominant purposes by our fathers in the past. They are now entirely surrendered to trivialities. On those large spaces nothing is seen except small things. That sense of the waste of size and the waste of space is in itself a witness to something that goes against the true intuition and imagination of Culture. Anybody seeing such a space would say, "This should be used for some greater purpose." But when we have that kind of centralisation of all commercial effort, those things, I think, will continue to go through quite naturally, because of all the advantages that are claimed for that centralisation. I am not going to argue the sociological question now; but everybody knows that there is a very good argument for the trust, just as there is a very good argument for the Socialistic State, and indeed they are very nearly the same. But the essential of that argument is that such a unification gives the public mind repose, that there is no longer that agonising sense of a
