most significant features of newspaper advertising to -day are that the advertisement is used to influence public opinion quite
as much as it is to sell commodities , and that it is the advertise ment rather than the editorial that is used as the most effective
means of influencing public opinion.74 This use of the advertisement for other purposes than for the
exchange of commodities has apparently been a very recent de velopment and it has grown to such proportions that it is possible
that the present zeal of the advertiser to have his copy set up
" next to readingmatter ” may in timebe rivaled by the desire of authors to have their articles printed “ next to advertising
matter.” 75 “ Short stories” often become in reality long stories
and are apparently spun out in order to hold together the adver tisements.
The natural sequence of this extraordinary development of advertising has been the introduction of educational courses to
teach how to write advertisements,76 the development of the of patent medicines, as a result of the campaign for honest advertising , there would seem to be no objection to the expansion of the card now permitted
so as to include facts that the public reasonably wishes to know , as office
hours , and Sunday hours . Authors do not personally advertise, but they are advertised by their publishers. Members of the theatrical profession often find that indirect means of advertising themselves are more effective than are direct advertise
ments .
74 A striking illustration of the relation between the editorial and the advertisement is seen in the republication as an advertisement in the Philadelphia Public Ledger , November 1, 1916 , of an editorial that had ap peared in the Chicago Daily News, October 25, 1916 . Illustrations of this are frequent.
G . J. Holyoake says that Joseph Cowen 's first speech in Parliament, March 23, 1876 , contained three things never heard in Parliament before ,
that " the divine right of kings perished on the scaffold with Charles T,” that “ the superstition of royalty had never taken any deep hold of the English people," and he described Napoleon III, the ally of England, as
" a usurper.” These statements so accorded with popular sentiment that some persons paid for their publication as an advertisement in the Daily
News and other newspapers. — Bygones Worth Remembering, II, 54. The speech as given in Hansard does not give the statement concerning Napoleon III.
75 The advertisement has already invaded the editorial page and heads the editorial columns. See series running in the New York Evening Post, No vember, 1916 , and continuously for some weeks afterward . 76 The success of these has been such as to give rise to the pleasantry that the “ cereal advertisements in the magazines are far more interesting
than the serial stories ;" to the rebuke, attributed to Kipling, of a fr
