must be the increase in facility with which advertised articles can be produced and consumed.
To estimate the industrial basis of modern advertising do not, therefore, compare our great publishing houses, press rooms and mailing facilities with the printing and distributing plants of seventy years ago. They are only the corresponding accompaniments of the two periods. Compare our great factories and specialized machine production with the little workshops and hand tools of the former time. And do not compare the educational conditions of today, which enable almost everyone to read advertisements, with the period when far fewer were literate. But compare the economic conditions of today, when a high purchasing power enables practically everyone to be a consumer of advertised products, to the non-advertising times when but few were able to purchase.
To understand American advertising industrially we must understand that the basic reason of it is that this nation has reached the point where only a small fraction of the people are unable to buy and consume. The American people are quick to learn and use and to want what they learn to use. Their adaptivity calls for a large supply of a large variety of products. These are the reasons why advertising has found its greatest and most rapid development here.
For it is our great machine-driven clothing
