Formerly the Problem Was Only One of Insufficient Production.
While things were being made so slowly by hands, the value and use of every good thing was easily made known to the public far in advance of the ability to offer it in any considerable quantity.
Of articles other than those established as necessary, the manufacture was so small and expensive that their use was necessarily confined to a small class—the rich and fastidious. Beds, chairs, shoes, collars, umbrellas, forks and sugar, which our manufacturing conditions have made cheap and attainable by all today, were originally luxuries designed for the rich, and their manufacture was confined to the needs of the rich. The desire for them developed well ahead of the ability to make them in quantities large enough and cheap enough to be available to all.
There could be little advertising under the physical disability which prevented products from being offered at a practicable price. The problem of making the people want and need more could not exist when it was still impossible to furnish more.
For centuries and centuries, while progress was being kept back by the inability of hands to make goods rapidly, the poor people—that is, almost all the people—had very little and got used to wanting very little.
