printing press and the spread of literacy. The industrial efficiency of advertising, therefore, has depended upon the increased ability of our modern presses to print and our modern people to read advertisements.
These, as necessary accompaniments to the great growth of modern advertising, must be obvious. But it should be equally clear that as fundamental causes for its efficiency today they must fail.
The vital change from the time prior to sixty years ago, when advertising had yet to start toward its present efficiency, is not the increase in the facility with which advertising matter can be printed and circulated and read, but it is the entire transformation in our method of specialized production of commodities, the revolution in the speed with which it became necessary to carry on production and distribution.
I have not paralleled, therefore, as I traced the slow development of advertising, the slow perfection of printing machines, but I have suggested as I followed the crawl of advertising as a force the corresponding abeyance in the application of the power-producing machine—the steam engine.
For the vital change from former to modern times—the change which has given us the industrial basis for advertising efficiency—cannot be merely the increase in facility with which advertising literature can be produced and read. It
