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The Science of Advertising
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more as fast as you can make more? Why can't you keep up with your goods?

"In my time, what was holding us back was not that we could not use but we could not make. To progress we had to learn to make, and we learned. But now you have learned to make and passed on to the problem of learning to use—to consume. Not incapacity to make faster is holding you back now but incapacity to consume faster. And instead of trying to solve your own problem in your own terms—that is, by hurrying and developing more consumption—you put it back into the old terms by checking production.

"For you have pretty well solved now the industrial problem of producing fast. And today your progress does not have to wait upon that. But you have still to solve more thoroughly your economic problem—the problem of use. Upon that the rapidity of your progress now waits. And solve it in terms of economics—in the terms of use!"

This treating of the problem of today's progress, not in terms of checked industry and of holding back our advance in production to the slower gait of our demands, but the treating of it in terms of economics and of hastening our wants to keep up with our greatest possibility of production:

That is the function of modern advertising.