better goods or if they wish to sell the same goods more profitably.
4
The American problem of production, as thus traced, is not how we, as a nation, may make more; but how we may profitably use more. The check to the more rapid advance of our industries is not the physical limitation of manufacturing, but the social and economic checks of consuming capacity.
When the manufacture of all sorts of commodities leaped far beyond the popular acceptance of the use of those things, the suppliers took to advertising to create quickly a higher standard of living among the masses to make them consume more. But the tendency of this advertising to raise standards for the consumer is only a half of its essential economic action. How modern advertising began to operate to raise the standards for the manufacturers themselves, to better the product and effect a purer as well as a larger output, is equally as important to trace.
For we Americans are credited with producing more and using a larger proportion of what we are capable of producing than any other people. We also accuse ourselves of manufacturing and being forced to consume a larger proportion of "shoddy" and unworthy, cheap and adulterated products than any other people.
The comparative figures are unimportant. But
