ing to indicate that this crash nevertheless can not much longer be averted.

It is estimated that last year two billion dollars was expended in the United States on advertising and "salesmanship" and still is heard from Maine to California a general complaint that Business is Bad.

The President assures the nation that this condition is but Psychological. Glowing Crop Reports are circulated as evidence of a well fed populace. Old party political orators find assurance of national prosperity in the annual report of the Department of Commerce, which shows American Exports exceeding Imports by $653,000,000.

But all the time the merchant looks with dispirited eyes upon his shelves of goods which I will not sell. The commercial traveller finds it hard to maintain that light assurance and optimism, which salesmanship experts assure him is the successful commercial manner, in the face of ever lighter order books and ever mounting household expenditures. The eyes of the Unemployed leap across the Crop Reports to scan with eager ferocity the Help Wanted column. And as mayhap one of this gaunt army catches the light assurance of the well-fed that with Exports exceeding Imports all is neces

sarily well with us, perhaps at least a glimmer flits across his confused and tired mind of that profound though seldom regarded economic fact, that over-Exportation abroad indicates under-consumption at home.

The great Siegel dry goods enterprises failed in March, the Claflin chain of stores went to the wall in June. In every large city in this country to-day are closed stores and factories with goods on their shelves and signs on their front doors reading "Bankrupt Stock" or Receiver's Sale.”

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And in every city and village in this country to-day human beings are walking the streets looking for work and destitute of the barest physical necessities of life. Necessities which lie stacked up on counters and in warehouses, which their labor has produced and which the insane Capitalist or Profit system does not allow them to use.

This condition of industry in which factories shut down, stores close and men are laid off is called variously a slump, a business depression, hard times. What it really means is that men must walk the streets and beg for work because they have worked too much. They and their families must do without the barest necessities because they have produced too much.

All the wheels of industry must slow down until the Unconsumed Surplus is worked off. Sometimes even with all the resourcefulness of high salaried managerial skill this can not be accomplished at home. Then the capitalist owners of industry begin to look abroad for a foreign market for their goods and foreign investments for their surplus capital. For the high purpose of finding a dumping ground abroad for a surplus domestic product, capitalists force wars. Then under the guise of "Patriotism" the workers of one country are fooled into going to the front in defense of their Nation's honor. There they murder in battle the workers of another country and help to destroy some of the wealth that they have produced and for lack of which their families are suffering at home. Also they help to send interest rates up for the gentlemen whose patriotic services in the nation's honor consist in staying at home and financing these undertakings.

Meanwhile just in the name of common sense how does the whole thing strike you?

You pinch and scrimp and save, Madam House-wife and Mother. You force your weary eyes to remain open a little longer at night in order to put another patch on the little fellow's

trousers. And your reward for that will be to learn at the end of the season that your boy's father has been laid off from work because the manufacturer for whom he toils has hundreds of dozens of pairs of unsold trousers left over on his shelves. You save and scrimp and pinch, you cherish eggless recipes and learn to feed your family on six eggs a week and your reward for that is to read one day the statement of Dr. M. E. Pennington, Chief of the Food Research Laboratory of the Department of Agriculture, that $50,000,000 worth of eggs in this country never reach the consumer at all but are sent to the garbage dump and destroyed.

In the very face of the most palpable and desperate efforts of our owners of industry to work off their surplus product we are cursed in this country with a breed of shallow minded reformers who assume that the remedy for all our economic and industrial ills is to create more product. Back to the Land is a popular slogan with these profound thinkers. Let us raise two hogs where but one was raised before. Or let us put up more dwellings that all may be well housed.

Meanwhile miles of bill boarding beseech the prosperous in pocket to buy Our Particular

Brand of bacon. And rows of good houses and apartments stand vacant while the poor pack their tenements a little closer. Also rents are no lower and the price of bacon is shoved a notch higher to cover the cost of our latest "advertising campaign."

But the shallow minded reformer apparently uses neither his eyes nor his reasoning faculties. To him appears no flaw in the argument that if 96 per cent. of our population are ragged, underfed and ill housed for lack of enough production it should be necessary to expend two billion dollars annually in the insane devices of advertising in order to get rid of a surplus product.

He never once questions the reasonableness of an arrangement by which it is necessary to employ a vast army of shop-keepers, market men, clerks, sales persons, agents, solicitors, advertising staffs and selling experts to supplicate possible purchasers to buy in a country in which the vast majority of the population are lacking the barest physical necessities.

When the country was young and the wilderness to be conquered men often worked from sunrise to sunset to produce for themselves and their families the things that they needed. Today the great masses of men and women toil