A Hundred Years Hence: The Expectations of an Optimist

by T. Baron Russell

Although, in some of their characteristics, they will be greatly ameliorated, advertisements may very likely still constitute one ground of discontent with the newspaper of the future. They sometimes are, in the newspaper of to-day, the subject of complaint not altogether reasonable, because if there were no advertisements there could be no newspapers. At all events, without this powerful source of revenue our newspapers could be neither so cheap nor so liberally conducted as they are; and all the economies of the new age will probably be insufficient to enable newspaper proprietors to dispense with them. The better and the more generously-conducted newspapers are, the more money they spend in the careful collection, editing, printing and illustrating of public information, the more dependent they will become on the revenue from advertising, which is the sinew of journalism; and the more widely and attentively newspapers are read, the greater will be the revenue they are able to command from this source. Moreover, they would be incomplete without this feature. The unreflecting newspaper-reader, who anathematises his favourite journal because its weight and bulk are increased by the presence of advertisements which he does not want, seldom takes into account the fact that there are plenty of his fellow-readers who do want them, or some of them, and that he himself is often in the same predicament. Thousands of copies of newspapers are bought every day in order to consult advertisements which they are known to contain. A man who purposes to take his family to a concert often buys The Daily Telegraph because he knows that The Daily Telegraph has more concert announcements in it than any other paper, and that it is in fact a practically complete directory to all the current musical opportunities of the Metropolis. Another man, who wants a secretary, or a steward for his estate, probably orders The Times because he knows that the best class of secretaries and stewards advertise in The Times for employment. One hardly goes to the theatre or buys a supply of coals without looking at the daily paper for information; and assuredly this information is not inserted without being paid for; in other words, it forms part of the advertisements. Deprived of newspaper advertisements as a way of announcing its need of clerks, warehousemen, labourers and assistants of all kinds, commerce, even if it could manage without advertisements of the sort more commonly thought of when the nuisance of them is being condemned, could hardly keep up its organisation at all. Thus, so far from this feature of our newspapers being a grievance, it is both directly and indirectly a boon to all who read them. And when we remember in addition that the cost of the paper and printing alone in a copy of most newspapers exceeds the price at which each copy is sold by the proprietor, so that the whole cost of newsgathering, the whole cost of editing, the fees of contributors and artists, and the cost of pictures and engraving, as well as the profit which induces persons to embark upon an enterprise so troublesome and precarious as newspaper-publishing, must be obtained from the cost of advertisements and from this alone, we cannot doubt that the enormously developed newspaper of a hundred years hence will “give us bold advertisement,” even as now, and that our descendants will have the intelligence to be very glad that it does so.

This being unquestionable, we can hardly think that we have made a complete forecast of the newspaper of the future unless we consider what sort of advertisements it will contain, and in order to do this we must consider just what advertising is likely to be needed in the new age.

As every condition of commerce must necessarily be affected by the mechanical and economic developments of another century, evidently advertising will have to undergo vast changes in order to adapt itself to new requirements. Already competition and the urgent demand of the public for all possible utilities and luxuries to be supplied with the greatest economy of money and trouble have produced changes in the machinery of supply and demand which must develop at an increasing speed as time goes on. One tendency of these things is current talk; we speak of “eliminating the middleman.” Well, the middleman will certainly be eliminated by the end of the century, and one of the forces which will help to eliminate him is the very force with which, at present, he endeavours, with a high degree of transient success, to defend himself—the very force we have to discuss here; advertisement.

So long as a population is scattered into groups in small towns, and hampered by difficulty and expense in transportation, there is an evident advantage in the retail-shop system. But we can hardly with convenience remain a nation of shopkeepers in the present and future state of concentration and with cheapened transport. It is only necessary to observe the different ways in which we supply ourselves with commodities, according to where we live, in order to understand the tendencies at work. In a village remote from any large town there are generally one or two general shops, at which a highly miscellaneous collection of merchandise is handled. The smaller the village the more miscellaneous the stock kept at a single trading establishment. In a small town the shops differentiate themselves more: but they still cross the boundary lines of trade, and one gets tobacco at the chemist’s and goes to the draper’s for writing materials and books. When we come to towns somewhat larger, trades keep more to themselves, and it is often possible to find a place where there are no miscellaneous shops at all, except those owned by the industrial co-operative societies now so common and so useful to the thriftier artisans. It is only when we enter the largest towns and cities of all that we find large shops divided into departments and again selling almost everything under one roof.

The conditions in these large towns are an index to what is likely to occur a hundred years hence: because (as has already been seen) towns will certainly grow, and the population will become more concentrated, while, even where improved facilities for travel enable men to live at a great distance from their work, the same facilities will enable their wives to do their shopping in the centres of commerce. Consequently, except for a few highly perishable commodities, such as milk, butter and the like, small shopkeepers in residential neighbourhoods will be driven out of business, as they are in fact already being driven out of it in the suburbs and dependencies of all large cities.

It is always possible for a large miscellaneous trader to sell at a smaller percentage of profit than a trader in a single class of merchandise: and by his bulkier purchases the former is also able to start with a lower cost price, and thus he is in every way better situated to meet the demand for cheapness. He can also meet the demand for convenience, because when he is getting almost the whole trade of a family, even at some little distance, he can afford to arrange for the transportation of goods in ways convenient to the purchaser. Thus the small shopkeeper will lose custom in every way and the large shopkeeper will gain custom. But there is still a middleman. We have not yet begun to see how he is to be eliminated, but only how he is to be limited in his numbers while being individually pampered with increased trade.

No one who observes the trend of things, however, can have failed to note how, from both sides, the middleman, quâ middleman, is liable to be squeezed out. These very large retailers tend more and more to become, little by little, manufacturers instead of merely agents for the manufactures of other people. Very often they are actually forced to this by the difficulty of obtaining a regular supply of goods of satisfactory quality from the existing factories. One of the largest companies doing a miscellaneous retailing business has an enormous estate in the neighbourhood of London covered with orchards where fruit is grown for sale and for jam-making; and it has factories of various kinds dotted all round the Metropolis, though a few years ago it was a simple trading concern which manufactured nothing. On the other hand, large manufacturers in many trades (of which the boot trade is an example which must have come under the notice of every reader) are tending to open retail shops of their own in favourable localities, so as to obtain the retailer’s commission as well as the manufacturer’s profit. Evidently these large manufacturer-shopkeepers are more likely to be extensive advertisers than small one-shop retailers.

Another circumstance which will tend to the increase of advertising is already apparent in the growing tendency of the public to prefer branded or packed commodities before bulk goods. Such groceries as tea, oatmeal and the like are more and more purchased in packets bearing a manufacturer’s name or trade-mark, instead of being purchased from bulk and wrapped up by the grocer. The obvious reason is that by this means a housewife can secure a greater uniformity of quality. She finds that she likes a certain manufacturer’s oatmeal better than any other, and always buys it; whereas if she bought bulk-oatmeal she would have the product now of one mill, now of another, and these products would vary. The only way in which a manufacturer can call attention to his speciality is to advertise it. The immediate consequence of this movement is the degradation of the retailer, who ceases to be the custodian (so to speak) of his customers’ interest and becomes a mere hander-out of packed specialities. It is not very likely that every manufacturer of such specialities will become a retailer with shops everywhere; but it is practically certain that trusts will be formed on a sort of co-operative principle by combinations of manufacturers, who will divide among themselves the expense of organisation and obtain the whole profit without having to share it with any middleman. And in many departments of commerce the elimination of the retailer will be secured by the utilisation of improved transport, orders being received at the works by letter or telephone and executed direct from manufacturer to consumer. Such business can only be stimulated through advertisement, and the newspaper of the future constitutes the most convenient medium for such advertisement.

The intrinsic nature of the vastly-extended advertising of the new age will be influenced by the new growth of public intelligence. Once almost wholly, and now to a very great extent, addressed to the least intelligent faculties of the public—the faculties most liable to be influenced by large type and ad captandum phrasing—advertising will in the future world become gradually more and more intelligent in tone. It will seek to influence demand by argument instead of clamour, a tendency already more apparent every year. Cheap attention-calling tricks and clap-trap will be wholly replaced, as they are already being greatly replaced, by serious exposition; and advertisements, instead of being mere repetitions of stale catch-words, will be made interesting and informative, so that they will be welcomed instead of being shunned; and it will be just as suicidal for a manufacturer to publish silly or fallacious claims to notoriety as for a shopkeeper of the present day to seek custom by telling lies to his customers. Skilful writers will be employed upon the work, and skilful journalists will think it no derogation from their dignity to be employed in the writing of commercial advertisements. No doubt the methods of illustration employed in journalism proper will also be pressed into the service of the advertiser, and in this, as in other respects, our “divine discontent” will still look for improvements, and the newspaper of the future will be a vast improvement upon the newspaper of to-day.

Although the distinction between journalism and literature is likely to define itself more and more sharply—periodicals growing more literary, and newspapers less literary—it is here convenient to pause for a moment on the question of the direction in which literature is likely to develop—meaning especially imaginative literature and poetry. The past of this development, widely considered, has been, of course, since the close of the eighteenth century, from the classical, through the romantic, to the realistic school; and the last has been associated with a greatly-increased and minute consideration of language as an implement of exact and elegant expression. Literature has become, and will no doubt continue to be, increasingly self-conscious. Happy effects are deliberately sought for. Felicity of phrase is no longer a matter of unconscious, almost accidental, accomplishment; it is purposefully and deliberately obtained. We no longer expect inspiration from the Muses, but climb Parnassus with arduous consciousness of our meritorious pedestrianism. The methodical, scientific orderliness of modern thought has, in short, invaded even the field of art, and we have sometimes an air of trying to make of literature an exact process. Perhaps very great literature, and certainly, according to all precedent, very great poetry, cannot be produced in that way. There is something of mystery about them, something of the instinctive, of the elemental, or, to speak with a more critical exactness, of the spiritual. And the development and circumstances of very elaborate civilisation do not wholly favour the spiritual. But to conclude from this that great poetry will never again be written would be to overlook one of the disturbing, the cataclysmal factors of human life. This factor is one of the greatest pitfalls of the would-be prophet. By examining the past, one could predict almost unfailingly the future, if there were not always, and in every department of life, the strange, incalculable thing which, for want of a better name, we call genius, to be reckoned with, to be almost alarmed by. We may examine, we may reason, we may reckon up almost anything; but athwart all our conjectures, charm we never so wisely, comes genius, and revolutionises everything! It is the one thing which no formula can embrace. Not in the realms of literature and art alone will it break in and stultify our best prevision. In every department of life we must tread cautiously, aware that no one who would forecast the future can afford to neglect its disturbing possibilities. We must prayerfully and joyously expect that from time to time genius will suddenly arrive and pass across the stage, changing everything, bringing to naught our cunningest anticipations; and as it is peculiarly the quality of literature to be thus perturbed and regenerated, we must not even attempt to predict what schools the literature of the future will pass through. The only thing we can be certain of is that from time to time some epoch-making mind will express itself. Acquainted with all the devices of the schools it will brush them all aside, and half unconsciously, half a-dream, as if indeed it were literally “inspired,” it will establish new standards, engender new methods, and endow the time with new delights. Criticism will dissect, examine and explain, until the creative mind is almost persuaded that it has all along understood itself; but the one thing by which criticism must ever be eluded, the one thing which must ever elude prophecy, is genius itself. When all is said that man can say, and all is said in vain, the best explanation of the unexplainable is perhaps the old one, that genius brings in some way a message from outside the world. Perhaps, since there is always a demand for something which man can worship, this inspiration may be the subject of the conscious adoration of the new age. Perhaps we have here the subject of the religion of the future; for inspiration, as we may most conveniently name this mystery, has just that character of the unknowable half-seized, which is precisely what the soul of man is ever yearning for.