From The Nineteenth Century.

ADVERTISING AS A TRESPASS ON THE
PUBLIC.

dom- now, unhappily, impaired by anarchic license.

There is in some minds, apparently, WHATEVER may be the fate of the a good deal of confusion as to what Rural Advertisements Bill in the pres- constitutes the wealth of the nation. ent session, the subject with which it We all see that man needs or enjoys a deals is one which must engage the great many things for the supply of very serious attention of future Parlia- which human exertion is necessary. ments. It is sometimes assumed Most of us would say that in an ideally and not always by the kind of people constituted society every one ought to who have a motive for being obtuse contribute to the common stock of that the determination to check the comfort by a certain amount of effort, ravages of the disfiguring advertisers is and should get as his reward his own an amiable foible of a few visionary share of the benefits resulting from the persons morbidly sensitive to pictur- toils of the others. I, for one, hold esque effect. The very reverse is the that the existing social system gets as truth. The movement is the work of near to this standard as the infirmities men and women who take their stand of mortal man permit. But, unluckily, on common sense, and are well aware the arrangement by which labor is rethat they cannot carry the dictates, munerated in money wages has deeven of right reason, to uncompromis- veloped in many a habit of mind which ing lengths. They are not asserting occasionally leads to very erroneous any new principle in public policy; it is rather their purpose to secure the application of time-honored methods to a department which has till now simply because the abuse is of recent growth remained outside the pale of wholesome regulation. In brief, they are engaged in asserting, as a matter of grave and urgent public interest, the effectual protection of one of the chief elements in the national wealth; or, to look at the matter, not as a question of collective property, but of individual liberty, they claim for the seeing eye the same relief from wanton injury as is already afforded in the case of every other organ of sense.

notions concerning the elements of general well-being. Because for so many things we depend on exertion which has to be directly purchased, and because it is convenient to estimate the value of these services in terms of the currency, people are apt to forget that a very large part of the things that minister to happiness bear no price at all. Bracing air, fine scenery, cannot be sold by the gallon or the square mile, but they form as real a part of the riches of the community that commands them as fine wheaten loaves or dainty books. An able schoolmaster rightly receives a large salary; but who would venture It is well at the outset to lay stress to appraise in figures, or who would on this essential aspect of our aims. question the essential importance of We are, in the strictest sense, cham- the infinite devotion of a wise and pions of the utilities. We are alive to tender mother? A clever cook posthe instincts and the impulses of an sesses a marketable accomplishment, industrial and competitive age. We but what would be the dinner without believe in untrammelled production and the unpriced flow of talk ? I must not free exchange; in the march of inven- labor a truth which, once it is asserted, tion; in a word, in all the fine abstrac- may appear a truism. But elementary tions which our detractors (for we are as the doctrine is, it is frequently lost not exempt from the invariable penalty sight of in discussions on the manifold of good intentions) fondly picture us phases of the condition-of-the-people as despising or neglecting. We are for problem. It is treated with tacit concivilization as against barbarism, and tempt by those who defend the for progress as against degradation. undisturbed liberty of advertising-disAbove all, we are for individual free- figurement, and this is my only excuse

for trespassing thus far on the out-ings which the plague of placards perskirts of social science. sistently wounds. Surely it is gross There is no need, surely, of demon- inconsistency, on the part of a nation strating that the aspect of unspoilt which prides itself on being practical, English country gives genuine delight to spend a large part of our resources to multitudes of our people. We are on creating a craving for what is fair not all susceptible in the same degree and dignified, and then hesitate about to the charm of landscape, but scarcely repressing abuses which render the any one is wholly indifferent to the culture imparted a source of pain. freshness of the fields and woods. If Consider the amount of labor that is it were not so, excursion trains and the given every year, in every English tourist traffic generally would be phe- town, to the maintenance of parks and nomena baffling explanation. It is gardens. Yet our native land, which, quite true that a great many of the till comparatively recent times, was places to which the picnicking masses one glorious panorama, is, for want of resort are not patterns of sylvan seclu- a little prescience, becoming a mere sion. But the good-humor, or, let us background for painted boards along say, the equanimity with which the the more frequented routes. It is not throng of honest folk who are having a merely a question of the mischief that day's outing bear the catchpenny eye- has been done already. The saddest sores ought not to be interpreted as and most serious part of the business deliberate acquiescence. Taste is not is, that in the miserable competition of confined to one class, and many work- the people who resort to this means of men, whose means do not permit them catching custom the evil must grow to escape from the horrors of the way- and spread indefinitely. side, feel as keen a resentment at the wanton fouling of what is fair as the most fastidious artist or the master of a jealously guarded Highland retreat. The simplicity of rural prospect is a portion of the national wealth which it is emphatically a popular interest to save from destruction and impairment. In many ways already the State and the municipalities, as well as private benefactors, have recognized the importance both of developing the sensibility for beauty and of providing facilities for gratifying the implanted tastes. Art museums are kept up at great cost. Encouragement is given in elementary schools to the training of the eye and hand, with a view mainly to help the children to enjoy the gracious aspect of outward things. History is taught, or ought to be to another by the advance of the taught, in the hope that the study will enemy, discover one year that some engender a patriotic pride in connect- fishing hamlet has escaped the sweep ing the memories of the past with the of the advertising agent. When they scenes in which great things were return next summer they are greeted done and endured by our forefathers, by the odious soap and the execrated or in which generation after genera- pills. One snatches only a precarious tion have lived their unrecorded lives. respite; what is to multitudes the deIt is, I assert, an accepted article of light of their lives is held on sufferance public policy to cultivate the very feel-at the discretion of the foe who works

The pest, I grant, is not as yet everywhere. The enthusiastic pedestrian can escape easily enough from its immediate presence. There are stretches of country still in which no jarring emblem spoils the harmonious perfection of the landscape. But wherever the beaten track leads there is either recurring disfigurement or the indefinite fear of encountering the detested objects. Just as certain microbes abound in the soil where certain plants are grown, so this fungoid growth fastens on the highroads and the by-ways. If a village becomes a place of pilgrimage by reason of its old-world beauty, forthwith descends upon it the shower of enamelled placards. The weary seekers of sequestered nooks, driven from one retreat

in darkness and blazons his deeds in | proclivities" do not hesitate to avow killing light. If it were possible to that undiluted town life is bad, and, suppress the resentment which these with commendable energy, municipalperpetual affronts are so admirably cal- ities have set themselves to repair as culated to cause, and regard the phe- best they may the loss by laying out nomenon in a purely scientific spirit, parks. No form of benefaction is more there would be something to admire in highly appreciated than the gift by a the stupid mechanical tenacity with local magnate of a pleasaunce for the which the persecutors do their work. masses. Lord Meath's association and the Kyrle Society have done great things in this way for the metropolis, and that admirable organization which devotes itself to the preservation of commons has saved for posterity many a fine tract of breezy down and many a picturesque old village green. But although these things are welcomed, both as good in themselves and as illustrations of the bent of popular feeling, the net result of the conflict of forces is to leave our urban population infinitely poorer in one of the essential elements of happiness.

The reader will, I hope, see at once the pertinence to the matter we are considering of the economic truism with which I delayed them on the threshold of our inquiry. If a man tried to draw attention to the fact that he wanted to sell a cough mixture by blowing up the British Museum, he would be punished for destroying property on which the people set great store. Why should he be allowed to destroy another, no less valuable and no less cherished possession - the refreshing charm of rural views? Is nature so ridiculously inferior to art? Is the The creeping blight of disfigurement attempt of the painter to simulate land- has blasted infinitely more beauty than scape on canvas to be recognized as a creative energy has brought into belegal chattel, and the landscape itself ing. The measure of the loss is not to be treated as a thing of no worth? the mere area of the ground that has Again, to look at the question in an- been transformed into dumping-ground other aspect. If the vendor of black- for catchpenny eyesores. If we wish lead follows me down the road, yelling to estimate aright the extent of the into my ear that his article is incom- injury done, we have to think of the parably the best, his molestation is, I effect on the opportunities of enjoysuppose, actionable. Why should I ment in the every-day life of the averhave no redress when he waylays my age individual. For one trip taken for eyes with his impudent tablet in vivid pure purposes of pleasure, thousands blue and white, and annoys not me of journeys are undertaken in the ordionly, but every one who chances to nary course of business. The view pass that way? On mere grounds of from the window of the railway-carhumdrum comfort we honest ratepayers riage used to be a real pleasure to those are surely entitled to the peaceful en- whom affairs called from one great joyment of the highway which has centre of activity to another. A conbeen made at our cost. siderable portion of our city folk live out of town for the sake of escaping from the eternal tokens of competitive strife in the streets. But now the sole avenue of escape has been set thick with the horrors; and the vexatious

It is, alas no slight or exceptional grievance that we labor under. The attack is directed against rights which are of enormous and ever-growing importance to the well-being of the community. Amid all the obstinate incongruity of the intrusion adds keenquestionings concerning our social state, it has become a commonplace to speak with deep concern of the tendency of population to herd in great cities. Town councillors who would not for worlds be suspected of "æsthetic

ness to the smart. No trifling part of the modern Englishman's existence is spent in transit to and fro between home and shop, or office, or factory. It is surely the very height of folly, while we are all bewailing the unavoid

jects specially designed to brand upon the retina the most galling features of the turmoil which it is the cyclist's one desire to forget; and the worst of it all is, that some unreflecting gentle folk lay on the poor wheelmen the blame of vulgarizing the region through which their routes lie. I acquit the people who do the mischief of all deliberate

able drawbacks of crowded civilization, | passes sees these highways equipped to permit this wanton and utterly un- with more frequent, more staring, obproductive sacrifice of our solaces, and addition to our worries. The persistence with which these engines of torment infest our thoroughfares takes away half the pleasures of the deliberate holiday. Granted that there are spots beyond the reach of the profaner, the ordeal of affronts through which the pilgrim has to pass en route blunts present delight and spoils the retro- malignity; but if they were on princispect. To recur to our economic tru- ple enemies of their race, they could ism, the toleration of disfiguring not devise more effectual methods of advertisements causes every day and every hour wholesale destruction of that natural wealth which consists of the restfulness or the beauty of the outlook. We spend millions without grumbling on the maintenance of an army and navy to defend our shores from the foreigner; but by a defect in our system of local government which an act of a few clauses would make good we permit domestic foes to play havoc with our native country. We resent an insult to the flag, but with inexplicable tameness of soul we allow any one (who is mean enough or foolish enough to do the deed) to mar the very face and features of the fatherland. Some there are who talk of restoring the land to the people; let them, first of all, save from sordid eclipse the glory of our common domain.

torment. Above all, they make war upon the working-man. It is on the lines which the artisan (whose field of choice is necessarily limited by the facilities of cheap travel) has to use that the blots are most diligently multiplied. The poor are robbed even of the treasure that costs nothing, and yet is of priceless worth. Some of the experts in this form of highway robbery add insult to injury by pretending that "the people don't mind ;” that they "rather like" the vulgar blaze. This is calumny. The people have to endure, and, alas! they have not yet learned to resist to good purpose. But to say that they enjoy the horrors is a bad variant of the old fable that eels acquire a taste for being skinned alive.

An edifying tale may here be told. A party of mechanics were going in a special excursion train from the East End to Oxford. At one point the train was detained for some time. It hap

Let me illustrate, by reference to a single pursuit, the wrong done to large classes by the absence of legal protec-pened to be a place where an exquition against assaults upon the eye. Bi- sitely beautiful reach of the Thames cycling is an institution which nearly is disclosed, or, rather, used to be every one regards with favor. Those disclosed, and where, as a natural conof us who are not adepts willingly take our chance of being knocked down and the certainty of being whistled at (which is almost worse) in consideration of all the blessings the machine confers upon the rider. The queen's counsel or the city clerk can leave behind him, when the blessed hour sounds for release from court or counter, the stifling atmosphere of London, and in a few hours find himself in Arcadia. But, unluckily, Arcadia is approached by metalled roads, and every day that

sequence, the gentlemen who treat scenery only as decoy for possible customers had raised a more than usually bountiful crop of blazing field-boards. Indignation waxed warm among the party. It was proposed and carried unanimously that they should descend from the carriage and demolish forthwith the offensive emblems. It required a very strenuous discourse (delivered, the legend runs, by a convinced Home Ruler who was in charge of the party) concerning the reverence due to legal

ity to dissuade them from executing | nary to suggestions for a remedy. Desummary justice. One of the company liverance, I contend, is assured as soon argued that if the medicine man hit as those who are especially sensitive to him in the eye he was entitled to hit back. The train, however, moved on, and the controversy remains an open and burning question to this day.

Once again I must ask the reader to bear in mind the true conception of wealth. If the production of a bicycle is to be regarded as a service to the community, on the ground that it enables the townsman to get to the fields and villages, the destruction of the features which make the country a source of pleasure is, even from the industrial point of view, impoverish

ment.

It is hardly necessary to add that in a tourist track picturesqueness is a commercial asset which it argues strange blindness on the part of hotelowners and others locally interested to subject to deterioration.

Even if the wares which it is the purpose of the annihilators to commend had the virtues ascribed to them by those interested in their sale, if good soaps were only made by the anarchist firms, and if no physic was so potent as that compounded by the nihilistic pillmen, the havoc wrought by their board far exceeds any conceivable addition to household cleanliness or the healthy action of the public liver. Some of us would sooner die than save our lives by absorbing the nostrums so nauseously puffed.

the affronts realize that the question is essentially a public one, and that they may fearlessly and resolutely appeal on broad grounds of national interest to the judgment of their fellows. I admit at once that those who feel very acutely are but a small percentage of the community. But if reforms depended upon the ardent, and concurrent, and spontaneous demand of a majority there would have been no change of institutions since the flood. It is the fervid conviction of minorities that has worked all the great revolutions. It suffices if the numerically small band can obtain even the languid assent of the many, and are not confronted by a hostile minority equal in influence to themselves. Now the most dismal theory that has ever been propounded regarding popular taste does not assume that the masses have a craving for the naughty superfluities which offend the select. They are supposed to tolerate them; but the sounder doctrine is, that they have too many other things to think of to take note of the loss they sustain, or to meditate on modes of redress. If only we who are keenly interested make our views known, the eyes of thousands will be opened to the extent of the injury done. If we are a minority, we are a minority not less powerful than the minorities that fought successfully the battle of sanitation, of popular education, of factory regulation, and of the many other beneficial reforms which a generation ago were laughed at as crazes, and to-day are accepted by the lineal intellectual descendants of those who scoffed as elementary institutions of civilization.

But, of course, not the smallest good results either to the consumer or to the whole class of producers to which the disfigurers belong. The starch of blatant A may supplant in the market the starch of modest B, but the laundresses use no more and no less of the commodity in question. The only effect is that little by little all the makers are Every one at present (to confine ourdrawn into the insane rivalry by plac-selves to one illustration) accepts withards, and that the wearers of stiff out murmur the dispensation by which shirt-fronts have to pay in their wash- he is bound under frightful penalties to ing-bills for the monstrosities which connect his drains in a particular way embitter their existence. with the public sewers. But there was a time, not so long ago, when the notion of preventing each householder from flinging his own rubbish into the

There would be little purpose in thus analyzing the nature of the evil if the inquiry were not an essential prelimi