have a greater margin for advertising expenditure, but how this will work out is, of course, pure guesswork. If the party in power adheres, too, to its determination to place the bulk of the customs tax upon luxuries coming into the country the situation would seem to justify and encourage much publicity on the part of American producers of this class of goods.

It is to be borne in mind that the new Congress is to put into effect a national income tax which will tax all incomes of $5,000 and more from any source-possibly all incomes, earned or unearned, above an even lower minimum. This will be a new factor in our national life which may have some effect upon individual purchasing power and which is as worthy the study of advertisers and sales managers as is the rising price of gasoline or any other new influence.

The United States Supreme Court now has pending before it several cases, the outcome of each of which is awaited with the greatest interest and even anxiety by many publishers, advertisers, etc.

One significant appeal to the highest court in the land is that of the New York Journal of Commerce and Commercial Bulletin, which seeks to test the constitutionality of the new "newspaper publicity law," passed by Congress within the year, as a part of the Post Office appropri ation bill, and the object of which is to compel all newspaper publishers to file semi-annual statements of circulation and to mark all reading matter that has been paid for as advertising.

Former Postmaster General Hitchcock agreed to hold up the enforcement of the law pending the decision of the Supreme Court, but when the new Postmaster General, Mr. Burleson, took office he announced that he would proceed to enforce the penalties-barring from the second class mails periodicals that had not filed the required statements-without waiting for the decision of the Supreme Court. Thereupon the Journal of Commerce applied for and secured a restraining order which calls for a continuance of the agreement of inaction pending the final disposition of the case in the Court.

There are before the Supreme Court three cases that involve in one form or another that great question of the hour-the manufacturer's right to fix and enforce a resale or retail price. One case is that in which the Fair, a Chicago department store, seeks to have the Federal court of last resort reverse the decision of a

lower court, which decreed that the Chicago concern was guilty of patent infringement in selling at a price lower than the placarded figure, gas heaters manufactured by the Kohler Die and Specialty Company.

The second case represents the final stage of a fight made by the manufacturers of "Sanatogen" against a cut-rate retail druggist who sold the patent remedy at a price lower than that stipulated by the maker.

The third case is that in which the proprietors of R. H. Macy & Co., a New York department store, seek an injunction against the American Publishers' Association, preventing the allied book publishers from carrying into effect certain contracts and combinations for the purpose of maintaining a fixed price, at retail, for all copyrighted books; and which has had the effect of cutting off Macy's supply of these books for sale at cut prices.

In each of these various cases-the most formidable array of advertising cases ever before the Supreme Court at any one time-the decision ought to be as significant, in its way, as that in the famous Dick-Henry mimeograph case. This was, to a considerable extent, the inspiration of all this later legal controversy over price maintenance.

Ultimately there will probably be carried to the Supreme Court the government's action against the Kellogg Toasted Corn Flake Co., which involves the propriety of the use by a manufacturer of a patented carton or container as a means of enforcing the resale price under the patent laws.

Advertising interests will be affected to some extent if there is adopted a plan now proposed to have Uncle Sam issue weekly an official gazette. It would carry not only all Departmental announcements, but also a goodly share of the advertisements for bids on government contracts and other paid advertising, which now goes into the columns of independent periodicals.

It is not the intention to cut off governmental newspaper and magazine advertising entirely, but to have the official journal carry a large proportion of the notices which are now paid for. An official estimate shows that the national government last year spent for advertising an aggregate of nearly $150,000 and it is expected that a large share of this annual appropriation will be diverted from the coffers of publishers if the scheme for an official gazette goes through.

The action by Congress in the closing days of the last session in appropriating money for the preparation of plans for a new Patent Office is welcome news to all manufacturers and advertisers who appreciate to what extent attention to their interests has been hampered by the inadequate facilities of the present overcrowded Patent Office.

One branch of the Patent Office which will benefit especially by more commodious quarters is the Trade Mark Division, which has charge of the registration of all trade-marks and the copyright entry of prints and labels. While n the subject of trade-marks it may be mentioned that there is a moral for advertisers in the recent decision that a corporation in the State of California, made up of nine associations of fruit growers, merely acting as selling agents, not owning the fruit sold and not controlling the character of the fruit, is not the owner of the trade-mark employed and cannot register it.

Now that the country has a new President, applications are being received in Washington for the registration of the name, the portrait and the autograph signature of Woodrow Wilson as a trade-mark for cigars and other advertised products. All these applications have been rejected, the Patent Office having a rule that it is against public policy to register the name or portrait of the President (or indeed of any living celebrity) without the written consent of the individual concerned.

If any manufacturers can secure the written consent of Woodrow Wilson they can carry out their trade-mark plans. And, in this connection, it may be noted that Grover Cleveland, who was not generally regarded as amiable in such cases, did give written consent in one case during his term of office.

A Patent Office procedure, of no little interest in advertising circles, was found in the recent action of the Commissioner of Patents in recommending to the Secretary of the Interior the reinstatement of John Wedderburn, an attorney, who for sixteen years past has been disbarred from practice before the Patent Office because of alleged improper advertising. The specific offense which invoked this severe punishment was the offering of medals as prizes for the most meritorious inventions patented during the year in which the advertising appeared.

The Patent Office officials have frequently taken occasion, of late, to indicate that whereas they do not object to dignified, legitimate advertising by patent attorneys, they are opposed

on the new Sherley law-which gives Uncle Sam power to regulate the labels on all drugs and medical preparations-to banish all false and fraudulent matter from the wrappers of the bottles and the packages on the retailer's shelves. But, of course, this ban does not extend to advertising matter distributed apart from the product. Dr. Alsberg is known to be turning over in his mind the question of whether it may not be necessary to institute some governmental board of censorship that will pass upon all drug and medicine advertising.

From the standpoint of manufacturers and advertisers, one of the most important developments of the month is found in the preparations now being pushed forward for the inauguration on July 1, next of the C. O. D. feature of the new Parcel Post. This is the only feature of Uncle Sam's postal package delivery service not now in operation, and obviously it is an adjunct that is expected to prove of great aid to all those who sell goods by mail.

Elaborate preparations had to be made-including the arrangement of blanks, forms and reports for the C. O. D. system, and consequently this feature could not be put in operation when the main service was instituted the first of the year. Indeed, the officials are congratulating themselves that they have been able to get matters in shape to introduce the collect on delivery privilege at the turn of the year.

The charge for collection on a Parcel Post package will be ten cents in Parcel Post stamps affixed, provided the amount to be collected does not exceed $100. A C. O. D. parcel is to be insured against loss, without extra charge, in an amount equivalent to its value, but not to exceed $50. An important fact is that C. O. D.

parcels will be accepted for mailing only at money-order offices and only when addressed to a money-order office.

Every sender of a C. O. D. parcel will be given, at the time of mailing, a receipt showing the office and date of mailing, the number of the parcel and the amount due him. Postage must be fully prepaid on any package on which it is desired to have the price of the article and the charges collected. The "charges," it may be explained, consist principally of the fee for a money order, which is the medium whereby the collected purchase price is returned to the shipper.

The mail man who delivers a C. O. D. parcel must obtain a receipt for it on the tag which is duly attached to the package for that purpose. This tag, duly receipted, is considered the addressee's application for a money order for the amount due the sender. The addressee will not be permitted to examine the contents of a C. O. D. parcel until it has been receipted for and all charges paid. A parcel may be refused when tendered for delivery, but after delivery has been made it cannot be returned because of dissatisfaction with the contents or the amount collected.

W

E reproduce a recent photograph of Col. James M. Emery, a familiar figure among Chicago advertising men. Col. Emery is one of the oldest and most respected men in the field. He has been in continuous service with the National Stockman and Farmer since 1894; with the Farmers' Review since 1898, and with the Farmers' Guide since 1908.

The early life of Colonel Emery was as full of excitement as his later days are endowed with peace and satisfaction.

He was born in 1845; is of New England parentage; and gained a knowledge of the printing business in his boyhood.

He laid down his composing stick to enlist with the First Pennsylvania Cavalry at the outbreak of the Civil War.

He suffered more than twelve months in Anderson prison, but finally reached home victorious. Subsequently he became successful as Captain and Major in the Sixth Regiment, Iowa National Guards infantry. In 1884-5 he was appointed Lieut.-Colonel and Special Aide-deCamp on the staff of Governor Sherman.

This last summer at the reunion at Los Angeles Mr. Emery was made a member of the Executive Committee of the National Association of Union ex-Prisoners of the Civil War.

Mr. Emery has been for nearly fourteen years the honored superintendent of Railroad Mission-a Chicago religious organization that has put many a down-and-outer up and on his

way.

Col. James M. Emery.

66

OMETIMES," remarked the Adman, turning to me across the top of a maga zine he had been leafing through, "the 'tears of things' come over me in a wonderfully keen way. I seem to feel the usually rich and varied music of the market, the metropolis and the money-changers falling into monotones. The allegro is gone from the singing, the urge from the cries in the canyoned streets. Color pales from the spires, whether sun-tinged at morning or purpled with city twilight. I take up my pencil; I endeavor to concentrate on my client, his problems and his present sales status; I seize on a clean block of paper and try to conjure from its white square of mockery a new and fetching layout, a distinctive neadline. But it is no use; the agile arguments, the clean brevities, the striking display, won't come. My brain balks, I am dead. The spirit is gone; the bell on the temple-door silent.

"In copy parlance, I am stale.' I call it ad

nausea.

When it comes it casts its shadow before. Once possessed by it, I try to lock up desk if I possibly can and undignifiedly 'beat it'; anywhere, just so it carry me as far from an advertisement or the thought of one as I can get. But what can we do, we of the copy-writing craft, when clock and circumstance combine to hold us prisoners in the four walls of work, while the Ego rebels and monotones replace the music? I am going to speak of an incident of mine which will illustrate this malady of monotones and its remedy as well. There is something deeply significant about the principle of mental hoboism which we often overlook to our disadvantage; particularly when we forget that Open Road of the spirit which is too much untraveled in these days.

"The writing of good, galvanic copy is a task for the gods, belittle it as we will. Me

thinks Kipling or H. G. Wells, or any other of our latter-day literati, would find his Pegasus in pound if he were tied to some of the propositions which today litter the desks of any big agency. Imagine him compelled to bring from the commonplace individuality and out of dull mechanics magic, without leaping into extravagance or disturbing credibility! I do not speak in any disparagement of a Kipling or with the implication that he would not evolve much finer and more compelling copy than us ordinaries. Rather, I am contrasting the freedom of fiction and fiction-writing with the intense restriction which bounds the writer of advertising, whom we presuppose to be a man of 1913 standards. It is this millwheel round of recurrent thought that sooner or later brings the monotones to the copywriting brain, and when they come, escape is a man's one undeniable desire.

"In my more active agency work, say four or five years ago, there arrived an unusually congested period in my part of the game when it seemed as if my work were eternally chasing me instead of the usual reversal of such a situation to which I had been accustomed. Headline ideas stared me in the face for recognition, then jumped headlong into the crowd before I had time to capture them with a notebook. My desk was cold and uncommunicative to the touch and refused to yield up a single suggestion. The pictures on the wall, the old worn spot on the telephone, the changing pattern of cloud and blue framed in the upper half of my window which generally carried a hint of some value or other-all were unresponsive and speechless. Ad nausea, casting its shadows ahead, was invading me and I could count the exact number of minutes before my brain and Hardtmuth would be of

no more use to that agency than an aeroplane to a miner.

"I had just been assigned a most prosaic account, with an uncommonly big expenditure behind it, too-genuine country butter, with practically national distribution arranged for and calling for the very best in copy to stimulate thousands of non-butter-minded consumers all over the country. With ad nausea in full possession and a new, yet commonplace, butter account staring me in the face, I groaned aloud: 'Non compos mentis; I'm bughouse! Why, oh why, didn't I stick to the straight literature game where at least, if a fellow wearied of villains and highbrow banquet-room intrigues, butter might be to him as manna and mazuma?' I went straightway to the Main Reverberation and declared I must have a rest, that in a short time I should be only a bunch of idle flotsam on his hands anyhow, and that he might at least salvage some part of me by letting me go now. He gave me five weeks on the spot and I got me home on the first car with several steamship folders in a sidepocket and a hazy desire for departure in my skypiece.

* #

"Now, let me speak of a scene which, for beauty and pacific thoughts out-scenes anything I have ever known. It is sunrise on an Autumn morning in the Gulf of Mexico, while the spectator indolently reclines in the deck-chair of a fruit steamer steadily churning its way Southward toward Central American ports. There is a stillness, just rayed with one round gold star on the horizon rim-a gentility of movement as the vessel crosses its liquid floor —that I have never experienced in any other of my wanderings. The floundering foam pushes our ship from side to side with the amiability of Ocean at his best, and the silence, the sense of pleasing relaxation that pervades you, your boat and the field of waters that glints against your eyes, are things of infinite healing. I had rushed to a steamer office on leaving the agency and booked passage to an out-of-the-way spot in Guatemala, for sheer desire to escape in the shortest possible time from the city and civic trammels; to taste of blue seas and bright skies in the land of their nativity; to feel the primeval pulse, slow and insinuate, of Nature in a place where trolleycars and truisms were incognita. To fight monotones with monotones; yes, that was it. To match the great physical world, with its unvarying sound of sea and wind, palm-tree

and bird-song, against this other great world of towers and cars and bells and men's barter -the monotones of solitude against the monotones of society.

I

"As I half dreamed away the hours of that first morning in the Gulf, all remembrance of an advertising agency, of ad-making, marring and mending, faded into insubstantiality. looked level into the fairy furnace-red of that swift segment of sun, climbing out of its darkness and environing sea, and the old life seemed to shrivel in the growing light like an old letter that one tosses into a fire. The girdle of circumstance which enclosed my city life back there in the North seemed to contract like the parchment in Balzac's story. Recent importances and problems came to focus in a normal ratio to a very big and bright universe, where men are only incidents, and passions a flicker of flies in immense Night. I talk like Omar, eh?-well, the vision of that Central American trip hangs in my memory yet with all the vividness of reality. The difference, the subtle separation, between Broadway and those impersonal plains of water all round our tiny steamer, came with the impact of Persian philosophy against my small modern mind.”

Here the Adman turned to me with a look of interrogation, as if seeking to know how I was following his more than usual rhetoric of speech and intensity of emotion.

"It's all right, old man," said I. "I've had those same thoughts too, although not exactly on the Gulf of Mexico. Don't think you are the only one who gets ad nauseated and drinks deeper and differently from the Pierian springs when he has a chance. In the last test, you know, mind and its movements are a good deal as they ever have been. Cicero must have gotten jolly well tired of his paralyzing language, blasé in his Roman arbors, and wished he could never set eyes on it again-even the little preposition ad," said I, laughing.

"Then you understand the revulsion of ideas and physical sensations which accompanied me on that excursion into summer seas and seasons. Our first real port of call was Belize, in British Honduras. I remember how intensely hungry I was and yet how most of it was forgotten in the interest which I felt in watching our preparations to land. The bay waters were too shallow to permit of our approaching nearer than a half mile to the palm-fringed and low-lying shore line, so a motor-boat, operated by a barefoot little Hondureno black as Stygian night, came off from the town to meet us. We