or escape instantly from any hold." Moreover, the Professor agrees to send three trial holds to show the value of the system, for one dollar, to any citizen of good reputation.

Just notice in the illustration how a sassy slap from an "unathletic man" is able to put out of business the most dangerous plug-ugly. And think of the persuasiveness of the headline "A Dollar Prevents Anyone Striking, Choking or Shooting You."

The advertisement doesn't make the statement but it is presumably true that if any one should beat you into pulp, put a kink in your windpipe or fill you full of lead, thereafter, you are entitled to get your dollar back.

** * *

Now the Baker Electric is undoubtedly a car of class, merit and distinction. A car that deserves the best kind of advertising.

But the finest car ever made and the most interesting illustration would not induce the most susceptible automobile buyer to burrow through the longest advertising sentence on record. Approximately 260 words without a stop for breath. Think of it!

For years the wise men in advertising have told us of the strength and effect of short paragraphs.

How can any copywriter imagine that he can get his stuff read when he knots it into one continuous tangle like the first paragraph in this Baker Electric advertisement!

66.

Y

ES," said the Ad-man, as we lighted

pipe and cigar and took seats close to his bookstrewn table, "the longer I live the stronger becomes my interest in noting the part Sentiment plays in this great melodrama of Business. Nor in Business only, but in every activity of man on this oblate spheroid of cities, times, tribes and creeds which we call Earth.

"Sentiment we cannot escape, say or write what we will. We cannot laugh it away, as our old Castilian friend laughed away chivalry from the purlieus of Spain. Though a purely personal matter, yet having said that, we see it is equally a matter of nations, climates, traditions, history and education. For sentiment after all is only 'feeling'; although, following an Americanism characteristic of everything we do, we are gradually twisting and diverting the word away from its original meaning to something synonymous with 'mawkishness,' 'emotionalism,' etc. In fact, we are only kept from the actual change by the use of another word, 'sentimentality,' which partially aids in maintaining the distinction.

"Strange, isn't it"-continued the Ad-man, between comfortable puffs of his pipe, "that the problem of how far sentiment shall have 'a show for its alley' in our own lives is a matter of childhood training, parentage, circumstances, etc.? Through sentiment our valuetags, by which we distinguish every incident and interest of life, are re-lettered from year to year. The young man has his enthusiasms, most omnipotent for good or evil because of the magic touch of Sentiment. Here are two Scotchmen toiling in a mountain field. One is a poet, the other a plowman, and why? Because one sees the values that color an upland daisy, senses the Homeric tragedy of a 'Cot

ter's Saturday Night,' while the other accepts the daisy as an incident of his furrow, and reads in Saturday night only a semi-colon to his sentence of lifelong toil. One is guided by sentiment, the other by the lack of it.

"Forgive me," laughed the Ad-man, "at my slightly blasé expression. "You are doubtless wondering what has prompted me to take this strain. You are saying, too, that this has nothing to do with Business; that from Burns to the General Manager's desk is a far cry. But, my boy, you cannot divorce one thing from another in this world, except as you do it arbitrarily. In Nature, every thing is related. Mention the word swallows, and see what a wonderful series of relations is immediately set asinging in consciousness! The South, with its acres of sun-color and roses, its cane-fields, drowsy skies, lazy rivers and dreaming plantations. Then a Northern spring and the note of that other, truer Northerner, that braver music-maker among our birds, the robin. The robin-thought again suggests that great worldstir of cities which heralds a resumption of brisker trade among men, and we seem in his building song to hear an echo of the quickened sentiment which you and I try to write into our ads. It is thus that Sentiment binds an entire day's thinking into relationshipsidea begetting idea, and question question till we see the pertinence of sentiment to every thing said or sung in a circuit of the clock.

"Nor has my notion that Sentiment underlies whatever we do been clearer borne out than through a couple of episodes which attended my trip to England some years agoone an international instance of sentiment in business, the other an individual one; both characteristic of that solidarity of feeling which is the most pronounced trait of the Englishman of any age.

"It was at the time of the Boer War. Without entering into any discussion of its pros and cons, its rights or its wrongs, it serves my purpose well enough merely to remind you of one or two of the things which made my trip such an auspicious one and my subsequent success in a sales and advertising capacity, while there, so striking an instance of sentiment in business. You will remember that Germany considered the British-Boer clash a pre-eminent opportunity to align herself with the Boer interests and, no doubt, looked upon the occasion as more than favorable for a chance to provoke active hostilities with the Lion. In fact, as time went by, the shadow of coming events pointed more and more toward a genuine war between England and her Tueton antagonist across the Channel. well, it was just at this juncture that Uncle Sam shook slumber from his eyes and assured Germany in no very uncertain terms, that if she violated her neutrality by a gunshot there would be a day of reckoning with another English-speaking nation. This checkmated any further restlessness from down Berlin way, and gave England an open field for the completion of her nght-whether justly or unjustly, of course, 1 is not in my province to say. (Sotto voce, old boy, you know, I am slightly a paradox among ad-men in that i am not a politician.)

"Well, it was then that I footed it for England, opening up a London sales-office on behalf of a large American manufactory anxious to avail itself of the English market. The subsequent successes which I achieved during my stay there were, I am frank to admit, not more than 50 per cent due to my own ability or initiative. They were the tangible flowering of that strange little sales-seed, sentiment in business. As an American, and therefore strictly non-committal, personally at least, on the subject of the Boer unpleasantness, while at the same time representative of that big Yankee brother who had told the Kaiser to abstain, I was welcomed on every hand and the sooften dubbed 'phlegmatic' Englishman certainly belied himself for once by the cordiality o his buyers toward my line of goods. So strong was this example of sentiment in business that I venture to say no American, in spite of our added standing as advertisers and our increased sales-ability through the growth of competitive influences, could go to England today and duplicate the sales record I made in London

during those war-days of several years ago. "Similarly characteristic of my notion that the Englishman concedes to sentiment a stronger place in his itinerary than does the American traveling man, is the individual incident which I am going to relate." (Here the Ad-man paused to relight his pipe and smile whimsically, as he often does when once launched on a congenial idea.)

"During my stay in England, I indulged in frequent travel as a part of my duties, and chanced on a particularly inauspicious day to be put up' at a hotel called the Coach and Horses. Its real name has left me but the one I have given is significant, at least, of my estimate that this hotel couldn't have been any more behind the times than a coach and horses of old hostelry days would be in contrast with a Packard Six. I do not mean that it lacked its full quota of electric lights, 'lifts' and gingerbread furniture, because those things do not constitute a good hotel in any land. It was the service and cooking and the generally rack-and-ruin air which pervaded the place which caused me to comment on the fact to a fellow-traveler, an Englishman of veteran experience, also out of London.

"No, said he, 'it isn't up to what it used to be and I have thought for some time that I would change and go to another hotel when I make this town.'

"'Why don't you do so?' I asked, as it was evident that, in the course of years of travel he must have been in this hotel a number of times already.

"Well, to tell you the truth,' he burst ou in a sudden moment of those all-too-rare confidences on the part of the Englishman, 'I have stopped at this hotel for eighteen years, my father stopped here for twenty-seven years before me, and the firm for whom we work have always had their own travelers stop here, so I kind of hate to make the change now, don't you know.'

"This same sort of sentiment, my boy, per vades every transaction across counters. Sentiment and its blood-brother, Habit, are the two elements of consumer demand for which we daily lie in wait. We coin our slogans, fret up a headache over 'copy,' and soak our wits in midnight oil, merely that we may snare Sentiment and Habit into looking our way when next Madame Housewife or Mister Paterfamilias are on the eve of purchasing some

article we are advertising. Show me a sale where sentiment is not, and I will show you a good thief.

"Only tonight I dropped into that little Jap curio chop and art store on Eighth Street for a five minutes' indulgence of curiosity. Imagine my amusement when I casually picked up the daintiest of dainty tea-cups, in an odd pattern with just an intimation of cherry-blossom and mountain-peak in tints around the rim, and inadvertently discovered a tag pasted on the bottom which had been but half torn away and still showed the letter 'R' in ink. Mrs. R, you may not know, but I do contracts some of her work to this astute Fujiyama on Eighth Street and so cleverly imitates the work of imported pieces that a purchaser is none the wiser if he marches off with a few of her 'creations' in his package that have been selected from the Jap's shelves.

"Well, I set the cup down with a smile and continued my little tour of inspection. Presently I chanced on a quaint little vase; a fairy fancy in porcelain, vignetted with infinitesimal art into glimpses of a valley, a spray with a bird on it, a few reeds in a lazy wind and a nodding geisha girl with an unfurled parasol. Here was a touch of the Outmost East, the sort of land Hearn loves to picture in his pages, and I fell for it instanter. I paid a price too high, I know, but sentiment must be satisfied; and when I got home my wife, with that feminine intuition which always has a 'hunch' that hubby has purchased 'not wisely but too well,' turned the vase over and there, as plain as this tobacco ash on my fingertip, was the fatal little tag half torn off, marked 'R'!

"Sentiment!" continued the Ad-man, yawning, as he turned to the latest magazine and began slitting its pages with a paper knife, "builds our houses, cooks our food, paints our pictures and writes our songs. Nothing, apparently, is more prosaic than a busy ad-man's desk on ten o'clock of a Monday morning, when he is dictating with one eye on the clock and

one hand on the telephone. It is stacked with mail, proofs of advertisements, bills for O. K., sales reports, solicitors' cards, and all the whatnottery of routine which makes the 'man behind' a shining mark for toilsome hours. 'Nothing but the daily grind!' says the Ordinary Manager to himself as he rolls up his figurative sleeves and 'pitches in.' But listen to the still, small Voice and I think you'll hear it whispering in his ear something like this:

""Here are Romance and Ambition and Onportunity. Sentiment and Music and Poetry. and the great soul of the First Man, stacked here in odds and ends of manifestation right under your nose. This sale is the Ambitionthermometer of our new branch man in X-. It shows him at the boiling point of interest and enthusiasm. Don't forget that in your next mention of X in the House Organ. This inquiry-letter is the first return from that new ad. you had your doubts about. Squeeze out all the rineness of Opportunity from it: don't tag is and let it pass up with a fill-in and a rubber-stamp signature! This testimonial letter throws a new light on the possibilities of vour line in a new field. Here is Romance smiling at you from between its lines-the Romance of Next Year's Sales. This criticism of last month's double-page spread from vour brother ad-man-Gee. that should be Music to It's constructive criticism, the hardest of all commodities to obtain in a Simon-nure consignment. Get its key-note and tune un to a higher effort next time. There. stand off. man, and get a new squint at the day's work. See it imaginatively as a different task from vesterday's and thank your stars for a chance to make it a "ioh with a distinction" today. In a word, then, put sentiment into your business and you'll take out a double portion of satisfaction in its doing!'

"That." said the Ad-man, as he knocked the ashes from his pipe and settled back to read, "is a little screed that wouldn't cost any man a cent. And it's a 'tip from father,' too."