Jackson was greatly aided during his canvass by his ability to capitalize a grievance. His friends believed that he ought to have been President four years before, and they made the country believe that he was a muchabused man. They iterated and reiterated the cry that he had been kept from the White House by corrupt bargains and the bigotry of the aristocrats. There has been a good deal of the same feeling with respect to Governor Smith since the Madison Square Garden fracas of 1924. Most of his friends are convinced that he should have had the Democratic nomination then, and but for his religion there can be little doubt that he would have had it. On the whole, it was his good fortune to have failed, for his chances of election would certainly not have been better in 1924 than they are now. He would also have been minus a grievance which his backers are losing no opportunity to utilize in their appeals to the proletariat.

If any one is in doubt as to whether the standards of political campaigning have been noticeably raised in the United States during the past

hundred years, he need only spend an hour or two looking over the "literature" which was thrust upon the electorate by both sides during the campaign of 1828. Nothing so ruthless would be tolerated to-day. The country was deluged with scurrilous pamphlets and handbills which contained little or no reference to the issues, but plenty of personal slander and innuendo. Jackson was pictured as a drunkard, a cock-fighter, a gambler, an adulterer, even a murderer. The famous "coffin handbills" bore the names of his alleged victims. Even the reputations of his wife and mother did not escape the malicious literary onslaught. Adams, on the other hand, was pilloried as a rich skinflint who never paid his honest debts, a swindler of the national treasury, a man who had married a foreigner and who never kept his word. One of the hostile cartoons showed him using a horsewhip upon a crippled old soldier who had dared to ask for a bite to eat.

It is hard to believe that votes could have been gained by this carnival of printed vulgarity even in the crude days of a century ago. Certainly we have climbed a huge turn of the spiral on the way to more dignified conduct in national campaigns. Whether the son of the new frontier will fare as well at the polls as did the son of the old frontier, is for the future to disclose. In any event, he will not do it by the same methods, nor will he have similar methods used against him.

M

R. H.G. WELLS, a man of many convictions, gave forcible expression to one of them when he said a few years ago that Americans spend half their lives in a "loud glare," and the other half behind a very effective smoke-screen. They are as dexterous in courting publicity as in eluding it. "When you go to the United States," he wrote, "and see head-lines and interviews with a girl about her engagement, or with a professor about his resignation, you at first say: 'Good God, there is no privacy here at all.' Then you discover that outside that crude, cheap, hasty lighting-up of salient objects and events, there are abysses of darkness, immense pits where much goes on and nothing is exposed; and people, rich people especially, are unobserved in them, and doing the most extraordinary things."

This is a truth so manifest that no one dreams of questioning it. But the phenomenon is not confined to America or to the twentieth century. Long before newspapers began their enlightening career, astute men knew what to blazon to the world, and what to withhold from observation. How otherwise would the Delphic oracle have run its long and honorable course? How otherwise

would treaties, pacts, protocols, coalitions, concordats and the like, have come into being? In the press of to-day the columns of foreign news are padded out with fragments of unimportant intelligence enlivened with adroit speculation. We are told that the Prince of Wales has learned a few words of Welsh, that Mussolini desires all Italians to wear the same kind of head-gear (a thing abhorrent to the human spirit), that a poor little mission has been looted and burned in China. But an indiscreet explosion of poison gas, where none was supposed to exist, is lightly handled; and into the sacred sanctuary of the great god, Capital, no one ventures to intrude. When a Paris despatch is headlined, "Europeans to Keep Steel Sales Hidden-Trust Will Not Disclose Its Export Markets, or Sharing of Business Among Members,” we know that Trusts abroad and Trusts at home are very much alike. One touch of finance makes the whole world kin.

The gentle wish-wash of social gossip which has a generous allowance of space in American newspapers rises occasionally (as when the Queen of Rumania visited our shores) into a tidal wave of imbecility. During our submerged period,

nothing seemed of importance save the lady's vapid utterances and amazing wardrobe, unless, indeed, it was the desolating fact-cabled hysterically from Paris-that her son, Prince Nicholas, had appeared in the rue de la Paix "with a hole of considerable size in the heel of one of his socks, which showed plainly above his Oxford shoe." Yet amid the feverish paragraphs which dealt with the intimacies of the queen's toilet there was never a word of information as to her purpose in coming to this country. Her too zealous publicity agents exhausted themselves in raptures over her "low-cut pumps of amber snake-skin," and left us to suppose she had journeyed all the way from Rumania to show them

to us.

Two years ago the managers of Philadelphia's ill-fated Sesqui-Centennial Exposition contrived adroitly to wedge a prize-fight (DempseyTunney) between a Greek play and a great religious ceremony. They were broad-minded men, devoid of prejudice. Reams of printed matter filled the newspapers for weeks before this epoch-making event. Preachers, women's clubs, "redblooded men" and "hundred-percent Americans" (terms of mystery both of them), uplifters and some dozens of societies for regulating other people's lives-all contributed their views. Much irrelevant information was offered and read. Yet, as the "New Republic" pointed out, the one thing that should have been known, Dempsey's physical condition (he had for years preserved a maximum of reputation on a minimum of fighting), was as carefully hidden as is the financial status

A typical illustration of American. sentiment concerning privacy and publicity is the ever-renewed dispute anent the printing of income-tax returns. People with incomes do not want the returns printed. They say, and with some show of reason, that taxes are personal calamities, and of no concern to the public. People without incomes not only want the returns printed, but take a somber delight in reading them. The more fabulous the figures, the keener the relish for this Barmecide feast, which appears to afford the feasters a ghostly form of nourishment. The conservative press supports, as in duty bound, the people with incomes, and denounces the printed lists as the surrender of life's last decency. The radical press supports, as in duty bound, the incomeless people, and denounces all efforts at secrecy as inspired by sinister motives. And to supply the comic element which is seldom lacking in public affairs, an occasional bootlegger or burglar (men who certainly have a need of, if not a right to, secrecy) takes pleasure in paying his taxes, and stating with commendable candor the nature of his avocation, and the profits accruing therefrom. One Chicago burglar of a humorous turn claimed a deduction for certain small tools lost on the job. Crime being a popular and lucrative American industry, it is only right that it should help support the the government it

to

defies.

The eagerness of adults for "reve

lations" of any kind about anybody is like the well-remembered eagerness of children for a "secret." Nothing was ever so full of promise and so empty of fulfilment as the secrets of childhood unless it be the revelations of maturity. Think of the vogue accorded to the "true" biographies of distinguished Americans "The True George Washington," "The True Benjamin Franklin," when they first flaunted their verities to the public eye. Yet they were, in the main, indistinguishable from the presumably false lives which preceded and which followed them. A brief biography of Mr. Coolidge promised to tell "his whole life as a human being"-something which has never yet been told about anybody since the beginning of the world. "The Secrets of the White House," as revealed by its housekeeper, went no further in all likelihood than the President's inclination to economy and fish-cakes.

England may be less adroit than the United States in shadowing her "abysses of darkness"; but in the matter of "loud glare" she stands second to none. The memoirs of the irrepressible "Margot," now "Margot," now the widowed Countess of Oxford and Asquith, were as loud as a saxophone, and as glaring as a Broadway electric sign. When some reminiscences by Mrs. Lloyd George were under consideration, the publishers thought fit to promise her readers "Fascinating glimpses into the secret history of politics" and "Intriguing sidelights upon leading personalities"-assurances which they must have known to be vain. The "Life Story of the Queen of England," as told by a "fire-eating Laborite" who was her

Majesty's "personal friend," belongs to the realm of harmless absurdities. But it does not sin on the side of reticence.

The indifference of the French to the private lives of public men (unless there is a cause célèbre) amazes Americans who like to know every day what their President is about. Président Doumergue has an official residence at Rambouillet. Half-adozen lines in the press suffice to inform the public that he has gone to it, and there is apparently nothing more to tell until he returns to Paris. Premier Poincaré has a summer home in Lorraine. When he goes there, another half-dozen lines announce the fact, and a soothing silence follows. What these gentlemen do with their moments of leisure is apparently their own concern. Now surely President Coolidge may be excused a little silence, a little secretiveness, a little inscrutability (if it came to that) in view of the fact that he has been compelled to live his outward life in proximity to a camera and a radio. Think of the fish he has caught and the worms he has caught them with? Think of the pictures of him in chaps and a sombrero! Think, good Heavens, of the pictures of him in the head-dress of an American Indian! Think of his few guarded words let loose upon the country! Think of the thousands of photographs of Mrs. Coolidge! Think of the hundred thousand allusions to her as "the first lady of the land." And think of a vast, keen, strenuous nation forever regaling itself with this infantile substitute for news.

23

James Gordon Bennett, in the height of his arrogant renown, said

that the function of a newspaper was not to instruct, but to startle. He knew whereof he spoke, and he startled successfully for quite a number of years. But startling, like shocking, is effective only when it plays a lone hand. Competition ruins the market, because people cannot be either startled or shocked beyond a certain point, when custom renders them insensitive. "Margot" depended upon startling her stolid public, and shocking the delicately minded. She did not need to go far to obtain the desired result; no further really than the ambitious lady in Sir Owen Seaman's ballad: "Across the sounding city's din

She wandered, looking indiscreet, And ultimately landed in The neighbourhood of Regent St."

But such half-way measures would win little publicity in these advanced days. "Now that women have learned that they can talk about everything, they won't talk about anything else," observes a captious critic; and it takes a deal of plain speaking to make any impression upon a jaded and sex-soaked world. Isadora Duncan left us a categorical list of "lapses"; and people whom she must have reasonably hoped to horrify were only amused. The carefully exploited irregularities of the Countess of Cathcart could not save her dull play from failure, while better plays by perfectly respectable men and women ran their merry course. It was easy for Swinburne, writing for a reticent generation, to achieve a succès de scandale with a volume of verse in which the purpose was louder than the fulfil

ment:

"Far rolling my ravenous red eye, And lifting a mutinous lid, To all monarchs and matrons I said I

Would shock them-and did."

He could not do it now-not at least with that equipment, and with the disadvantage of being really a poet. poet. In fact he recognized his limitations, and wisely changed his ways or ever he came to die.

A few years ago a clergyman could gain a fair share of publicity by denying in the pulpit those articles of faith which he had been ordained to uphold. If he attracted the attention of his bishop, as well as of his congregation and the ever-attentive press, he was a made man—not perhaps for life, but certainly for a season. It was only when bishops grew wily and lay low, and when muddled congregations no longer knew what they believed and what they didn't believe, that the hardpressed man of God was compelled to introduce heathen rites, and rhythmic dances, and choral songs of dubious vintage. This was up-hill work. Nothing is more disheartening than to try to keep on agitating an indifferent world which fumes one day and forgets the next.

The uses of publicity, the capture of space in our newspapers, has developed a national industry to meet a nation-wide demand. It costs a great deal to advertise, and the advertisement, while rich in suggestion, is necessarily weak in authority. But when camouflaged as news, it is effective and all pure profit. This is what the "public relations counsel," alias "publicity man," alias "press-agent," sets out