whole system of competition in selling! You have manu~
facturers contriving tens of thousands of catchpenny
devices, storekeepers displaying them, and newspapers and
magazines filled up with advertisements of them!"

"And don't forget the wastes of fraud," put in young
Fisher.

"When one comes to the ultra-modern profession of
advertising," responded Schliemann -- "the science of per~
suading people to buy what they do not want, -- he is in
the very center of the ghastly charnel-house of capitalist
destructiveness, and he scarcely knows which of a dozen
horrors to point out first. But consider the waste in time
and energy incidental to making ten thousand varieties of
a thing for purposes of ostentation and snobbishness, where
one variety would do for use! Consider all the waste
incidental to the manufacture of cheap qualities of goods,
of goods made to sell and deceive the ignorant; consider
the wastes of adulteration, -- the shoddy clothing, the
cotton blankets, the unstable tenements, the ground-cork
life-preservers, the adulterated milk, the analine soda-water,
the potato-flour sausages--"

"And consider the moral aspects of the thing," put in
the ex-preacher.

"Precisely," said Schliemann; "the low knavery and the
ferocious cruelty incidental to them, the plotting and the
lying and the bribing, the blustering and bragging,
the screaming egotism, the hurrying and worrying. Of
course, imitation and adulteration are the essence of com~
petition -- they are but another form of the phrase 'to buy
in the cheapest market and sell in the dearest.' A govern~
ment official has stated that the nation suffers a loss of a
billion and a quarter dollars a year through adulterated
foods; which means, of course, not only materials wasted
that might have been useful outside of the human stomach,
but doctors and nurses for people who would otherwise
have been well, and undertakers for the whole human race
ten or twenty years before the proper time. Then again,
consider the waste of time and energy required to sell
these things in a dozen stores, where one would do. There

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