V.sabond Editorials

By Jack Dionne

A famous advertising authority now declares that one of the troubles with the advertising business is that advertising people do not themselves read advertising. Maybe they are like the Irishman who came along the road pulling a wheelbarrow load behind him. A friend said to him, "Pat, you know better than that. You know it's easier to push a wheelbarrow than it is to pull it." And Pat said, "I know, but I get so tired of looking at the damn thing."

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I'll wager that the guys that write the cigarette and coffee advertising, do not read advertising. Not their own, at any rate. If they did they wouldn't have the heart to go on with it.

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Those who preach birth control are evidently not readers of history. Frequently the world has seen a mother bring forth a series of barnyard mongrels; and then an eagle. Had birth control been practiced through the ages many of the mighty minds that have swept across the human horizon like flaming meteors-would never have been born.

Take Benjamin Franklin, for instance. To me he was the most useful man in all the history of this world; the wisest, most practical human who ever wore the crown of American citizenship, and the only really great diplomat America has ever produced. As the truthful perspective of history more and more accurately measures the altitude of men now gone, the size of Benjamin Franklin looms ever larger. And Ben was the fifteenth in a family of seventeen children. Let us thank God that birth control was unknown in his day.

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Coleridge, the great poet, was, if f recall correctly, the last of thirteen children to be born to his mother. None of the first twelve amounted to anything. She bore twelve ordinary brats while preparing to bring forth a genius. History is thronged with such significant examples. Mothers have often given birth to a yard filled with pygmies; and then produced a giant. Of course, if the birth controllers could legislate to compel the mother who is to produce one of the world's great to bring him forth FIRST it would all be very fine. But it would seem rather difficult. And, since no man knoweth when or where that child shall be born whose mind will illumine this dull world, legislation or education along lines of birth control would only people the world with pygmies. God sends great men and great women. But He does it at His own time and in His own way. And so far in this world's history those who have blazoned their nannes on time's firmament have frequently been born to mothers who have already produced a brood marked only by mediocrity. But we could ill spare these great folk of the past; ill afrord to lose a single one whom the future may be prornising us.

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I have been declaring most emphatically in these columns that one of the saddest things that could happen to this country would be the elimination or even the modification of stout, efficient competition, that keeps men and industries up on their toes, thinking, striving, hustling to out-do the other fellow. With this great urge we progress; without it we die. ***

The other day I made an address to a group of publishers, using tlrat thought as my topic. And I ilustrated it by telling them how a forest of Pine trees grows, and how that growth illustrates more perfectly than anything else I know of the fact that there is no socialism in Mother Nature, and that she teaches her children the immutable law of competition and its beneficial results. ,1.**

I told them of watching young Pine forests grow, the little trees planted closely together. And how immediately there begins. a quiet but mighty competition between those little trees to grow UPWARD toward the sunlight and the moisture in the upper air; those two priceless factors which give to the tree life and strength. And every little tree in that forest strives and stretches and fights its instinctive way upward, and ever upward. And so by this competition and this striving it grows straight and tall. The tree-tops merge; there is shade below; and gradually the lower limbs fall from the trunks of the young trees, the bark covers over the scars, and the surface of the trunk becomes smooth and straight, as the trunk itself is straight.

And to show what the lack of this competition and this upward striving does, f pictured a lone tree planted a hundred feet from the edge of this young forest, out where it gets the sun and the available moisture without effort. What happens to that tree? An amazing thing. It is invariably stunted in its development. Because it does not strive and strain upward, the trunk is squat, and much shorter than in the forest trees. And because there is no competition and therefore no shade to destroy them, the lirnbs of the lower trunk do not fall off, but rather become stout, and gnarly, as does the trunk of the tree itself. The wood is gnarly, and knotty in this tree that has grown non-competitively. It has no value, other than for firewood. The tree is squat, wide, ugly, and valueless. While a hundred feet away stand its sister trees, tall, straight, strong-fibred, clean-trunked, valuable in a hundred ways for man and his uses.

I can't remember talki; ; ;, subject that interested my listeners so much. One of my friends told me he went home that night and told his mother-in-law, who is a militant socialist, the story of how Pine trees. grow, and how Mother Nature demonstrates in their growth that there is no socialism in nature, and that competition, even in inanimate things, makes for strength, and beauty, and quality. Perhaps YOU can use this story of trees. It's a fine lesson-subject.

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If I were asked what one thing more than any other is obstructing the return roadway to'prosperity in this country, I would unhesitatingly reply-TAX-FREE SECURITIES. Damn tax-free securities, say Mhe man who first thought of such a thing in a country like this ought to be sought out, arrested, and locked up in an asylum for life.

How i4 the name of all that's good and holy are you ever goin$ to get money-owners to invest in business things-with all the hazards and the difEculties that beset business today-when their Government offers them securities that are free from taxation, pay interest, and are exactly as sound as the Government itself ? *** ff we haven't learned the eternal damnation that comes to a nation in time of economic depression by the wholesale issuance and sale of tax-free securities, and the recovery obstructiveness of such procedure, then we ought to have our skulls trephined to give our brains room to grovr. Every time you see a m4n (and I've seen an army of theln myself) closing out business investments and selling busi-

On one hand we work for a return of prosperity; and on the other hand we pile obstructions in the way of any such return. Prosperity will return when there is sufficient confidence in this country to put our money-and thereby our people-to work in honorable and useful employment. Every time a man takes a thousand dollars and buys these dad-blamed securities-he is prolonging this depression. And every time he turns around and invests that money in active business channels-he is picking at the jam that blocks business recovery.

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