This effort to limit the height of billboards affords, by the way, some interesting illustrations of the unequal conflict now going on between the united billposters and a public that lacks union. An ordinance was adopted in Buffalo, for example, a few years ago, to limit the height of billboards to seven feet. It was contested, and the battle was carried from court to court, until finally the ordinance was approved by the highest court of the state. The Billposters' Association, in order to become a foreign corporation and thus come under the jurisdiction of the Federal courts, then obtained incorporation outside of New York, and began injunction proceedings in a United States court to prevent action under the ordinance. By this means long delays were gained, and the fight is now being made for the Buffalo posters by the National Association. This is thoroughly organized, and its system is said to be so complete that it practically controls the situation in every city and town in the United States.

The location of the billboards may be a not less aggravating abuse than excessive height, and it is even more frequent in its annoyance. We have seen how the thought that a city can forbid the placing of billboards in proximity to a park may lead by a natural advance to its claim of the right to determine where they shall be located, in all parts of the town. But the step, if natural, has proved too radical to be taken as yet except on the rarest occasions, and the billposting companies are restricted in their choice of desirable sites only by the easy task of finding a land-owner who is willing to lease to them a strip of property that otherwise probably brings him nothing. It has been many times suggested that a reasonable condition to impose would be the procurement of the consent of the adjacent property holders. A man should not be suffered to do with his property that which his neighbors consider a nuiIn Chicago this requirement has

sance.

been put into an ordinance which demands that no billboard be erected on a residence street without the consent of three fourths of the frontage in the block concerned. Another suggested requirement is that the billboards be put back a certain number of feet from the building line, with the result that they shall be visible only when one is directly in front of them, and shall not mar the street vista.

The measures that have been adopted in some foreign cities for the control of advertisements, generally, of course affect hoardings in particular, since these exist expressly for advertisements. They will be touched upon later. Meanwhile it is only fair to say parenthetically that even the billboard, with all its faults, has good points and has improved. A wellbuilt hoarding, with neatly framed posters, may be so much preferable to an abandoned vacant lot as to be by comparison no nuisance. And with the enormous growth and more efficient organization of the advertising business, there are factors naturally at work to remedy some of the more glaring billboard offenses. The hoardings are better constructed; they are kept in repair; the posters have distinctly improved in artistic character; it is becoming the custom, in order to secure greater effectiveness, to set each poster within its own frame or moulding; and this, with a standardizing of sizes, tends to lessen somewhat the discordance of the always inharmonious battery. Finally, the advertisers themselves have learned that mere multiplicity may go too far; and now in almost every city there are advertising rights which are leased but not used, because the signs displayed are rendered more valuable through the keeping of neighboring sites vacant. That the best billboard may invite to acts behind it that are contrary to the law, and may be so offensive in itself to a neighborhood as actually to decrease the value of property, is good evidence that the possibilities of advertising abuse are very many in the billboard, and that

unless the hoardings are legislated out of existence no general restrictions can guarantee unfailing satisfaction. There will always remain cases to be separately judged. In justice, therefore, it ought to be acknowledged that the hoarding is not wholly evil, however fruitful a source of evil; and that the billboard which is a civic abuse in one place may not be one somewhere else.

Of other advertising developments, the so-called "sky signs are generally recognized in Great Britain as an abuse, many of the corporations having ordinances prohibiting the erection of signs of which the letters, standing clear of a building's top, show against the sky. This is forbidden even in London. Flashlights and certain kinds of illuminated advertisements are also condemned, on the ground that they might frighten horses; and the use of vehicles exclusively or principally for the displaying of advertisements is very frequently prohibited. American cities and towns quite commonly go to the extent of prohibiting the stringing of banners across the street, or requiring for the act a special permission that is rarely granted except to political parties. Projecting signs, standing out from building fronts, have so many possibilities of abuse that ordinances almost always hedge them about, determining their minimum height above the sidewalk and their maximum projection and size.

It may be well at this point, lest these and other curbs to the advertiser's freedom to ply his business how and where he pleases seem too onerous, to ask ourselves just what would be a reasonable ideal in the display of advertisements on the street. For our modern civic art is not impractical. It would not exclude from its dream of the city beautiful the whir and hum of traffic, the exhilarating evidences of nervous energy, enterprise, vigor, and endeavor. It loves the straining, striving, competing, as the most marked of urban characteristics, and in

the advertising problem it will feel, not hostility, but the thrill of opportunity. It will recognize evils in the present methods, but will find them the evils of excess and unrestraint, and it will perceive possibilities of artistic achievement by which even the advertising can be made to serve the ends of art dans la rue. As far, then, as abuses are concerned, civic art would predicate its desire for restrictions upon the conception of what the street reasonably ought to be. Any advertising display out of harmony with this conception would be considered an abuse.

There would be required, first, a clear path for travel by walk or road, which means that advertisements must retire to the building line. Second, there would be insistence that no announcement intrude upon the vista of the street. These requirements purport, concretely, that civic art that is, the art of making cities dignified and beautiful would prohibit advertisement erections of any kind at the curb or on the sidewalk, and would suffer no public utility, or ornament of the way, to be placarded; would frown upon projecting signs, and would have no banners hung across the street. would sweep the street clean of advertisements from building line to building line. And, on the buildings, it would require that there be some respect for the architecture; it would not have advertisements plaster a façade. In this matter it has a positive as well as a negative creed, but that is not part of a discussion of the abuses of advertising.

It

Of the restrictions thus demanded several have already had mention. In regard to the removal of bulletin boards, signs, and transparencies from a position on the sidewalk, probably the most interesting case for citation is that lately offered by the Merchants' Association of San Francisco. This is interesting because the prime movers in demanding the ordinance and its rigid enforcement were merchants, not a few visionary and impractical idealists, but the advertisers

themselves; and the action, formally taken after long thought, was that of the association which represented them, and which is one of the strongest commercial bodies in the United States. The ordinance excludes everything except clocks, and refuses to permit any advertisement on these. It should be noted in connection with this that when all the advertisers of a community are subject to the same prohibition, no one is put at a disadvantage; and that, without restrictions, there may be a competition between advertisers which will prove a very serious abuse to them.

The fixture of posters to monuments and other public ornaments of the way is not attempted in this country; but two years ago it was a serious abuse in Paris. The public utilities are usually protected by ordinance, whether owned by the municipality or public service corporations, and lately there has been an interesting extension of this restriction by its application to railroad structures. Chicago offers an example in an ordinance adopted last fall. It requires that the advertisements on so much of the elevated railroad structures and stations as is not on the company's own right of way that is, for instance, on stations built over cross streets shall be removed. In London advertising on railroad bridges is forbidden, and in Glasgow and many other cities of Great Britain advertisements are not allowed on the outside of the trams. This was an advertising abuse that had become much more serious in England than it ever has become with us. Finally, any advertisements on the public buildings or on the pavements, or the scattering of handbills in the streets which the city is trying to keep clean, may be properly called an advertising abuse that it is utterly inconsistent for the city to allow.

There is philosophically also an essential fitness in the protection by a city of its own property from advertising disfigurement; for if the community as a body

cannot be loyal to a wish for civic dignity and beauty, or does not on its own property set an example, it cannot expect its citizens to be zealous and particular. It has the advantage, too, that it can be frankly loyal to an æsthetic ideal, while the citizens have to show that the advertisement to which they object does injury and is a nuisance. They also are distracted by conflicting interests, and find it difficult to judge impartially of the good or evil of advertisements from the standpoint that the city, in its aloofness, takes. And no other course than the protection of its property is logical for a community that is spending money not merely to keep clean and neat, but to secure positive æsthetic results by maintaining parks and squares, and by erecting handsome public buildings, fountains, and statues.

A grievous mistake, therefore, is made when a town undertakes to advertise its attractions by means of a monster hoarding beside the railroad. This is an abuse of advertising that is growing somewhat in frequency. In the West you will often come to a town with a town-sign; but the best thing that a town can have is an ideal, and a civic spirit that will work for that ideal. The town-sign reveals, more emphatically than it says anything else, the crudity of the vision which the community has. The condition is sad enough when the great city of New York presents to the stranger on the viaduct of Brooklyn Bridge only a sea of signs; but he does not think quite as badly of it as he would if the city itself had officially set up the signs, to show him that it was thriving! He would have then considered it thriving, and nothing better.

Akin, in lack of consistency, to a town's deliberate and official marring of its beauty by the erection of a hoarding is the permission which associations that exist to uplift communal life sometimes grant to advertisers to use their property. The Academy of Design in New York,

having purchased a spacious site for a beautiful new home, let for advertising purposes the boards surrounding its property. These were covered with a huge sign to advertise a five-cent cigar, while on the same premises the society was conducting free art classes in an effort to train the taste of the youth of New York. It is clear that all the advertising abuses are not due to the advertisers. A degree of responsibility rests upon the public itself.

In occasional discouragement, the champions of a better sort of advertising may well ask, now and then, "Whom shall we trust?" This feeling, and, above all, the knowledge of the immense and rapid growth of the business, of its increasing resources, and its efficient organization, have inspired a fear that has led to attempts to control it and restrict it as a whole. Foreign cities and nations, managing this more easily than can the United States, offer a number of interesting examples. France and Belgium have a tax on posters, and such an impost has been proposed in England. It is easily levied by means of stamps, and through the proportioning of the tax to the size of the poster considerable restraint is exercised. The tax also makes it possible for the government to scrutinize the advertisements before they are set up, the law requiring their submission before posting. In France the poster tax brings in something like four millions of francs a year. In the cities of France, Belgium, Germany, and Italy, the posters must be placed on columns or other devices especially prepared for the purpose. These are placed at designated spots, are of a design approved by the municipality, and are frankly artistic in effort.

In New York state a bill was introduced in the Legislature in the winter of 1902, and received influential backing, for the imposition of a stamp tax on posters, the suggested tax being one cent per two square feet, measuring the greatest

length by the greatest width. The bill was opposed by the labor and other interests, and failed to pass; but the introduction of the measure was not a little significant. In Pennsylvania there was enacted last winter a law which makes it necessary for the advertiser to secure the written consent of the owner or tenant upon whose property a sign or poster is attached, and prohibiting altogether the fixture of advertisements (save legal notices or announcements pertaining to the business conducted on the premises) to any property of the state or of any county, township, or city in the state. In Illinois last winter a bill was introduced and valiantly championed which would have given to the officials of the cities, towns, and villages of the state the "power to license street advertising and billboard companies, and regulate and prohibit signs and billboards upon vacant property and upon buildings advertising other business than that of the occupant." The measure was fought aggressively by the billboard trust, and at last it failed.

Now these bills are significant because they go to show that in this country also popular attention has been aroused to the abuses of public advertising. Any serious extension of these abuses is likely to provoke an adverse legislation that will be costly to the advertisers. This significance is the more marked when the origin of the bills is examined. Behind the bill which was introduced in New York state was the American Scenic and Historic Preservation Society; the bill that became a law in Pennsylvania was fathered by the American Park and Outdoor Art Association, which has on this subject a standing committee, to whose interesting latest report this paper is much indebted; the Illinois bill was introduced at the request of the Municipal Art League of Chicago. The public has not yet united, as have the billboard people, but it has taken the first step in forming itself into organized bodies for the waging of the contest. If any

abuse becomes very serious these bodies can be depended upon to act together, if they do not combine. And there are these hopeful elements in the contest: the public does not and will not fight to suppress advertising, but only to restrict it to reasonable proportions; the advertisers do not want to offend the public, but are bound to respect any genuine popular sentiment. As it is not war to the death, but a mutual adjustment of opinions (which have differed because of different points of view), that is before us, in the just settlement of the advertising problem, mere discussion must help to cure the mistakes on either side.

Finally, there is this to be said: the advertisers can gain their ends in other and unobjectionable ways. In the bare recital of abuses it may have seemed as if there were so many that, should they all be checked successfully, there would

ness.

be left to the advertiser small chance to proclaim his wares. But that is not true. He would still have opportunities, substituting—with much gain to the community and probably with some to himself- for mere bigness and multiplicity of announcements a quality of attractiveThere would lie the new competition. He has already learned that emphasis is gained not only by screaming a word, but by pausing before and after its utterance. He is finding it more profitable to put his colors together harmoniously than to shock the eye. He has discovered that if he can entertain and amuse the public with jingles or clever names or well-drawn pictures, he makes more impression than by shouting. Thus advertisements now render many a long ride less tedious than it used to be, and even win for the billboards some friends where before, because of the abuses, all must have been their enemies.

Charles Mulford Robinson.

SOME months ago Wall Street was currently reported to be suffering from an overload of undigested securities, the result of unprecedented industrial promotion. This situation has now resolved itself into the "digestion of insecurities," through the long process of financial liquidation which has been in progress since last summer. American trade-unionism to-day, while numerically prosperous beyond comparison, shows symptoms of the same disorder. The incubus, in this case, consists of a vast new and as yet but half assimilated membership. This condition 1 The recent phenomenal rise of trade-union

ism in the United States is traced by the writer in the World's Work for November, 1903.

of instability in labor organization as compared with Great Britain is, in part, due to the racial peculiarity of the popu lation of the United States. Ethnic heterogeneity enormously complicates the situation for all parties concerned, but especially for the working classes themselves. Consider the situation for a moment.

For half a century about one seventh of our total population has been regularly constituted of persons born outside the United States; and for twenty-five years at least, one third of our people have not enjoyed the inestimable privilege of American-born parentage, that is to say, with both parents native born. More than half of the population of the