Edward Dicey

“ It may be so, but my informants have always been the owners or agents of advertising mediums. The traders who have been most fortunate as advertisers, cannot tell themselves to what their success is due. All they know is, that if they leave off thrusting their goods under the eyes, and up to the mouths, and into the pockets of the public, their sales fall off at once. But whether one form of advertisement attracts more than another, they cannot discover. ”

“ Death for death, he prefers to die by Russians rather than by his own countrymen, as a martyr rather than as a traitor. No sum of money is of any value as a bribe, if the receiver knows that he will be stabbed like a dog to-morrow. ”

“ Happily, by the law of compensation, advertisers lose their money, just as anglers lose their time. The process of puffing does not create new consumers, or supply them with any additional cash to spend. It simply offers them a bait more tempting than those already at their disposal. One vendor succeeds by driving another out of public favour. Advertising always reminds me of a roulette-table. ”

“ There is no playing upon credit, no winning (at least directly) the money of men you know cannot afford to lose it. If you do win, your stake is paid down on the moment; and the mere fact of having drawn money from the proprietors of a gaming-table appears, by a mental sophistry, to be rather a meritorious act than otherwise. Moreover, the fact of your gambling in this fashion does not bring you into contact with all the blackguardism and rascality that you must perforce come into companionship with, if you wish to make money by gambling on the Turf or the Stock Exchange. ”

“ Before morning came, and wealthy men began to drive citywards, the scraping of the hundreds of thousand feet that pass along the great central thoroughfare of London, was certain to have rubbed off the announcement of the fire-and-robber-proof safe. Supposing, by any remote chance, that any belated banker, or a merchant driving to catch an early train, did catch sight of the short-lived announcement, is it conceivable that his mind was influenced by it? To own a safe you must be a man of wealth, gravity, and respectability ”

“ As far as I can learn, a traveller has no redress for lost time. The delay of a quarter of an hour may often be a matter of incalculable importance; yet the railroads cannot be called upon to give compensation for the losses accruing from their own unpunctuality. In the days when railways were novelties in Italy, a train stopping at a station on the Modena line, delayed there, from some cause or other, for upwards of an hour. The passengers could put up with the despotism of Francis V., of evil memory, but they could not stand the tyranny of a railway official. ”

“ So, if you must resort to puff advertising—advertise, everywhere and anywhere, to the utmost of your means, or your credit, and you will end in the House of Lords or—in the Gazette. But if you trifle with advertising, you will lose your money without a doubt. As the majority of mankind have not the courage to play a bold game in any pursuit, it is certain that, as a rule, advertisers make small ventures, and waste their substance foolishly. ”

“ In the small hours of the night, when people wake up and begin at once to speculate unpleasantly on their sins, I should think of those columns upon columns, and feel weighed, as it were, to the ground with a nightmare of letter-press. ”

“ The chief duty, no doubt, of a railroad is to convey its passengers as rapidly as may be to their destination; but then, this is not the whole of its duty. After all, a railway journey is a slice out of one’s existence, and we have a right to ask that it should be made as pleasant as possible. If travelling were more comfortable, there would be more travellers. On our main lines, competition secures decent treatment for a traveller. ”

“ The National Government exists by sufferance of popular opinion, and is powerful only so long as it acts in consistence with that opinion. Now public sentiment will indorse heartily the assassination of a spy or a traitor; but it will not sanction the infliction of the punishment of death on persons whose only crime is their defencelessness. On various occasions the National Government has endeavoured to forbid petty tradesmen and mechanics from rendering compulsory service to the Russians. ”

“ Now, there are many positions in life in which the chance of winning a large stake is worth much more than the certainty of retaining a small one. If a man wants a hundred pounds to-morrow, and has only got five pounds to spare, I know of no way in the world by which he has a fairer prospect of multiplying his one note by twenty than at a German gambling-table. ”

“ Till it be done, passengers will break the law, guards will be bribed to wink at an infraction of their duty, and non-smoking wayfarers will be subjected to the annoyance of travelling in carriages redolent of stale tobacco. We always boast of being the freest country in the world, but there is no country except England where the public would submit to such an interference with their tastes and habits as is daily practised upon our great smoking community in its journeyings by rail. ”

“ Railway annoyances do not belong to the order of troubles that are soon forgotten. On the contrary, the traveller has time to brood over them to his heart’s content or discontent, as he is jolted along mile after mile and hour after hour. For my own part, I do not consider railway journeying to be conducive to pleasing reflections. ”

“ The world stands upon the tortoise; but upon what does the tortoise stand? To the question how an unknown and nameless committee, living in daily jeopardy of their own lives, can have it in their power to condemn any traitor to death with the absolute certainty that their order will be executed, I could obtain no sufficient answer. ”

“ The truth is that, as a rule, the stake played on each round of the game is not sufficient to create intense interest. It may be extremely annoying to lose a hundred or two of guldens in a day, but each individual loss is not to the run of players any serious calamity. In the course of my life I have spent a great many weeks and months at different German baths, where public play is carried on, and I never but once saw what may properly be called a “scene” occur there. ”

“ A good workman who is proud of his work would, I am certain, feel it a bitter humiliation to have to head his page with sensation type headings.
Indeed, I consider that the whole system of advertising is still in its infancy. It is a science which has yet to be studied. At present our knowledge of its rules are purely empirical. Men who have had great practical experience of the subject have assured me that if you have a good article to sell, and if you advertise largely enough, you must make a fortune. ”

“ Now, the guests of an American hotel in the far West would be ashamed to devour a dinner in the time that our railway passengers are expected to consume theirs in. Any man who can eat several slices of under-done meat, a lump of heavy pudding, and a pound of bread and cheese, in five minutes, without feeling the worse for it afterwards, must be possessed of more than mortal powers of digestion. The consequence of this state of things is, that people eat less and less at our English refreshment rooms. ”

“ In America, on the other hand, the sensation advertisement runs to absolute riot. Every contortion and combination that type is capable of is resorted to in order to attract attention. The advertisements are placed at every angle to the letter-press, and disfigure the look of even the first papers in the country to a most marvellous degree. ”

“ The stock commonplace assertion is, that nobody can possibly win, and that a man must be a fool to play when he is certain to lose. Like most commonplace truths, these assertions must be taken with a great deal of qualification. No doubt the chances against the players vary, at the different German tables, from five to ten per cent, in favour of the bank. In the long run, therefore, any man who goes on playing constantly must lose; but it by no means follows that every player always loses on every occasion. ”

“ I always get hungry in travelling: and even if I am not hungry, eating promotes sleep, and I fancy a desire to sleep as much as possible while travelling by rail, is one very generally entertained by passengers. But yet how am I or my fellow passengers to gratify this natural and innocent taste? It seems to me, that within my memory, railway refreshments have fallen off. ”

“ If any English traveller can say the same about a journey from London to Aberdeen, he has been much more fortunate in his experiences than it has fallen to my lot to be. On many, if not all, of the French lines there is a system in vogue which very nearly ensures punctuality. Whenever a train is exact to its time between station and station, the drivers receive an additional gratuity of a centime for every kilometre run over. To the companies the extra cost is unimportant compared with the saving gained in many respects by the additional regularity thus acquired. ”

“ We have to seduce them, by advertising, into fancying they want to do so.”
And in this profound remark the whole philosophy of the modern art is contained. You fish for purchasers as you do for trout. You bait your hook so as to suit their fancy, and the most successful advertiser is he who baits his hook most cunningly. The fish can find plenty of food in the waters, but the artificial fly tickles their fancy, and they are seduced into biting. So it is with the human prey who is angled for, fished for, and advertised at. ”

“ Time is of more value in Great Britain than it was ever known to be in any portion of the globe, or at any period of the world’s history. Punctuality is claimed, with some reason, to be an emphatically British virtue. ”

“ It is impossible to believe that any one of the thousands, or tens of thousands of Poles, who must have, to say the least, a shrewd suspicion as to the names of the members of this secret organisation, should be of such a heroic type, as to be able to withstand every inducement of terror or avarice. The plain truth is, that fidelity is secured by terrorism. ”

“ If you ask a Pole how he can justify such acts of tyranny as these, he does not attempt to do so; but he tells you that, after all, the National Government, whatever its faults may be, is a native Polish one, not a Russian; and that he must support his own people against foreigners ”

“ It was by playing this doubling game that the firm of Mephistopheles, Faust, and Company, hoped to make their fortunes. Every morning, as soon as the tables opened, they seated themselves side by side at the board.—Mephistopheles with his note-book before him, and the stump of a pencil in his lips; Faust with his pocket-book of bank-notes sticking out of his breast-pocket. The senior partner never played himself, but whispered his instructions to his colleague. Their rule was to stake a hundred-franc note, say upon the red, and to go on doubling till they won. ”

“ Very few persons would ever observe the mistake; and of the few who did, fewer still would trouble themselves about it. Of course, some ill-natured critic, who had plenty of time and bile to spare, would write to express his astonishment at the astounding ignorance of a paper which professed to represent public opinion ”

“ As long as you can look out on the passing scenery, well and good; as long as you can sleep, well and better; but, if the prospect from the windows is dull and dreary, or if it is too dark to see anything, and if you cannot sleep, then I fancy most persons’ reflections on a solitary journey are not peculiarly lively ones. ”

“ There are an equal amount of odd and even numbers on a roulette-board, and therefore, in the long run, the odd or even numbers turn up one as often as the other. Now, supposing you put a sovereign on the odd numbers and lose it, you would then, according to the Mephistophelian system, stake next time two sovereigns on the same numbers. If you lose them you stake four, and so go on doubling till an odd number turns up. Whenever this event happens, the difference between the stake you win and the amount of the various sums you have lost is exactly your original stake ”

“ Now, the vast majority of the players at these tables are very much in the position of the man I have spoken of. They have got a few florins or napoleons they do not mind losing, and they would like particularly to win a few hundred. Of course they would do much more wisely not to play at all; they may form habits detrimental to their ordinary pursuits; and if by luck they do win, they are very likely to go on playing till they have lost all their winnings, and a great deal more besides. ”

“ I am prejudiced enough not to like sensation advertising, as applied to books. For instance, every now and then I take up my daily paper, and see that the proprietors of a semi-religious publication have filled a whole page with a string of selections from their own periodical. ”

“ They have no friends, and their fate, however cruel, is considered well deserved. But when it came to punishing men whose sole fault was that they had paid taxes to the Russian authorities, when compelled to do so by sheer force of arms, the feeling of the community would not support the act. The decrees issued by the National Government forbidding payment of taxes under compulsion, and prohibiting manual labour in the employment of the Russian government, were never carried into execution, and have had to be dropped silently. ”

“ All we can do is to spread our nets, and fill them with all manner of flies and worms, and when we draw them up we are sure to find some fish at the bottom; but how many is as yet the result rather of luck than skill. Meanwhile it is also an open question whether the profit on puff advertising is commensurate with the trouble and outlay, even in the cases of the most successful followers of the art. ”