DOI Page / Citation link:
https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.42346#0056
44
THE NEW COMPETITION
The value of structures well built and perfectly kept, as
an advertisement, is being- recognized.
Compare the fronts and interior arrangements of the
shops of to-day with those of a few years ago, the ef-
fort to make them look better is obvious even if the ef-
fect is often blatant.
There is a growing effort to make our cities and towns
and all they contain more beautiful. This effort is crystal-
lizing in the appointments of commissions, the organiza-
tions of societies and public bodies; it finds expression in
laws and appropriations; it may make many attempts that
are failures; it may produce ugly where beautiful effects
were intended ; but the point is, the cry for quality is mak-
ing itself heard above the din of the demand for quantity.
Beauty is not a wholesale proposition; it dislikes the
partnership; it avoids the corporation; it flees the trust.
It is essentially personal. When America really demands
beauty, demands it as loudly and insistently as it now de-
mands wealth, many of the problems of to-day will find so-
lution in the changed conditions, but, for the present, we
have competition in the most extensive form the world has
ever known, and the problems presented by that competi-
tion must be dealt with; we cannot wait the slow chang-
ing of ideals, the evils of the hour must be corrected; all
that is false, vicious, unfair, must be eliminated. The race
for wealth, for quantity, must be made a fair race in which
all will have as nearly equal opportunities as human in-
genuity can provide.
V
As already stated, this inevitable tendency of competition
in the production of quantity is combination of forces, of
strength, of capital and labor, in large units to secure
greater results per dollar invested and per man employed.
THE NEW COMPETITION
The value of structures well built and perfectly kept, as
an advertisement, is being- recognized.
Compare the fronts and interior arrangements of the
shops of to-day with those of a few years ago, the ef-
fort to make them look better is obvious even if the ef-
fect is often blatant.
There is a growing effort to make our cities and towns
and all they contain more beautiful. This effort is crystal-
lizing in the appointments of commissions, the organiza-
tions of societies and public bodies; it finds expression in
laws and appropriations; it may make many attempts that
are failures; it may produce ugly where beautiful effects
were intended ; but the point is, the cry for quality is mak-
ing itself heard above the din of the demand for quantity.
Beauty is not a wholesale proposition; it dislikes the
partnership; it avoids the corporation; it flees the trust.
It is essentially personal. When America really demands
beauty, demands it as loudly and insistently as it now de-
mands wealth, many of the problems of to-day will find so-
lution in the changed conditions, but, for the present, we
have competition in the most extensive form the world has
ever known, and the problems presented by that competi-
tion must be dealt with; we cannot wait the slow chang-
ing of ideals, the evils of the hour must be corrected; all
that is false, vicious, unfair, must be eliminated. The race
for wealth, for quantity, must be made a fair race in which
all will have as nearly equal opportunities as human in-
genuity can provide.
V
As already stated, this inevitable tendency of competition
in the production of quantity is combination of forces, of
strength, of capital and labor, in large units to secure
greater results per dollar invested and per man employed.