Life — October 16, 1902 — page 13: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

* LIRR As Advertised. qs possible that the scourge of wayside adver- tisements will be lightened in the near—or even in the far—future? We have been so long disciplined by these haunting horrors that we no longer dream of escape. Every city, town and hamlet in the United States lies girdled by them, and we run the gauntlet of pills, embrocations and ready-made clothing for long sad miles of marsh and meadow land. They are outrageous, and we know it; but they are part of a curious system which excuses the fraudulent because of its surpassing meretricions- ness, But now from over the sea come signals of revolt. Prussia objects to the ugliness of advertising boards, and England objects to their impropriety. Prussia wants her ‘natural beauties’? undisfigured by placards, England z wants her innocent youth untarnished by posters. Prussia, with AS TO REDUCING WEIGHT. the admirable promptness of a paternal government, has taken The Hog: wow pip ue po 1rt measures to abolish the abuse. Her police are empowered to ce remove ‘all pictorial devices that deface the landscape.” England, with the cautious hesitancy of a free nation, is agitating along the same lines. Her ‘ Billposters’ Association”? is endeavoring to decide what pictures are, and what are not improper. It is helped— or hindered — on its way by much newspaper discussion. Bristling virtue points out the shameless nature of certain advertisements; and gentlemen who sign themselves ‘Christian Hedonists” shrilly reply that the advertisemente are as harmless as Dr. Watts’ hymns, and that the evil lies in bristling virtue's breast. It doesn’t greatly matter on what grounds an evil is abolished, if it goes. Our ‘‘natural beauties” are sadly defaced, and, if vulgarity can tarnish, then our innocent youth is in no better case than our landscapes. Even the business streets of a great city, though necessarily unbeautifal, need not be too deeply de- graded. A cockroach, ten feet long, crawling up a wall ten stories high, offers no assault upon unguarded ethics; but it is, nevertheless, revolting to a sensitive mind. As an advertisement of insect powder it is perhaps startlingly efficacious, yet even a Christian Hedonist might reasonably object to a mammoth representation of a creature so unlovable and so unloved. The very perfection of the machinery which enables this Gargantuan insect to climb its wall, descend, and climb again, is an added insult to decency. In the matter of cockroaches, real- ism may be easily overdone. The yoke of the advertiser lies heavy on our necks, Nature is his handmaid, and cities are his slaves. He has turned traveling into a sorrow and home coming into a reproach. If there were any loophole of escape from his wearisome oppression, we should welcome it with rapture. As it is, we are disposed to envy the Fatherland—for once—the robust simplicity of her legislature. Agnes Repplier, ONE OP THE REPORE HUNDRED. comicbooks.com.