WORLD-WIDE PUBLICITY FOR THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS [To the Editor
of the SPECTATOR.]
Sift,--T am particularly glad that Mr. Murray Allison has brought us back to a realization of what his proposal really was, namely, world-wide, and not sectional, publicity, for it is a fact that few of your correspondents have grasped the psychological value of such publicity if it could be effected. This value is difficult to explain or to estimate in words ; one must employ the faculty of imagination. May I suggest it in this way ? Let a man imagine himself as the sole spectator of a league football match. Would he howl, yell, wave his hat and generally lose control of himself in his excitement ? Then, for comparison, let him imagine himself as one of 40,000 enthusiasts—and we know what happens every week for about seven months out of every twelve.
Mr. Allison desires, I suppose, to achieve just this mass enthusiasm, the world over, for the League of Nations, and lie proposes to do it by advertising. One naturally desires to treat with respect the opinion of such a man as Professor Gilbert Murray, but really I am afraid that he must have had a headache when he wrote his letter appearing on the 5th inst. ! Ife tells us that " interest in the League is not only real but, politically speaking, irresistible. Some day an enter- prising newspaper will discover this," and yet, arguing against advertising, he says later that " it will be information that the public does not want to read, for if it did the paper would give it." Prof. Murray also says that paid advertisements are tainted. Possibly, but the fact remains that the public reads these tainted advertisements and proceeds to buy the goods they describe. " Advertising, when it does not allure, repels," is another of the Professor's dicta. I do not know that it repels—it simply fails to achieve results. We should all agree with Joseph Addison in the early Tatter That " the great art in writing advertisements is the finding out a proper method to catch the reader's eye ; without which a good thing may pass over unobserved."
Education as to the League's activities must be made easy for the average citizen, and this can best, perhaps only, be done by clever and persistent advertising of an " alluring " nature, carried out by the best brains the advertising world can produce. This advertising must be done in the name of the League by all the nations who compose it. The mass effect of such an effort, carried on practically throughout the world for a year, could not fail to be enormous.—I am, Sir, &c., Jos. S. ROWNTREE. 2 Weaponness Park, Scarborough.
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