The great shops tried other ways of letting people know.  They tried handbills, a huge helpless patter of them over all the city.  They used billboards, and posted huge lists of items for people to stop and read in the streets, if they wanted to, while they rushed by.  For three whole weeks they held on tight to the idea that the newspapers were striking employees of department stores.  One would have thought that they would have seen that the newspapers were the representatives of the people—­almost the homes of the people—­and that it would pay to treat them respectfully.  One would have thought they would have seen that if they wanted space in the homes of the people—­places at their very breakfast tables—­space that the newspapers had earned and acquired there, they would have to pay their share of what it had cost the newspapers to get it.

One would have thought that the department shops would have seen that the more they could make the newspapers prosper, the more influence the newspapers would have in the homes of the people, and the more business they could get through them.  But it was not until the shopowners had come down and gazed day after day on the big, white, lonely floors of their shops that they saw the truth.  Crowds stayed away, and proved it to them.  Namely:  a store, if it uses a great newspaper, instead of having a few feet of show windows on a street for people to walk by, gets practically miles of show windows for people—­in their own houses—­sells its goods almost any morning to the people—­to a whole city—­before anybody gets up from breakfast—­has its duties as well as its rights.

Of course, when the shopkeepers really saw that this was what the newspapers had been doing for them, they wanted to do what was right, and wanted to pay for it.  One would have thought, looking at it theoretically, that the department stores in any city would have imagination enough to see, without practically having to shut their stores up for three weeks, what advertising was worth.  But if great department stores do not have imagination to see what they would wish they had done in twenty years, in one year, or three weeks, and have to spell out the experience morning by morning and see what works, word by word, they do learn in the end that being right works, and that bullying does not.  Gradually the level or standard of right in business is bound to rise, until people have generally come to take the Golden Rule with the literalness and seriousness that the best and biggest men are already taking it.  Department stores that have the moral originality and imagination to guess what people would wish they had bought of them and what they would wish they had sold to them afterward are going to win.  Department stores that deal with their customers three or four years ahead are the ones that win first.

CHAPTER VI

GOODNESS AS A CROWD-PROCESS