Here is a pretty direct indication of the store's attitude towards its immensely valuable windows--if you do not consider them valuable inquire the price of the advertising signs in the Herald Square neighborhood. I asked its advertising manager if, in his opinion, the window space would not bring better returns if it were devoted to direct selling, instead of mere indirect selling through display. I had in the back of my mind some of the great Paris emporiums who think so little of window- and so much of selling-space that on bright warm days they spread some of their notions and novelty-counters right out upon the broad sidewalks of the Boulevards. "No," said he, "decidedly no. To be able to show one's goods to the multitudes that pass these windows nearly every hour of the day is an asset that cannot be overestimated." This is neither the time nor the place to go into the ethics or the fine principles of the most recently developed of American professions--advertising; the salesmanship of goods and of ideas not so much by the merchandise itself as by the representation of it. Neither is it the place to review the vast position that the modern department store has taken in the development of modern advertising of every sort: Newspapers, magazines, bill-boards, electric signs, other forms of display as well. There are folk who say that if it were not for the department-store advertising we should not have had the fully developed metropolitan newspaper of today; while, on the other hand, some of the larger merchants are not reluctant in saying that our modern metropolitan newspapers are the chief causes that have made the department-store as we know it in New York and other large cities of the United States possible. Be these things as they may, the fact does remain, however, solid and indisputable, that the co-operation between these two groups of interests has been more than profitable to their patrons, to say nothing of themselves. And not the least of the contributing causes to such profits is the fundamental honesty of the advertisements. Not so very many years ago the measure of integrity in advertising was, to speak charitably, a variable one. When they talked about them in print merchants were very likely to become overenthusiastic about their goods. Modesty was flung to the four winds. Printers' ink seemed to be taken as an automatic absolution for exaggeration--and oftimes absolute mis-statement--and, strangely enough, the public appeared to fall in with the idea. More often than not the merchant "got away with it"--or, if not, made good with bad grace, in which case the customer was satisfied. He had to be.