464 Viscount Burnham [Jan. 27, 



striking colour on a wall or a hoarding, he should walk straightway 

 into a shop and ask for the " proprietary article " in question, which 

 may be recommended by an "ex parte" statement or may be merely 

 the letters of a name. The undoubted fact is, however, that he does 

 so do, and huge fortunes have been made on this simple assumption 

 of human sensitiveness to suggestion. If to the force of the alphabet 

 you can add the excitement of the " flash-light " it seems that by 

 some subtle process akin to the penetration of the X-rays you reach 

 the public mind with even greater success ; from which it is quite 

 possible to argue that light has even more influence than colour on 

 the human intelligence. I have been told that Charles Dickens, who 

 carried his mighty genius into every detail of the trade of authorship 

 and had his newspaper experiences to guide him, showed his know- 

 ledge of human nature, especially of the common man and of what 

 •one of his characters calls the " human boy," in the rules that he 

 observed in the scheme of his advertising. When one of his works 

 was about to appear he took the best spaces available in Central 

 London and covered them with a huge blank space of white ; then 

 when the book was about to be published there appeared its title and 

 nothing more. His is the first and the last word in advertising, and 

 the revolving years teach us little more except its variations. We 

 know that coloured paper was deliberately adopted in that belief by 

 certain newspapers. The Sporting Times — the " Pink 'Un " of our 

 youth — undoubtedly gained much in prestige and popularity by its 

 colour, although painting the town red dates back to the Bucks of 

 the Regency, if not to the Mohocks of the Restoration. The West- 

 minster Gazette gained in the same way by its green colour, which 

 is mentioned in the Life of Sir George Newnes as being something 

 of an inspiration. It was always associated with " the sea-green 

 incorruptible " of Carlyle's " French Revolution," and was supposed 

 for some reason or other to express not only incorruptibility but 

 respectability as well, for Robespierre in his way had both ingredients 

 in his character. It would be interesting to know now whether the 

 present proprietors of the Westminster Gazette consider that they 

 have lost or gained by hauling down their colour, for it was distinc- 

 tive and characteristic, and personally I very much question the 

 expediency of their change over to the common use. The colour 

 was the paper. Why, therefore, should it have been bleached and 

 blanched ? 



I do not believe that the possibilities of tinted paper, or possibly 

 of colour on paper, have yet been anything like exhausted. In 

 America colour printing is a great feature of the Sunday editions of 

 all the big papers, and it is bound before long here also to lay its hold 

 upon the popular press. I see no reason why headlines and captions 

 should not be printed, as contents bills are now, in different and con- 

 trasted colours, or even why colour printing should not be adapted to 

 various kinds of matter for publication : why, for example, politics 



