The Gilded Age


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"Oh, yes. Perhaps the biggest thing we've done in the advertising line  
was to get an officer of the U. S. government, of perfectly Himmalayan  
official altitude, to write up our little internal improvement for a  
religious paper of enormous circulation--I tell you that makes our bonds  
go handsomely among the pious poor. Your religious paper is by far the  
best vehicle for a thing of this kind, because they'll 'lead' your  
article and put it right in the midst of the reading matter; and if it's  
got a few Scripture quotations in it, and some temperance platitudes and  
a bit of gush here and there about Sunday Schools, and a sentimental  
snuffle now and then about 'God's precious ones, the honest hard-handed  
poor,' it works the nation like a charm, my dear sir, and never a man  
suspects that it is an advertisement; but your secular paper sticks you  
right into the advertising columns and of course you don't take a trick.  
Give me a religious paper to advertise in, every time; and if you'll just  
look at their advertising pages, you'll observe that other people think a  
good deal as I do--especially people who have got little financial  
schemes to make everybody rich with. Of course I mean your great big  
metropolitan religious papers that know how to serve God and make money  
at the same time--that's your sort, sir, that's your sort--a religious  
paper that isn't run to make money is no use to us, sir, as an  
advertising medium--no use to anybody--in our line of business. I guess  
our next best dodge was sending a pleasure trip of newspaper reporters  
out to Napoleon. Never paid them a cent; just filled them up with  
champagne and the fat of the land, put pen, ink and paper before them  
while they were red-hot, and bless your soul when you come to read their  
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