MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE THE CONSUMER'S PART J W. SULLIVAN f ii! f I lilllllilliiilill ! i IHIIH AOPIC, DEPT, MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE THE MACMILLAN COMPANY NEW YORK BOSTON CHICAGO DALLAS ATLANTA SAN FRANCISCO MACMILLAN & CO.. LIMITED LONDON BOMBAY CALCUTTA MELBOURNE THB MACMILLAN CO. OP CANADA, LTD. TORONTO MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE THE CONSUMER'S PART BY J. W. SULLIVAN THE MACMILLAN COMPANY COPYRIGHT, 1913 Bv THE MACMILLAN COMPANY Set up and dectrotypcd. Published October, 1913 FERRIS PRINTING COMPANY NEW YORK, N. Y.. U. 8. A, THIS WORK I DEDICATE, WITH DEEP RESPECT, TO MISS HELEN WESTON 313260 CONTENTS CHAPTER PAGE I IN RESPONSE TO QUERIES, NATURAL TO THE READER I II "ECONOMY BEGINS AT HOME" 14 III FROM PRODUCER TO CONSUMER THE MOST COSTLY OBSTRUCTION 34 IV A PUBLIC OUTLET CLOSED BY THE AUTHOR- ITIES 53 V A RIGHTFUL USE OF COMMON PROPERTY BLOCKED BY STATUTE 76 VI PUBLIC MARKETS IN THE UNITED STATES HURTFUL TO "BUSINESS" ; 94 VII CUTS MADE AND TO BE MADE IN THE HIGH COST OF MIDDLEMEN 114 VIII Is CO-OPERATION COMING? HINDRANCES . . 131 IX THE RETAIL MARKETS OF PARIS ONLY THE OUT-DOOR SUCCESSFUL 158 X THE "CENTRAL HALLS" OF PARIS COMPETI- TORS ILLEGAL *74 XI THE MORIBUND BERLIN MARKET SYSTEM ITS LESSON FOR NEW YORK i9 2 XII RETAIL MARKETING IN LONDON THE OLD- EST-PLAN AND THE BEST ...... 209 XIII LONDON'S MIXED WHOLESALE SYSTEM No MODEL FOR NEW YORK . . . . * ..- 229 vii viii CONTENTS CHAPTER PAGE XIV Do MUNICIPAL MARKETS PAY? 247 XV NEW YORK MARKET PROBLEMS OFFICIAL PROMISE vs. PERFORMANCE 269 XVI PRICES; SUPPLY; DISTRIBUTION .... 287 XVII A METROPOLITAN MARKET SYSTEM, CUT- PRICE AND COSTLESS 301 MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE I. IN RESPONSE TO QUERIES, NATURAL TO THE READER. SEVEN years ago, on the formation of the Com- mission on Public Utilities of the National Civic Federation, I suggested, as one of its Committee of Five on Plan and Scope, that its investigations in- clude public markets. A possible reduction in the cost of food, evidently, was of pressing interest to the masses, even more than lower street-car fares or reduced rates for gas, water, or electric light. But the Commission decided not to extend its in- quiry beyond the reach of these four items of gen- eral outlay. However, while traveling, for a year or more, in America and Great Britain, as labor in- vestigator for the Commission, I gathered such data relative to markets as a casual observer might, visit- ing them wherever I went. Afterward, for more than a year, in going about much on the Continent, I continued my observations. Again, in 1909, while on tour in many countries in Europe with President * . ' . . ';:-. M **** - -,. '' THE PEOPLE Samuel Gompers, American Federation of Labor, I took the opportunity to visit public markets, collect official reports of their operations, and ascertain popular views regarding them from representatives of the organized wage-workers. During the years following, while I was assistant editor with Mr. Gompers, the rising discussion of the cost of living brought to the editorial offices in Washington, be- sides numerous letters, literally a stream of printed matter on the subject clippings, leaflets, magazine articles, pamphlets, especially prospectuses for co- operative and other distributive organizations, and various public documents, including reports of of- ficial commissions. Mr. Gompers procuring recent reports and other reference works on markets from various European countries, I examined this mat- ter, so far as my reading acquaintance with foreign languages permitted. My interest in the subject deepening with my information, I went in April, 1912, to Europe, and after visiting, among others, the principal markets in Switzerland, I saw reason to center my inquiries on the systems of Paris, London and Berlin. These are the only cities in the class with New York, presenting the market problem on much the same scale and with some- what similarly complicated conditions relative to MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE 3 supply, transportation, wholesaling and retailing. Since returning from Europe, in March, I have continued my inquiries in New York. In the four cities, besides consulting reports and reference works in the administrative and larger public li- braries, I have interviewed numerous persons market, police, city hall and other officials, market vendors, shopkeepers great and small, sociologists of various tendencies, and, continually, "the man in the street." Finally, within the last few months, Mr. Gompers has obtained from certain American cities official replies, more or less in detail, to a series of questions relative to their respective mar- ket systems. To this matter I have had access. Though much of my work on this question has been done while I was engaged with the American Federation of Labor, and I could not have obtained my information readily without the assistance of Mr. Gompers, in no wise is he or the organization responsible for my views or my treatment of the facts. I make this statement in order to anticipate the necessity of replying hereafter to a natural, and reasonable, query on the part of readers as to whom I represent and as to how I have been able to ac- quire a knowledge of the subject which, I recog- 4 MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE nize, has imparted to my assertions and views a vein of authority and conviction. The direct result of my investigations has been, I believe, to qualify me to point out, in the light of the experience of other great cities, the shortest and cheapest possible lines from the producer, near and far, to the very door of the consumer in our metropolis of New York. Of first importance in my recommendations is the economic principle by which the choked-up local outlets of our supplies may be kept clear and open namely, the largest practicable freedom, involving the widest competi- tion, in the use of the city's streets and open spaces. What I recommend in particular the plan for which I plead is summarized in the last of my chapters. Here, in outline, are my salient premises and conclusions : 1. People who do not practice the reasonable economies open to them fail to make the proper start in reducing their own cost of living. There- fore, their first necessary step is to join the thrifty, a true class of social reformers. 2. The outlay for food is 45 to 60 per cent of the breadwinner's earnings in the typical family among the masses. Therefore, the most widespread MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE 5 reductions in the cost of living can come from cheaper prices for food. 3. The New York grocery or provision store re- tailer makes by far the largest percentage in the additions to price put on by the successive middle- men engaged in selling and transporting from coun- try producer to city consumer. For New York, the costs of retailing are double or treble the costs of wholesaling. Therefore, in the consumer's task of cutting down costs his first attention is due the retailer. 4. The small retailer, moreover, while under heavy but unavoidable expense, is usually incapable of extending his trade beyond a regular custom re- stricted through unalterable circumstances; hence he cannot considerably promote the speedy distri- bution of an occasional or seasonal over-supply in the market; he cannot transfer to the general pub- lic the complete benefits that ought to arise from large crops; he has consequently learned to get his living through maintaining a high conventional level of prices or through other practices prejudi- cial to consumers' interests. The conditions of his occupation, instead of furnishing incentives to the most efficient public service, lead to his own non- service, or the excessive taxing of service, or the 6 MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE prevention of service. Therefore, the petty store retailer's part in the general commercial machin- ery, being economically defective, must inevitably give way to forms yielding better results for the consumers. 5. A twenty per cent saving to the consumer of moderate means, and in cases much more, on stock of equal quality, in particular on fruits and vege- tables, through pushcart dealers as against store retailers, has of recent years been repeatedly re- ported by investigators, among others by New York State and City Commissions. Therefore, the legiti- mate trade of the pushcart, to the fullest extent, is a reasonable demand on the part of consumers. 6. It is not only through the economies of their prices that pushcart dealers can ordinarily best serve their customers, but through the peculiar conve- nience of their operations. When their services are needed they can be handy are so in the great cities in which they have freedom of the streets serving the factory and other workers at lunch hour and housekeepers at all hours. Therefore, to meet vari- ous public wants, the pushcart trade should by law be freely ambulant and freely stationary, within general traffic limits, wherever consumers should wish to buy. MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE 7 7. The practicability and value of open-air mar- kets for metropolitan cities have been convincingly demonstrated, through diverse experimentation, in London, Paris and Greater Berlin in London through long-established operation; in Paris, through concurrent operation of both open and housed municipal markets, the latter ruined in the competition; in Greater Berlin, through the pro- gressive development of open-air markets in the suburbs while they were suppressed in the city proper to give life to the failing housed municipal retail system. New York, contrary to law, and Newark, legally, have today sufficient beginnings of the open-air markets to indicate that neither climate nor the habits of the people in this vast community are unfavorable to this economical an- nex of the kitchen. Therefore, any district of Greater New York, in suburb or centre, could be expected to supply consumers enough to encourage the attendance at open-air markets throughout the year by producers, pushcarters, and retail dealers. 8. Since selling in the open by pushcart and market regulates all forms of indoor retailing, it establishes a solid primary basis for the conditions of the foodstuffs trade, with consequently stable and unmanipulated retail prices. Therefore, it 8 MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE should take precedence of all other projects for reducing the cost of living. 9. The big up-to-date provision section of the department store, the "private market," and the chain store each today invading the commercial territory long held by the small retailer all alike evince possibilities of lowering their own prices, and in general catering with improved efficiency to the wants of the public, especially of the well-to-do, as competition should develop with them through forms of open-air selling. Therefore, the positive social value of these types of distributers, highly ef- fective as they are without official outlay or admin- istration, must be duly recognized by promoters of markets or other projects, public or private, in- volving expensive plant or cumbrous organization, for the sale of perishable foodstuffs. 10. Any proposal for distributive co-operation based on the impressive progress of the system in Great Britain imposes on its originators the obliga- tion of making a sincere and thorough study of the Rochdale methods and principles, ethical and commercial, and of the obstacles, peculiar in our national character and conditions, which for decades have rendered unsuccessful innumerable American imitations, genuine and counterfeit, of British co- MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE 9 operative methods. Therefore, serious advocates of true co-operation in any American community must content themselves to await the development of co- operators, in spirit and education, before proceed- ing to begin a co-operative business. 11. Successive investigations of New York's market problem have left unaltered a situation of many years' standing, except the recent concentra- tion of pushcarts in a few neighborhoods to the general detriment of the poorer classes. Inquiry by official investigators as to foreign methods has been inadequate, the deficiencies of retail services next the home have not been given due weight, in the search for ambitious administrative modes of reform, entailing large city appropriations and well- salaried political offices, the possibilities in free, humble every-day methods of selling have been overlooked. Recommendations by various commis- sions have been contradictory and all thus far im- practical, or at least fruitless in actual market changes. Therefore, the present voluntary inquiry and independent report may fill a want. 12. Housed district municipal markets, made up of rows of little stalls occupied the full week by petty dealers, have during the last twenty-five years been failing in all the four chief cities of our civili- io MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE zation; the system is unfitted to modern life and household conditions in large communities; pro- viders for the home in many cases prefer, one class open-air selling and another the more attractive pri- vate market. Therefore, proposals to rehabilitate housed public retail markets involve the difficult obligation of demonstrating ways and means to ob- viate their present proven shortcomings. 13. The problem of establishing a public market system, wholesale and retail, in Greater New York, widely differs from the simple question of setting up one or several comparatively small markets in a minor city. In the greater metropolis, important distinctive factors are arrivals of produce by car or ship load, local hauling of large quantities long distances, the defective system of retailing, difficulty in selecting market sites, cost of land and buildings, the faults of administration, changes in the business or residential character of localities, and especially the relative configuration of the five boroughs. Therefore, while the investigator may strongly sup- port the combined covered and open-air market of the Pennsylvania type for our lesser American cit- ies, the peculiar circumstances of the case compel him to question the same method for New York. 14. Transition, in several forms, is the dominat- MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE n ing factor in the market situation of today in this metropolis and its vicinity. Subway and tunnel are to bring about the greatest changes in history in local passenger transit; accompanying this may be an epochal change in distribution of produce by freight; commercial transformation may follow in many districts, especially along the rivers and in the suburbs; wholesale markets advantageous at present to retailers might prove inconvenient to open-air marketmen; the transportation companies, with improved market yards and piers, might take trade away from public wholesale markets. There- fore, great public market ventures today would be uncertain city investments. 15. The essential effects of a modern wholesale market lie chiefly in ascertaining and publishing the current prices consequent on an uninterrupted sup- ply coupled with a thoroughly effective demand. To indicate sufficiently the general supply and quali- ties of certain classes of produce the spot supply need be much less; the day's display, though per- haps far less than the general supply, brings pro- ducers or their representatives to meet in market places all classes of buyers; selling from it at auc- tion forms an undeniable base for price indications in general, insures an outlet for consignments to 12 MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE the market authorities, and is a means of further sales by sample for direct delivery to buyers. At present, these functions are not performed with the least possible friction and cost at either the New York public wholesale markets or the transporta- tion companies' yards and piers. But to assume that New York's scattered business of wholesale marketing can be attracted to, or forced by legisla- tion into, public markets is to accept an unproven theory. Besides, other forms of friction and cost in such markets are to be foreseen. The tendency in the metropolitan cities abroad is dissemination, and not concentration of sales of produce in bulk in the official wholesale markets. Meat selling, forming the most important part of the foreign metropolitan municipal market receipts, is centred in the abattoirs and wholesale markets in conse- quence of taxing, quarantine, inspection and slaugh- tering methods which render the general conditions of the meat trade entirely different from those of New York, where the packing-house supply is most- ly apart from the public market supply. There- fore, concentration of wholesaling in New York through establishing great public wholesale markets is not probable, but, in connection with the markets that already exist, there is promise of considerable MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE 13 improvement through the adoption of auctioning, the regulation of market-house commission men, and the encouragement of shipments from pro- ducers to the markets. 1 6. The point of view yielding to the general reader the strongest light on the subject of the cost of living is that of the consumer; the individual upon whom falls the burden of private and public duty in the question is the consumer; the citizen whose rights are most at stake is the consumer. Therefore, the consumer's part in reform should be predominating. 17. New York can have at once a public metro- politan market system, employing the cheapest methods of retailing, without spending a dollar for plant. The system is the one which has surpassed on trial all other public forms of marketing in the great cities of Europe. The plan herewith recom- mended is simple, direct, practical, costless. There- fore, consumers are urged to demand : "The streets for the people." II. "ECONOMY BEGINS AT HOME." IT is the needs of the consumer which initiate the production of food. Only on the spur of hun- ger in his home does the producer in a primitive state raise his crops. Likewise, in civilized condi- tions, upon the number of consumers to be served and their effective capacity for consumption depend the quantity and variety of foodstuffs to be pro- duced for the market. In other words, the pro- ducer is the agent of the consumer. Let us then conduct our inquiry from the standpoint of the consumer, that he may learn his part in keeping the cost of his living down to the normal point. What should be the normal cost of producing a commodity may be a matter of debate, but it is not difficult to decide what should be its additional legitimate cost after it has left the possession of the producer. Service for transportation and sell- ing by the most effective methods should be paid for, and nothing else. The consumer's influence on production is direct- ly affected by his methods of household manage- MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE 15 ment, his commercial relations with the purveyors of food, and his civic relations with the public authority. His duty to himself is thrift. His pub- lic duty involves helping to establish and maintain freedom and fairness in the methods of marketing; he must allow neither purveyor nor public author- ity to erect artificial barriers between him and the producers. First, then, household management a phase of thrift. To what class of consumers is it best worth while to give consideration? A pertinent initial query, since we aim at helpful action. The reply is to be had in a few lines of social analysis. Below Sixty-second street in New York is a popu- lation of a million and three hundred thousand. Of this number a certain percentage, living in hotels or boarding and lodging houses, has little or no op- portunity to practice household economies or direct- ly influence foodstuff prices. Another percentage is well-to-do families who usually order kitchen supplies by telephone or whose buyers are their cooks or butlers, price in either case not being a primary care. A third percentage, a small one, is the unfortunate families more or less dependent on public or friendly support. These three percent- ages we may roughly sum up as perhaps three hun- 16 MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE dred thousand. If they amount to more, a strip of city blocks northward near the East River might be added, to give us as remaining a sure million of Manhattan's inhabitants, within the boundaries in- dicated, which include an area equal to about seven square miles lying north of the Battery, who today must perforce wrestle in earnest with the question of the high cost of living. The marketing of that million it will do to keep in mind as our objective. Any proposed methods of economical purchasing applicable to this mass of consumers would with reasonable modifications apply also to people of the same class elsewhere in New York, as well as in other large cities. In Manhattan, the earnings of non-dependent normal families in this class usually run from $750 to $1,500 a year, the number making more than $1,200 being comparatively small, but there are many self-respecting families whose earnings are less than $750. Within the average figures the pro- portion of income expended for subsistence and fuel (the latter in part used in cooking) commonly runs from 45 to 60 per cent, the higher proportion for the lower earnings. This percentage is given quite invariably in tabular exhibits of government and other reports, among them before me various MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE 17 Bulletins of the national Bureau of Labor, the Fed- eral "Lodge Report" of 1910 on "Wages and Prices of Commodities," and the "Report of the Massa- chusetts Commission on the Cost of Living," 1910. Bj a "normal family" (Massachusetts report) "is meant one with the following attributes : It has no boarders or dependents. It does not own its dwelling place. It has an expenditure given for rent, fuel, lighting, clothing, and food. It has both a husband and wife. It has not more than five children, no one of whom is over fourteen years of age." Though in Manhattan, among our mil- lion, many normal families manage to exist on a total of $750, or even less, the Charity Organiza- tion's lowest figures for the maintenance of a fam- ily of five father, mother, and three children ' without risk of becoming dependent in some form, is $900 a year. The Federal Bureau of Labor in 1908 computed that among 2,500 workingmen's families in the country at large the annual outlay for food was $375 (now increased by what per cent?), and before the Lodge committee several of the big grocery store proprietors in Baltimore and Richmond testified that the family accounts of peo- ple of average means ran $30 to $40 a month (to i8 MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE which for New York must be added what per cent?). In these statistics, which indicate the financial situation of wage-workers, clerks, men in small business, and numerous professional people, is sketched the problem of table outlay for our mil- lion. The reader can see the grade in which his circumstances place him. If his annual food ac- count is $400, which in New York is below the family average, or is $600, more nearly the average for an income of $1,000 to $1,200, a saving of 20 per cent may mean to him the difference between deficit and surplus in his total family account at the end of the year. If, by painstaking household management, the consumer controlling earnings from $750 to $900 can save $100 to $150, this sum in pocket may transfer his family from the class living unhappily on the verge of dependence to the class living in the pride of self -maintenance. And to the family earning $1,000 or $1,200, a 20 per cent shrinkage in expenditure for the table signi- fies relief from many an anxious hour. If each of the two hundred thousand families constituting our million inhabitants could save $100 a year, the total would be twenty million dollars. The purpose of these chapters is to submit to MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE 19 the reader a collection of facts on which he may form a judgment as to whether it shall be possible for him, as head of a family, to effect an economy, to the percentage indicated, or even do better. This economy is to be brought about in part by saving and in part on buying. That is, the consumer is to practice the systematic habits of a wise thrift and he is to take a share in establishing in his com- munity the most efficient methods developed through the experiences of the great cities of the world for transmitting provisions from producer to consumer. The immediate result he strives for, it is assumed, is better nourishment in his home and the general benefits of an improvement in his circumstances. A further result, in consequence of the improved in- dividual and social conditions implied, is a perma- nent step in human progress through educating the consumer and eliminating what is now the waste effort, the false commercial motions, taking place between producer and consumer. Let the consumer begin with himself the mas- culine here including the feminine fender. The first point to be made is in his own mind. He must fortify himself with confidence in himself. He is not going to "lay down." He is not going to whine. What the thrifty of his class do he can do, 20 MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE if his handicaps are no heavier than the average. He is setting out to master his personal economic situation now, to the best of his abilities, which he may never have fully exercised, and to the best of his opportunities, which heretofore he may not have fully seized. The one practical principle, as well as immediate method, on which he can rely is a systematic control of his own acts as a domestic economist. He is going to make the best of things as they are no matter how much lighter his bur- dens might be were we in the happy coming age when the entire proper earnings of our million shall be retained by our million. He is going to do it, for one good reason, because he is a soldier fight- ing that a fairer society may be evolved ; the fuller his purse the stronger is he armed; his every act that counts for his own benefit also helps his plans for social improvement ; by each step that he moves toward self-reliance he adds his mite in permanently advancing society; in beginning with himself he takes up the thread of private duty that may lead to more effective work in his self-imposed public duty that of helping his fellow-strugglers to com- bat economic injustice, to elevate the standard of living among the masses, and hence establish a MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE 21 higher state of society. Thoughts, these, to be kept in mind as our practical points are unfolded. And now our first proposition. The beginning of "cost-of-living" reforms, in many a household, comes with the solution of this question : Are the selecting and the keeping and the cooking of the food in the family up to the possibilities of a wise economy? Our friendly consumer will not permit himself, on reading this suggestive query, to reject the consideration of commonplace everyday pecu- niary bother which it implies, a matter under his control, in order to reconstruct, for the twentieth time perhaps, his demonstration of the possible benefits to be conferred on all society through an ideal system of production, exchange, and distri- bution, a matter for many a weary day to be be- yond his reach or that of the jangling theorists. No contradiction is to be offered him here if he asserts that the majority in the poorer classes suffer from social wrongs rather than from personal neglect of picayune economies. No one ought to deny him the right to cry out on all proper occasions against, for example, the hundreds of millions of water in great corporations, or the social menace of "high finance," or the delays in the progress of what has come to be termed "conservation" of the country's 22 MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE natural resources. Everyone with a conscience must take sides with the agitator who denounces, and sanely struggles against, economic injustice. An unwelcome but persistent fact of his exist- ence to the man of restricted means is that well- adjusted self -management prescribes, besides his daily labor, unremitting care even in petty things. Shave he must, bathe he must, attire himself de- cently he must, and count his pennies going for sub- sistence he must, if he would not drop behind in the procession. When he comes to declaring of any of these things that they are not worth the doing he confesses an unmanly surrender to hopelessness, a falling behind and below his fellow-toilers who are making the fight that counts for civilization. In these days of controversy over the remoter causes of high prices, the consumer must guard himself against the false teachers who would make him believe that whatever he does for his personal benefit is profitless or eventually to his damage and that of his neighbors. When "the flood-of -cheap- gold" theory of high prices is cited to him to prove that commodities will never be cheaper, let him remember that the rise in prices has by no means been uniform throughout the world's gold-money countries, that food stuff prices vary with the crops MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE 23 and the seasons, that impediments to trade are a primary cause in discouraging production, that im- proved machinery or methods sometimes cut prices of commodities in half, and that certain staples have recently fallen in price both in Europe and America. When employers' association lawyers tell him that his own trade unions have raised the prices of table necessaries, let him quote the Lodge report (page 122), which says that the greatest advances "have been made in the groups of com- modities in which the labor cost is not a controlling factor/' as well as the Massachusetts report (page 53o), which finds that the trade unions can not "be regarded as a direct and active cause of the recent increase of prices." When the revolutionist solely through governmental activities raises the paradox- ical objection to individual saving that it is falla- cious, that the more the masses save the worse they are off a doctrine more common twenty years ago than now let the dime-saving consumer reply that the dollar he did not spend last week is good for his nourishment a part of this week, that each ad- ditional dollar he obtains, through striking or oth- erwise, is tantamount to an increased saving, and that if he saved for nothing else he might save to strike and to stay on strike to victory, in case his 24 MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE wages or conditions at work were unfair. When, again, he is in danger of being dazzled by wonders to be worked through the magic wand of this or that boon-conferring politician if but elected to office, let the consumer recall the political nostrums he has already ineffectively swallowed and pay strict attention to his job. Aye, to return from misty theories to work-a- day earth. We have perhaps now cleared the way for the consumer to be doing things, even small things, for himself. Back then to that self -ques- tioning as to the management of food in the home. Household storage facilities often control the amount of food and fuel laid in by the consumer. His room is insufficient or he has found the keep of an ice-box beyond his means. But even on these oft-considered points perhaps he may still be open to suggestion. Dry groceries can be put away in small space, stowed in plain packing boxes, set one above another, high toward the ceiling, to be reached from a chair, their lids opening sidewise, like the cupboard door. Potatoes, onions, and apples, bought by the bushel, will keep long in a moder- ately cool place. But the principal conserver of perishable food, cooked or uncooked, is the ice-box, and with care it can be cheaply managed. "The MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE 25 construction of an ice-chest," as described in Farm- ers' Bulletin 475, issued by the Agricultural De- partment, may be read with profit. The making of such a box promises a job for that boy of the con- sumer's family who is in the manual training class. The ice in a chest, if wrapped in layers of news- paper, keeps longer than when left loose. How- ever, good managers among people of small earn- ings can get along without an ice-box. The first necessary moves toward establishing a confidence in his own ability to become a successful household manager may have been accomplished when the consumer can see an appreciable saving, if not through an ice-box at least through storage boxes or barrels. On this point, R. A. Pearson, President of the New York State Agricultural So- ciety, wrote in his report, January, 1912: "Some families lose more in a month through the payment of exorbitant rates for food products in vest pocket quantities than they would have to pay in rent for enough larger space to live in to enable them to buy food supplies in quantities suf- ficient to last a few days or weeks." The matter being settled of laying in provisions in quantities as large as desirable, or as his purse and storage room will allow, and of using them 26 MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE with judgment, the consumer's next care will be to get his money's worth, in weight, measure, and quality, when buying. A pair of scales (bought at the ten-cent store) and a quart and a peck meas- ure (home-made, of cardboard, if not of wood) contain powers of revelation as to the gouging practices which are common with, let us say, wicked tradesmen only. On quality, or grades, or points in selecting, the consumer will gather many a good hint upon ob- taining, free, from the United States Department of Agriculture, Washington, D. C., these pamphlets : (i) Farmers' Bulletin 391, "Economical Use of Meat in the Home"; (2) "Consumers' Fancies"; (3) Farmers' Bulletin 256 on "Preparation of Veg- etables for the Table"; (4) "Food Customs and Diet in American Homes"; (5) Farmers' Bulletin 413, "The Care of Milk and Its Use in the Home"; (6) Farmers' Bulletin 249, "Cereal Breakfast Foods"; (7) Farmers' Bulletin 142, "Principles of Nutrition and Nutritive Value of Food." These publications are trustworthy, packed with information, and written in the interest of the con- sumer. They together contain something of an education for the beginner and much information at times neglected by the experienced householder. MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE 27 In a way they imply an indictment of our people, as a mass, whether as cooks, or purchasers, or judges of food. Many heads of families seem to be in the infant class as housekeepers. When the consumer has by means of these print- ed guides in diet, or through hard experience, learned what are the best and cheapest cuts of meat for his needs, and how to prepare them and con- serve and re-prepare the parts left over, and how he ought to buy fruits and vegetables, not solely on their appearance, but by their taste and substance, he will be keen for other information. He will probably try to get at the secrets of the price values and the food values of package goods. Dr. S. W. Stratton, Director of the Bureau of Standards at Washington, testified in 1910 that while rolled oats in bulk varied between 4 and 5 cents a pound, Quaker oats in packages sold for nearly 8 cents a pound; rice that cost loose between 5 and 10 cents brought when treated and packed 32 cents; wheat, selling when raw and untreated at 3 cents per pound, ran up to 18 cents as Egg-O-See, 22 cents as Force, and 25 cents as puffed wheat; corn, at 2 cents, sold at 4 as cornmeal, at 12 as Post toasties, and i$y 2 as toasted cornflakes; sliced bacon, retail- ing at 28, brought 41 to 52 in sealed packages, and 28 MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE chipped beef, 30 to 40 cents a pound in bulk, brought 49 to 51 in package form. The Lodge report found: "There must be an agreement of some kind among the cereal manufacturers." A western dealer in foods, testifying before the Fed- eral Commission, said: "When you buy bread at 7^2 cents a pound it costs you three times as much as it does when you buy flour at $6 per barrel." Turn now to the mute but obvious testimony of the goods in the multitudinous small shops cater- ing to our million. The grocers' shelves are pic- turesque and eloquent in indicating the enormous consumption of package goods. The fancy fruit- erers' display is largely of wax-skinned, pithy-pulp, flavorless show-pieces. The little butchers and deli- catessen dealers who penetrate almost every block confess by their presence the fat profits that must be made on petty sales of meats, whether fresh, canned or cooked. Bakeries, many of which never bake, are on every hand. This swarm of retailers tells a story, which ought to carry its own lessons, of the consumer's ignorance or of his indifference to his own health or pecuniary interest. It might be reasonably imagined that even the hall-roomers who, despairing of "the simple life," are living "the delicatessen life," would in self-defense hark MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE 29 back to the breakfast of corn-meal mush, which stands by the stomach so well, and the rough- faced fruit that often has taste, juice and nutrition, and home-made coffee not composed of chicory and barley and not boiled down to tannic acid. Let you and me agree, reader, that we need not proceed, in the course of our inquiries, into the region of controversies over flesh as against vege- tables or eating much as against eating little, neces- sarily, however, giving respectful attention to the excellent Mr. Fletcher, who preaches the riches in mastication and abstinence. We may dismiss this phase of the subject with the comment that in re- gard to it great doctors disagree. Dr. T. J. Allen, of Washington, "food specialist/' editor of a "Diet and Health Hints" department for a syndicate of daily newspapers, challenges the world to a debate on "Resolved, That the average man can do bet- ter physical and mental work and live twice as long on a diet consisting of entire wheat bread and water than on the average diet furnished in the best hotel." Directly opposed to this doctrine are the teachings of Dr. Henry T. Finck, who, turning from music to gastronomy, argues from his cos- mopolitan experience that the nations partaking generously of a rich variety of palatable dishes are 30 MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE the ones that are leading the world in mental and bodily vigor. Then Dr. Woods Hutchinson tells us in "Instinct and Health" that tendencies of ap- petite are in a large way safe guides to the normal human being. You have here your choice of ad- visers. But we all know that each human stomach is a little kingdom that resents alien government. Reflecting on the suggestions here imparted to him perhaps only a summary of familiar points, like a sermon on man's recurrent sins the reader may mentally calculate what savings in the kitchen he might possibly effect through buying in econom- ical quantities the most nutritious food. Could they amount to $10 a month? Let us say only $5. Well, $5 a month is $60 a year. But man takes into his mouth not only solid food but drink. How many thousands of more or less artistic drinking places adorn the area in which our million dwell? Their costly outward and brilliant inward decoration seems to indicate that a goodly percentage of the whole of our thir- teen hundred thousand feel in duty bound to con- tribute toward making New York a city beauti- ful in its festive drinking spots. As he separates himself from his money over a bar, especially in treating, the consumer usually also separates him- MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE 31 self from the thrifty. Rarely is he sure he is not throwing his good money away in exchange for chemical "blends" and "brews" much of it merely doctored, colored, carbonized, sophisticated, se- ductively labeled crude alcohol, the same old de- ceitful devil, in whatever of its varied forms. And mark you, the world-wide discussion of the uses of alcohol as remedy, stimulant, or refreshment has during the last decade left the number of its de- fenders among those most competent to judge the members of the medical profession only a small minority in any country within the domain of modern science. If a consumer's family expends a total of ten cents a day for drink, it sums up in a year $36.50. A few more drinks on Sundays and holidays, and the amount is $40. Cut that out from the annual family outlay, where it occurs, you who feel obliged to save your dimes, add it to the $60 saved on the former unwise selecting and careless keeping and wasting of food, and there is passed over to the right side of the ledger in the course of the year just one hundred dollars. But let us suppose that the saving in cash ex- penditure by these means should be but fifty dol- lars. Profit has been gained otherwise. A fair 32 MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE start in the habits of wise living has been made. Hand-to-mouth methods of feeding, with their con- sequent periods of semi-starvation in the household, have given way to regular meals. Knowledge has conquered ignorance and irregularity. An empty head is often the direct cause of an empty stomach. Are the wage-workers becoming more temperate ? Does their organization promote self-control with regard to drink? There are broad facts that to a fair mind must indicate affirmative replies to these queries. In Germany, the working-class, in its party and trade-union organization, by substituting in numerous towns its own meeting halls for the public drinking houses as evening and holiday re- sorts for its members, has brought about a reduc- tion of the average outlay for drink. In cases, in Berlin, where the support of the organized work- ers' hall was in part pre-reckoned from the usual average working-class consumption of beer, it has been found that on quitting the public saloons many members abandoned the beer-drinking habit. To make up the deficits, the membership dues have had to be increased. In Great Britain, the co-opera- tive halls, commonly open to discussions of the so- cial question in every phase, are closed to drink. MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE 33 Workingmen M. P.'s and other leaders are fre- quently "tee-totallers." The working-class movement toward justice throughout the civilized world is imbued with a profound moral spirit. Springing from this spirit is a developing thrift and temperance in the masses, leading to a clearer vision of true sociological prin- ciples and a better knowledge of the practical steps necessary in social progress. What ennobles every humble but well-considered effort toward a great end in view is the spirit that prompts the act. Even the systematic saving of copper cents thus becomes dignified as a duty. III. FROM PRODUCER TO CONSUMER- THE MOST COSTLY OBSTRUCTION. WHEN the householder's gas-pipes or water-pipes become obstructed, he at once brings in the plumber. When the city's water-mains or sewers fail in their free inlet or outlet, it is expected that the difficulty will speedily be remedied by a public department. But the successive barriers that clog the direct flow of foodstuffs from country producer to city con- sumer have long withstood the assaults of would-be reformers. Our typical consumer, now on economy bent, has as a beginning informed himself as to the ways and means for selecting and conserving his food to advantage. He is done with the improvidence of unsystematized living. He is choosing his table necessaries not only with a care as to their cost but with a view to their nutritive value in main- taining the physical and mental efficiency of the members of his family. He now turns to the sources of his buying. There is no longer any novelty, at the present 34 MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE 35 stage of the discussion of the cost of living, in statements of the disparity between farmers' re- ceipts and consumers' expenditures for one and the same article. Yet a review of some of the rele- vant facts may here be profitable. Whether improved methods might bring him his country produce cheaper than he gets it at the usual retail shopkeeper's prices is a question the consumer can have answered on asking another: What is the difference between farm prices and city store prices? If it is more than the lowest freight rates plus the cost of the most direct and freely competi- tive methods of handling otherwise, the consumer is, to the amount of the excess, paying somewhere a forced toll and not simply for service. The "Long Island Agronomist" tells the story of a Chicago man finding in a barrel of apples for which he paid $4 a note which read : "Dear Con- sumer I was paid 75 cents for this barrel; how much did you pay?" A Brooklyn man writes to a daily newspaper that recently a local meat dealer had told him he paid $18 a hundred pounds for lamb, for the like of which a Utah sheep-grower standing by said he received but $4 a hundred, and the query was raised, Who got the $14? A farm- er's wife at Sunnyside, R. L, sends this plaint to a 3 6 MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE newspaper: "Apples, choice varieties, all sprayed fruit, we are feeding to our cattle. If we send them to a commission house they will return us a bill for cartage and commission." John B. Cole- man, as Special Deputy Attorney-General conduct- ing in 1910 a milk investigation in New York, said: "I saw a statement yesterday to the effect that the farmers in northern New Jersey are feeding their milk to the hogs rather than sell it to the large milk-dealers at the prevailing price. Today the large dealers have raised the price of bottled milk to consumers from eight to nine cents a quart." A writer in a New York daily newspaper, January 31, 1912, stated that fishermen at Great South Bay told him they averaged about two cents a pound for their flounders, while he was paying at an up- town Sixth avenue fish-market for home use 18 cents. In another newspaper is comment by a country shipper on the rise in price of a barrel of his apples after it left his hands. While 83^ cents net had been paid him, the "Producer's Price Cur- rent" quoted the New York market price at $2 to $2.25 for the same grade. A man living near El- mira writes that potatoes were delivered at various railroad stations near his home for 45 to 55 cents a bushel for transport to New York, where the MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE 37 price was $1.60. An editorial writer in the "Fruit- man's Guide," expressing his opinion that "if peo- ple ate more grapefruit they would pay less money in doctors' bills," says that while the jobbers were selling grapefruit, fifty to the box, at $3, six cents apiece, New York restaurants were serving halves at 30 cents '"an impost on the consumers that measures up to the wildest dreams of usury." The report of President Pearson, New York State Agri- cultural Society, 1912, has this paragraph: "But lest it be thought that agricultural prices have taken a permanent high level, let me remind you that in the year 1911 farmers in New York sold large quantities of potatoes at 25 cents per bushel, eggs at 17 cents per dozen, and milk at two cents per quart." A wholesaler wrote in the month of May a number of articles for a New York daily news- paper giving these wholesale and retail prices for provisions on the same date: Strawberries passed from a range of 3 to 10 cents up to 15 to 30 cents; other berries, from 12 and 17 to 35 ; salad, 50 cents to $i a barrel to 10 cents a head; wax and string beans, 40 cents to $i a basket to 15 cents a quart quotations showing that the greatest jump in prices occurs between the wholesaler's and the retailer's. Widening our view from local and individual 38 MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE complaints, loud in the press of the cities, to the findings of government and other investigators, we see that the evidence against the middlemen is uni- form. The Industrial Commission reported several years ago that retail customers in general were pay- ing over 150 per cent more than the farmers re- ceived for onions, 135 per cent more for cabbage, 400 per cent more for oranges, 90 per cent more for apples by the barrel, 80 per cent more for po- tatoes by the bushel, 88 per cent more for poultry, and so on throughout a long list of provisions. In the Report of the Committee on Markets, Prices, and Costs of the New York State Food Investigat- ing Commission, issued August i, 1912, it is esti- mated (page 5) that "The annual food supply of Greater New York costs at the transportation ter- minals $3 50,000, ocx) or over, and that it costs in the consumers' kitchens $500,000,000 or over," an "addition of about 45 per cent." It was asserted before the Texas Farmers' Congress in July, 1911, that farmers got but nine billion dollars for prod- ucts that cost the consumers thirteen billions. Thus, whether the householder consults his neigh- bor, or the press, or competent observers over wide areas, or Uncle Sam's reference books, on this point of an increase in the price of foodstuffs between MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE 39 country producer and city consumer far beyond that warranted by service, the testimony is uni- form. It is so great as to indicate to a certainty that our commerce in provisions is by a defective system. Where is the chief trouble? First in order of the indispensable agents be- tween the agriculturist and the consumer comes the transportation company. Whether the rail- roads, under the stress of a regulation becoming more stringent every year, can take a charge in excess of dividends honestly earned is here not so much the question as the proportion they get of the price the consumer of provisions finally pays. When the inquirer wishes to settle his judgment upon the long-standing dispute between the rail- road managers and "the middlemen" as to which should bear the onus for the doubling, or trebling, of prices between farm and table, the railroad men refer him to the various stacks of new and old State and Federal reports, containing scores or hundreds of pages of tabular statements showing decreased freight rates for the successive decades in railroad history, with slight recent advances on certain classifications, which, however, they assert, in no wise justify any considerable part of the in- crease of prices on foodstuffs. President Pearson 40 MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE of the Agricultural Society said that "in some in- stances a desirable cheapening in the cost of pro- duction includes a reduction in freight rates," but "the railroads are blamed more than they deserve in this connection." His criticism is of lack of uniform rather than of excessive charges. The Massachusetts Commission's opinion (page 284) is: "Nobody appears to try seriously to lay the blame for high prices at the door of the railroads. As a matter of fact they are among the greatest sufferers; they are getting less for what they give than ever before in their history. Measured in money, their transportation charges are a little above the lowest point ever reached." The Com- mission prints pages of summaries on which this conclusion is founded. Railroad managers put emphasis on the fact that their profits obviously lie in the largest quan- tity of freight to be carried at fixed and known rates, whereas with middlemen the usual object in practice is the highest attainable prices on the quan- tities they handle, while market quotations are subject to manipulated changes at every stage in the handling. The railroad companies are willing to supply abundantly and even at times to glut a market with foodstuffs ; the dealers find their easiest MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE 41 profits, if not in a dearth, in a moderate supply. The Reading Railroad transports free to any point on its lines any wares bought in the great Phila- delphia Reading terminal market. The Massachu- setts Commission says : "The terminal facilities of the Pennsylvania lines at Pittsburgh for the recep- tion of fruits, vegetables, milk, and other perish- able produce are models of their kind, and are an excellent example of railway enterprise." Who can testify to any methods systematically practiced by the New York retail dealers for increasing the general stock of supplies, so as to reduce prices! Of all the phases of the trade in provisions to be brought to light in this consumer's quest, that at this point coming into view is of the first impor- tance. The mass of consumers is subdivided in numerous neighborhood groups served by local re- tail dealers. The interest of each dealer lies, not in making commodities over-plentiful so as to break market rates, but in keeping up prices on the usual volume of his stock, which is deliberately, in fact necessarily, limited to the effective demands of a small custom. This system of retailing, it is seen, is rigid. It cannot so develop an elasticity as to absorb the bountiful supply of table necessaries which producers from time to time have on their 42 MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE lands, awaiting a call to the markets. Retail food- stuff dealers' prices are mostly "conventional," as the economists say. On this point, the New York "Produce News" has remarked : "Retail prices on a great deal of produce in small lots do not vary much from year to year." It is the established large profits on these prices, firmly maintained at "the level which customers will stand," as supplies vary with the seasons, that brings into existence the multiplicity of small groceries and fruit and vegetable stores, each having a custom not readily subject to expansion. In inquiring whether it is really a fact that the middleman retailer wants a high price for the small quantity his experience has shown him he can of a certainty dispose of safely rather than a low price on possibly large sales, the first point coming to the consumer's attention is that in the city there are mainly two distinct classes of shop-keeping re- tailers in foodstuffs the "corner grocer," having a small area of delivery, and the "big stores," which usually do not handle green vegetables, covering the entire community in their delivery. The custom of the New York small grocer, who nowadays is often in the middle of a block, is held in part by having his stock of fruits and vegetables MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE 43 handy to his neighbors, by his giving credit, by his quick delivery of small purchases, by his "leaders" and "trading stamps," in a word by making his store at once a convenience and an attraction to the people in his block. Withal, he knows his busi- ness in every detail, the last touches including "the tricks of the trade." A small group of regular customers yields him a living. As to the astonish- ing number of retail food stores in New York, he who walks may count. W. C. Brown, President of the New York Central lines, tells of finding "twenty retail shops, where groceries, vegetables, and meat were sold, in one block." The New York State Commissioners' Market Committee reports (page 50) 11,000 "corner groceries," 6,066 butcher shops, and 2,682 bakeries for Greater New York; "one store to every 250 persons" (page 7) the cost of the wholesaling being 10 per cent and of the re- tailing about 33 per cent. In Prof. C. L. King's studies of food prices in Philadelphia, he makes out the advance of the retailer's prices over the wholesaler's from 30 to 100 per cent on eight com- modities ; including butter, 33 to 58 per cent ; pota- toes, 44 to 78; eggs, 30 to 100; tomatoes, 100. But, competition? Why, the query arises, does the horde of retailers not lead to a strife that must 44 MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE bring the lowest possible prices with the largest pos- sible supply? The answer plainly is that the indi- vidual retailer himself is victim of conditions in- separable from the system of which he is a part. He cannot, of his will, reduce prices. In order to make a living he must meet certain expenses un- avoidable in his business, as it is now conducted. In other words, to make up his costs and earnings, he must charge his limited circle of customers at least an irreducible minimum for the aggregate of their purchases; he usually cannot increase his pa- tronage because fellow-tradesmen, led into the busi- ness through its apparent profits, and then bound down under the same circumstances as himself, are everywhere at hand, to thrust themselves between him and other possible patrons. "A vicious circle," is said of this situation. "The system ends in a blind alley, tightly closed," is the figure others em- ploy. "The high operating costs of the individual (foodstuffs) retailer make his elimination inevi- table," says the New York Sta^te Commission Re- port (page 15). It is thus seen that the high level of the provision retailer's prices is not due to an exceptional greed in his class. His business, in other respects than perishability of stock, stands separate from all MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE 45 others. Its costs include, as perhaps one-half his running expenses, the daily hauling from a whole- sale or jobbers' market and the delivery of goods, even of small sales, to customers' homes, usually by wagon. He must also reckon with the difficulty of taking full advantage of low wholesale prices, the wasteful cost of a plate-glass front and other attractions for custom, trading stamps, and ad- vancing scale of wages, telephone, and a rental that has a yearly probability of increase as he builds up a trade. His landlord is a ready partner in his profits. To what percentage of his receipts must his cu- mulative burdens amount in the case of the small New York grocer doing a business of, say, $100 a day? Frederic J. Haskin, in his "Cost of Liv- ing," says: "The grocer doing a business of even $200 a day must make a gross profit of 15 per cent to get the $30 a day which it probably costs him to conduct his business." Beyond these fixed charges must come the living for a family and a provision for the future. In Grand Rapids, the "Michigan Tradesman" says, the local grocers, "who have always been pretty decent," "figure on a profit on the stuff they handle of about 50 per cent," 46 MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE The inquiring consumer, having ascertained that the retailer is the nearest clog of a series in the channel that brings foodstuffs to his household, can spy out the stoppages formed by the more remote clogs, with their relative cost. One arises from the chaotic method of buying and selling produce, after transportation from the producer to the freight termini of the railroads or to the piers of the pro- vision boats. There being only a small area of market gardens within twenty miles of New York, the amount of output from this source brought by wagons forms a negligible fraction of the entire supply. Produce usually arrives at night from long distances at the various railroad freight yards or down-town West Side river piers, where, in the earlier hours of the morning, it is bought and sold by commission men, speculators, wholesalers, job- bers, and lesser dealers. The transactions are quick work. Most of the goods is consigned by the send- ers to commission men, of whom there are none too few. These turn much of it over to jobbers, or wholesalers, from whom it is bought by retail- ers, either on the spot or at the commission men's or wholesalers' warehouses, or at the down-town West Side or Brooklyn wholesale market-places or at the jobbers' markets. After arrival in the city, MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE 47 the hauling of the goods to and fro and back and forth, from one set of dealers to another, from one locality to another, is part of the waste in a planless development. Subdivisions of the commission men, wholesalers, and jobbers dealing in separate lines of foodstuffs in New York give rise to various associations and exchanges. It is not the purpose at this point to particularize the peculiar functions performed by each of these subdivisions. Just when, in their dealings, the men composing them are legitimate dealers in goods held in their possession or venture- some speculators in the goods coming in on the market, or to arrive in the future, is a nettlesome point fought over by the dealers on one side and producers on the other. What may happen to farmers' consignments to commission dealers is thus described by Charles R. White, of Ontario County, N. Y., writing in the "Rural New Yorker," March 25, 1911: "A car of very fancy Spitzenberg apples was shipped to a well-known commission house, A. A sold the apples at the car to B for $4. B sold them back to A for $6. A took them to his store and jobbed them out at $7.50. A made returns to the shipper of $4, less freight and 10 per cent commis- sion, or $3.36, 45 per cent of the jobbing price. In 48 MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE this case the fruit must have retailed for a high price, and it is fair to assume the grower got very much less than 35 per cent of the consumer's dol- lar. The practice cited here is a very common one." This case, with a number of others, is cited by Mr. White to show the weakness and deceits of the commission system of marketing. His articles, of which he wrote a series, could not be given promi- nence in the reputable newspaper which published them unless they were based on circumstances rec- ognized as not unusual in the business and pos- sessed of a general significance to farmers and con- sumers. It is hardly to be expected that the mem- bers of a commission apfpointed by a State admin- istration would without due caution recognize charges against an entire body of business men, yet the State Commission Market Committee says (page 6) : "There is much evidence to show that commission men and dealers in farm products de- lay settlements with shippers, report shipments in bad condition without proof of same, that goods are damaged in transit, fail to follow instructions of shippers as to disposition of goods, etc. Legis- lation to remedy these alleged malpractices is de- sirable/' In an address at a meeting of the State MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE 49 Agricultural Society, Albany, January 13, 1913, Seth Low said: "The wholesale market is open to the farmer only upon terms which place him wholly at the mercy of commission men. I am far from wishing to imply that there are no honest commis- sion merchants; but every farmer in the State knows that there are some dishonest commission merchants ; and we all know that, as things are now, we are, practically, absolutely in the hands of the man to whom we consign." Both Mr. White and Mr. Low were making a plea for co-operative sell- ing by producers, who have a touching interest in studying the clogs in the channel between them and the city consumers. The latter might well join the producers in asking: "Why pay the suc- cessive percentages of profits to the several cate- gories, or rings, of handlers and detainers of food- stuffs, each of whom, down to the retailer, may be in part business man, in part speculator?" H. B. Fullerton, Director of Agricultural De- velopment, Long Island Railroad Company, writes me, January 27, 1912 : "In Greater New York the supposed markets are simply assembly places for a crowd of commission men." Ezra A. Tuttle, writing of the New York markets in a farmers' paper, says "they have to do with commission men, 50 MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE jobbers and middlemen generally." The farmers are asking in their newspaper organs such pertinent questions as these: What is the true office of the cold storage warehouse? Why the army of com- mission men, wholesalers, jobbers, members of ex- changes, etc.? What influence, for example, is brought to play on prices by the 131 provision men and the 374 receivers and shippers among the 3,000 members of the New York Produce Ex- change? How far does their "regulating the supply" go toward suppressing the supply? The "Long Island Agronomist" gives as its opinion: "City food prices of the present day are governed not one whit by supply and demand, but entirely by the barriers existing in cities between producer and consumer." Sir Horace Plunkett, writing in the "Outlook," puts the general case in moderate words: "Where . . .the town dominates the country, the machinery of distribution is owned by the business men of the towns and is worked by them in their own interests." Jointly, the commission men, wholesalers, job- bers, and exchange members have direct command of the trunk channels through which New York obtains from the producers its perishable food sup- ply. They can discourage farmers' shipments in MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE 51 the full fruit and vegetable seasons. They can for long periods hold back in cold storage the arrivals of eggs, butter, cheese, dressed poultry and certain fruits. Among them they can render price quota- tions unreliable. Jointly, as we have seen, retail- ers, in a different class from the handlers in bulk, have no interest in buying more stock than to meet the ascertained wants of their respective little squads of customers. They are masters of the sub- sidiary channels of supply. Each retailer knows how much his weekly cash receipts must be to let him live, and he buys as sparingly as he can and through a common understanding with other retailers makes his selling prices accordingly. As the "Fruitman's Guide" says of grapefruit when sold by the restaurant men: "They start them at the top notch at the beginning of the season, and they keep them at the top notch all through." The State Commission's Market Committee says (page 68) : "It seems the retail tradesmen take the atti- tude that the public have to eat about so much, and they are not disposed to lower prices when the mar- ket is glutted, even though they buy at a reduction." A leading commission man down-town exclaimed while I was interviewing him : "The retailers up where I live must have some sort of an understand- 52 MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE ing when they all ask twenty cents for strawber- ries that I sell them for six." "Monopoly in rates," sums up Frederick Charles Hicks, University of Cincinnati, in his work, "Competitive and Monop- oly Price," arises from "the existence of substantial unity of action on the part of the persons engaged in the business." New York's channels of food flow are dammed up through the interests of an inefficient local mode of distribution to the serious detriment of the masses. The consumer, paying 45 to 60 per cent of his earnings for food for his family, and being officially informed that respectively 10 per cent and 33 per cent advances in price of country produce are made here in New York by wholesaler and re- tailer, must logically take his first steps in econom- ical buying through cutting those profits by any legitimate means possible. Such means are at the command of the masses, without cost to them or to the authorities more than the exertion of enforc- ing common civic rights. IV. A PUBLIC OUTLET CLOSED BY THE AUTHORITIES. THE civic function voluntarily performed by the "pushcart men," as the genus is called in New York, is a noteworthy development of recent years in many cities of Europe and America. By the wealthier classes disregarded, save as road obstacles to pleasure vehicles, and by the police often treated as highway nuisances, these humblest representa- tives of trade, unless suppressed, testify by their continued presence and increasing numbers to the fact that they meet a constant and quite general public want. Speaking of Grand Rapids, the "Michigan Tradesman" says: "A few years ago grocers had practically all the fruit and vegetable business, but the hucksters have multiplied prodig- iously, and today they have the bulk of this busi- ness, especially during the summer months." Of Berlin it is said ("Municipal Markets in Europe," page 41): "The competition of the peddlers be- came so strong that a police ordinance of March 18, 1898, forbade the peddling of market wares in those 53 54 MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE streets surrounding the market halls. " Taking these typical examples, far and near, we have evi- dence that handcart vendors are enterprising and that, for both dealer and consumer, their trucking must pay. The methods of all trade have in the last few decades been revolutionized. Regarding the trans- port of food and its conservation for the final mar- ket, our attention is usually called to the striking changes effected by the improved facilities of the railroads, by refrigeration in cars and warehouses, by the growth of the "packing houses." But that the methods of retailing food the final stage of its organized distribution are changing as speed- ily as circumstances in various communities permit has received much less notice. The aid of the pushcart man to the thrifty householder, for one thing, has had little serious study. Yet the push- cart man is here, a modern institution, in his num- bers and his variety of stock if not in his occupa- tion. He has been encouraged to multiply by the substitution of smooth pavements for the old-time cobble- or stone-block, by the exorbitant charges of storekeepers, by the adaptability of his wares to the needs of small buyers, and by the possibilities of his successful competition through low expenses. MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE 55 "Increase to cost by the use of the pushcart sys- tem," says the New York State Commission Mar- ket Committee's Report (page 14), "is lower than for any other type of food-distributing agency." "Costermonger" in London, "gemiise handler" in Berlin, "venditore delle vie" in Milan, "marchand des quatre saisons" in Paris, the pushcart man is at hand in the streets of every city wherever a far- thing is to be gained unless he is suppressed by the police. In New York, the familiar newspaper cartoon depicting a miserably poor and dejected foreigner "moved on" by a policeman flourishing his club well describes the status both of the vendor and of the law which vexes him. It is a law of personal discretion, now exercised by the man with the club and again by the city magistrate, but chiefly by "the man highest up." The police patrolman, the police precinct captain, the police justice are all co- sufferers with the vendors from this uncertainty. The city ordinances embody the phraseology of pushcart regulations, dead law mostly. By these, first, street vendors must be licensed. A very large percentage of New York's pushcart men are usual- ly without licenses "fully a half," one high po- lice official told me a year ago; "fully three- 56 MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE fourths," others have testified, and Francis H. Oli- ver, former Chief of the Bureau of Licenses, said last year that, while the city charter limits the number of licenses to 4,000 there were then at least 10,000 peddlers working without a license. And by the same code no vendor may remain in one spot more than thirty minutes, while, as a fact, hundreds hold their accustomed places every day all day long. Further, the sanitary code requires certain foods to be glass-covered, stipulates fines for throwing fruitskins and the like on the sidewalks, and wholly forbids the erection of street stands. The code has been commonly ignored, because un- suited to the time, contrary to the popular will, and repugnant to the common sense of the author- ities. The police in patroling are harried by the anarchy of the situation quite as much as the ped- dlers. "Why strike me?" cried a peddler to a po- lice captain who poked him in the ribs while order- ing him to move on. "I've told him a dozen times to keep away from this corner," replied the cap- tain to a citizen making the same inquiry, but dis- daining to notice the victim of the club, "yet he is able somehow to come back in spite of the law." Even the consumers who wish to patronize these vendors in most parts of the city are made to feel MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE 57 like misdemeanants, while in a few districts local public opinion has so fully prevailed that the ven- dors have established permanent markets right in the streets. The extra-legal status quo in the war over the pushcart problem which was maintained until late in the summer of 1912 had apparently been reached partly through the influence exerted by the fellow "colonists" of different groups of vendors on the Board of Aldermen, partly through the toleration of the higher police officials while awaiting a solu- tion by means of laws to come that should be prac- tically operative, and not infrequently through an understanding between the peddlers or their "pa- droni" and the landlords or shopkeepers who, for a consideration, made no complaint if the right pushcarts stood all day in front of their premises. Two official municipal investigations of the gen- eral pushcart question were made in New York in recent years, previous to those of the last year. The first, in 1903, was under the direction of James B. Reynolds, Secretary to Mayor Low, deal- ing with the work of the Bureau of Licenses. The second was under Mayor McClellan, made by a Commission of which Lawrence Veiller was Chair- man, its report being printed in September, 1906. 58 MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE Secretary Reynolds' report had this paragraph : "Formerly, knowing that they were violating all the ordinances, the peddlers felt a sense of insecur- ity and found themselves absolutely in the power of any rough policeman who might take offense or entertain a grudge against a particular vendor. It was also the fertile source of a well-organized sys- tem of blackmail carried on by certain police offi- cers, with the probable co-operation and connivance of some representatives of the peddlers. Further- more, there arose a system of collection of rentals by the shopkeepers in front of whose stores push- carts were placed. If the rental was not paid, the shopkeeper would immediately complain to the po- lice that the peddler was a nuisance, an objection not repeated when the next peddler took his stand in front of the store and paid the unlawful rental." Quoting the foregoing paragraph, Mayor Mc- Clellan's Commission said: "The Commission has no information with re- gard to either of these charges. It has been a mat- ter of public knowledge for some time that among unscrupulous members of the police force there has been carried on a system of petty blackmail of these peddlers, the peddlers having been 'shaken down' at stated intervals by the policemen on the post. In a similar way the system of compelling the peddlers to pay tribute to the storekeeper in front of whose place of business the individual ped- dler might stand has been a matter of common knowledge for some years past. The Commission MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE 59 has not thought it worth while to attempt to obtain evidence with regard to either of these charges. The peddlers themselves have been unanimous in admitting their truth." In these two excerpts there is, if nothing more, conclusive evidence of the chaotic conditions which the two investigations brought to light and which in some phases prevail now. Every year thousands of arrests of street vendors have been made for peddling unlicensed, "standing at the curb," sani- tary violations, invading restricted streets, etc. The alleged causes of most of these arrests form an in- dictment of the city's government. Why, for ex- ample, should it be possible for a vendor to go out on the streets without a license despite the law, and why should he not stand at the curb when in no one's way? "It is to be feared," said the McClellan Commission, "that in many cases the policemen ar- rested the man and determined upon the charge afterward." Speaking of the situation in 1912, Mr. Oliver says that only a small percentage of the 10,000 unlicensed peddlers were arrested, but those that were "appeased the outraged law by paying a fine, and then they got back to work." The McClellan Commission's findings (1906) 60 MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE also included these points : A system of barter and sale in city peddling licenses, existing to a large ex- tent. The licenses were controlled by rich "pa- droni" who employed poor men to peddle for them. With the system of petty blackmail by the police was a "selling of indulgences." The existing ordi- nances were generally violated. In July, 1912, Morris D. Waldman, General Manager United He- brew Societies, told the newspapers that the issuing of peddlers' licenses had become part of the per- quisites of professional politicians. The system still continued. of granting many licenses to one man, who employed peddlers to hawk his wares. Could any duty of municipal administration be more disgracefully conducted? Regarded as a line of business, the wonder is that street peddling could live through its discouragements. Yet the McClellan Commission reported: "There is no danger to the community from the food supplies sold on pushcarts; the quality of the food is gen- erally as good as, and often better than, that sold in neighboring stores." In Manhattan, this Com- mission's investigators found pushcart food "good" in 71 per cent of 1,952 cases, "fair" in 23 per cent, "bad" in i per cent, and "injurious to health" in less than one-half of i per cent. The Commission's MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE 61 census of pushcart peddlers resulted in finding "be- tween 4,000 and 5,000 plying their trade in the streets of New York." Their earnings averaged "from $12 to $15 a week." The percentage sell- ing food in New York and Brooklyn was iden- tical 69. Several representatives of the pushcart men made extraordinary claims as to the cheapness of the produce sold from the carts. "A great many poor people of the East Side buy all their things from the pushcarts," said one witness, "because it is much cheaper." If deprived of this source of sup- ply, "it would raise their cost of living from two to three dollars a week." In the course of my own inquiries on the lower East Side I learned that peddlers have their regular customers and that in entire neighborhoods they supply the larger propor- tion of the foodstuffs consumed. Many of the ped- dlers, a clothing-trade union organizer said, are worn-out factory hands, who sell to their old shop- mates. In the belief of the McClellan Commis- sion : "Not only would the peddlers and their fam- ilies have been seriously affected by any radical change, but the great mass of the tenement-house population itself had been accustomed to the prices that prevail on the pushcarts, and any change in 62 MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE reducing the number of these peddlers would have brought serious consequences to the great mass of the poorer people of this city." The agitation of the question last year brought out a general East Side sentiment against any attempt to suppress the pushcart traffic. Custom, disobeying the ordinances, has given rise in a number of localities in the city to local open-air markets, especially on the evenings of the pay-days of the wage-workers or on the religious rest-days of the neighboring population. Pushcart floaters then become standkeepers. Of this descrip- tion are "Paddy's Market," extending along Ninth avenue for a number of blocks south of Forty-sec- ond street, liveliest on Saturday evenings; the mar- ket at the foot of Catharine street, on Sunday morning, which has existed for years, and other street markets, which are quite permanent. In the East Side streets certain days bring their special- ties in food products. Saturday night long wit- nessed a tacit leave granted by the police to the vendors accustomed to assemble at a number of other points up town and down where customers expected to find them. Now, if the New York street vendor, while treated as an outlaw, has thus succeeded in giving MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE 63 a large body of consumers good and cheap food, what might he not do for a much greater mass of people were he recognized as a legitimate agent in fulfilling a public need? If market places have sprung up haphazard in the city, with only local police tolerance as a protection, what benefits might not they bring were the city officially to recognize their function and systematize their regulation? In the spring of 1912 I put these questions to the heads of several city departments and to leading com- mission men and other prominent dealers in food supplies. The commission men doing business with the country forwarders of products by boat and rail had no complaint against the pushcart vendors as buyers except that they took time in paying cash in the busy hours of daybreak during the whole- sale transactions. Ordinarily trade is then on check or credit more than 90 per cent of it. Collections take place later through agents of the commission men's associations. But the pushcart men, having no commercial standing, usually pay on the spot. Some, however, buy in bulk quantities co-opera- tively, both of the commission men and at the wholesale fruit auctions. Commission officials thought that were the street peddlers better capable 64 MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE of looking after their own interests it would be a benefit to the community. Many of them are handi- capped by their extreme poverty, their inability to speak English, their ignorance of the city outside their own national "colonies," their slavish fear of the police, their dependence on their backers or em- ployers, their uncleanliness, and their lack of ability to push sales among the American public. The heads of the city departments without ex- ception favored a regulated pushcart system, not so much in the streets as in special markets. Police Commissioner Waldo's methods would include li- censing peddlers, furnishing them with identifica- tion certificates, and reducing their numbers, espe- cially in certain neighborhoods. He was an advo- cate of outdoor markets, letting the standkeepers spread their own weather awnings. In some in- stances, he thought, steel buildings, three stories high, might be built, having spaces for handcart men, as well as stallkeepers. Park Commissioner Stover, a jealous guardian of public space for park purposes, could see that parts of downtown paved parks and the open spaces bordering on them or the city squares could be used for temporary mar- kets. He was familiar with similar methods abroad, carried on even in the principal streets of MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE 65 important cities, the hours of marketing ending at noon or earlier, the spaces, cleaned up, at once pass- ing to other public uses. Health Commissioner Lederle said that the share of the work of his de- partment in administering markets, that of inspec- tion, would be a matter of the city having enough health agents. He believed the character of the pushcart men would be improved with just regula- tion. All the authorities I interviewed looked for- ward to changes in the system, and in general were sympathetic in considering proposals for a better control of the vendors, though one or two wanted them driven from the streets. Several police offi- cials frankly expressed their wish that the ordi- nances might be so amended as to win the uniform support of police and magistrates. Patrolmen, from their observations, had no doubt of the value of street vendors in reducing prices. One officer recalled that when, years ago, the cart men were driven from the Brooklyn Bridge terminus in Park Row the neighboring standkeepers doubled their prices. Another said that where the vendors them- selves arranged their order in the streets they gave little trouble to the police. Another spoke of the Broad street lunch-cart men, to whom the local police gave a square deal by assigning them their 66 MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE order, keeping them in line accordingly, and every day sending the one from the head of the line to the other end. After many interviews with New York policemen, I was inclined to believe that the independent judgment of aknost any patrolman was equal to regulating the possible pushcart traffic on his post, bringing it up to the requirements of law- ful order, fair play, sanitary rules, and the least interference with other street vehicles. To the com- munity the task of regulating the policeman's in- tegrity. On the whole, however, the official atti- tude toward the pushcart question was not dictated by any settled principle relating to the rights of the consumer. But the force of authority has wholly changed the pushcart situation since the spring of 1912. It is interesting to note the events terminating in the new situation. On July 9, 1912, the Board of Aldermen appointed a committee made up of seven of its members to investigate the subject of push- carts and public markets. On December 18, 1912, the Mayor appointed a Special Commission of five citizens "to examine into the matter of pushcarts in the city, and of their accommodation under shel- ter, in place of being exposed to the weather in the streets, and being an obstruction in the streets." MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE 67 On March 26, 1913, the Mayor's Commission re- ported to him, and on April 18 the Mayor trans- mitted the report to the Aldermen. On April 22 the Aldermanic Committee handed in its report. The two reports challenge attention by their simi- larities in statement, arrangement, findings and phraseology. The Mayor mentioned that "these two reports are very much in harmony." Both recommended that the pushcart peddlers be taken off the streets and put in shelters under the East River bridge and in the small parks, the Aldermanic Committee in a supplementary report agreeing to the recommendations of the Mayor's Commission regarding several places not named in their own first report. The "shelters," already termed "mar- kets" in the reports, are to be, with one exception, down town on the East Side. The Mayor in his letter calculated that the pushcarts in the three po- lice precincts in which the worst congestion exists could be housed at an expense of about $150,000. The Mayor's Commission submitted a design for a "sheltered space," to serve as a type for "any part of the city where pushcart peddling prevails" ; esti- mated cost of each shelter, $37,040. The net "profit" from the operation of 300 "stalls" in the 68 MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE two shelters and 2,000 spaces under the bridges was to be $40,500 a year! In calculating the receipts the Commission em- ployed this significant language : "Peddlers pay at the rate of $30 per annum for the hire of push- carts, and if shelter stalls were rented at the same rate the results would be" the estimate as given, $40,500. That is, the pushcart peddlers are to be- come stallholders in permanent markets, not using pushcarts to haul their stock, and not delivering sales to the houses of customers. The Aldermanic Committee says it sought to place "the pushcart peddler in a market where he would have a per- manent stand." The Board of Aldermen passed an ordinance in conformity with its Committee's report. This action is but "flying in the face of experience." It is but reproducing the commercial conditions of the old-time sellers in the housed mar- kets of New York's dead district system. Will purchasers walk blocks to buy at housed market stalls? What are the circumstances essen- tial to the success of the pushcart business? What will the masses lose through the extinction of the ambulant pushcart man? These and cognate ques- tions have for their reply the facts of procedure and consequence in the subsequent chapters on the MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE 69 pushcart in Berlin, Paris, and London. But the reply may at this point be also suggested in asking : What would be the effect on the circulation of the New York newspapers if the news vendors am- bulant and stationary were driven from the side- walks and "concentrated" about the publication offices? Plainly, what customers cannot readily reach they often do not buy, and the prices of the uncontrolled hotel stands and railway stations would tend to spread to newsdealers' shops. It is well for a fair discussion of the subject that both the Mayor's Commission and the Aldermanic Committee speak in their reports of the quality of the stock sold by the pushcart peddlers. The Com- mission says : "It has been found that the food- stuffs sold by the peddlers is nearly uniformly wholesome. These and other commodities are sold at a considerably less cost than obtained in stores." The Committee reports : "The quality of food and merchandise sold from these pushcarts is in the main of as good a quality (sic) as can be bought anywhere else in the city, and much cheaper." True? Then, in the name of humanity, why not let the peddlers push their carts wherever they can find customers, so long as they do not seriously inter- fere with more important forms of street traffic? 70 MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE In making out their case against the pushcart men in the streets, the Mayor's Commission recites : "Pushcarts have multiplied to serious proportions in numbers. In certain localities they occupy so much space on the streets that they form congestion on the highway (sic) and are a menace to the safety of citizens." True again. Last fall they were driven by the police from many streets up town and down town, especially the West Side, and concentrated mainly in the Jewish and Italian districts of the lower East Side. Official force was employed de- liberately in each step that tended to convert the ambulant pushcart peddler into a stalled market dealer. The authority wielding the supreme power in the matter has during the last year developed a policy destructive of the pushcart's social benefits and of the principle of equal rights in the highways. However, the lameness and inconsistency of the policy became apparent in June, when the Aldermen voted to oppose the necessary appropriation for the "shelter" markets. The pushcart people are in "con- centrado" camps, cut off equally from free streets and legal market-places.* * Later, last week in August: Pushcarts are reappearing in districts recently closed to them ; significant of the election coming in November. MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE 71 The main principle overlooked in New York in official attempts to solve the pushcart problem is the rights of the consumers. It may be confidently as- serted that every set of regulations or of proposi- tions which ignore the rights of consumers, as well as a pressing need of the masses, will in time be cir- cumvented by the peddlers, violated by purchasers, and to a greater or lesser extent be unen forced by the lesser authorities. General convenience and the "higher law" of statute-killing public opinion which effects much good in code-ridden New York customarily prevail. What are the chief needs of the peddlers' patrons in buying, and what are the basic principles of the law relating to consumers with respect to street selling? The representative of the Italian Pushcart Ped- dlers' Association told the McClellan Commission: "The patrons of the peddlers buy from them be- cause their merchandise is handy, everywhere." He might have added, "to the extent permitted by the police." The tenement-house mother who can but for a short time leave her family of small children alone at home, the down-town messenger boy or the typewriter girl, the garment-worker factory hand in the Broadway or Fifth avenue district, all have 72 MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE a right to be served by "handy" street-peddlers, when buying either household supplies or the mid- day lunch. This right is founded on equality in the use of the highways. In that use all citizens are com- munists and cannot be otherwise. Inhibition of use of the highways, or of having them used, in sup- plying each citizen's needs, can justly arise only in cases of nuisance, or of protecting the health of the community, or of similar regard for the general as imperatively above the individual welfare. In the crude attempts at adjusting the rights of the various parties in interest in the use of New York's streets for peddling, the last class to be con- sidered by investigators or lawmakers have been the consumers. They outnumber the peddlers, the shopkeepers, the drivers of vehicles, each class, hun- dreds to one, yet they are expected to submit with- out murmur to a code adapted to "traffic," or in- fluenced by "commerce," or dictated by a city de- partment seeking a "record." But, as we have seen, in spite of official orders, and of the theoret- ical assumption that street peddling is merely a matter of traffic regulation, or of protection to re- tail shopkeepers, wherever consumers insist in num- MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE 73 bers on buying from peddlers they find a way to buy. And is this not just ? The superior rights of traf- fic. What traffic? That of the automobile rider, flying through the streets without speed limit, re- garding anything in his way as an irritating impedi- ment? That of the retailer, whose horse and wagon is hurrying a few pounds or pecks of provisions to half-a-dozen customers? The letters to the daily press condemning the pushcart men, written in the tone of owners of the streets, are usually from the pleasure world or the delivery wagon interest. "Every movement against the peddlers," a whole- sale dealer in provisions said to me, "has originated among the retailers." The cry of "interruption to traffic" is often but the hollow excuse of retail produce dealers to rid themselves of the effective competition of the peddlers. To the consumer, highway rights only are the real question. The claims of retail grocers that, since they pay taxes or certain petty licenses to the city, they should be protected by it from peddlers' "unfair" competition is begging the question. They have bought no monopoly, in store or street, for their line of commerce. They have no ownership in the public's patronage. They have no special 74 MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE rights in the highways. They cannot be granted exemption from the social maxim, "a fair field and no favor." They are not guaranteed by the mu- nicipality a protection against newly developed methods of selling commodities. The pushcart, the modern smooth city paving, the peddler's muscular and mercantile powers, taken together, form a mechanism which is operated to the advantage of the consumer. This joint mechan- ism is encouraged by buyers wherever it is permit- ted to be employed. The pushcart "enterprise" is one of today's world phenomena. It is deprived of fair play and its due rewards whenever subjected to suppressive measures. That New York State law should be invoked in its defense which forbids any city, by ordinances, hindering the direct con- nection of producers and consumers. A remarkable charge was registered against push- cart peddlers by the McClellan Commission that of "lowering the standard of living by decreasing the cost of supplies!" The down-town stenogra- pher who wrote to a daily newspaper that she could get from the pushcart for five cents fruit that at the nearby fruit-store cost fifteen, the Fifth avenue operative tailor who gets a sandwich at luncheon hour from a peddler instead of being obliged to MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE 75 look for it with a drink in a saloon, the workers all over the city who on their way home pick up little bargains from the carts for their meals these are guilty of "lowering the standard of living!" This is an absurd contravention of the undeniable maxim of progress which requires that a minimum of effort should produce a maximum of results. In such topsy-turvy economics we read the origin of something of the prejudice against the pushcarts, something of the incapacity of officials to see how much the problem is one affecting consumers first and foremost, something of the perverted ingenuity that has done its best to do away the good for this community that lies, undeveloped, in the pushcart traffic. If intelligently regulated and treated as a consumer's legitimate agency, this traffic, it stands to reason, would help our New York million by a good percentage in lowering the cost of their food. This conclusion is fortified by abundant evidence, past contradiction, presented in subsequent chapters. V. A RIGHTFUL USE OF COMMON PROP- ERTYBLOCKED BY STATUTE. THE entire function possible to the pushcart man can not be fulfilled until his ambulant street vend- ing is supplemented by selling on stated days in an open-air market-place. Consider some of the rea- sons for official location of such markets in New York, with their advantages to consumers as well as vendors. The open-air market-place is a feature of numer- ous cities, large and small, in certain parts of the United States and in nearly all European countries. Many cities which have covered markets permit the streets or squares about them to be occupied on cer- tain days of the week by farmers' wagons, push- carts, or even temporary stands run by local dealers. In various American communities which have no market-houses there are open-air markets. The Massachusetts Report ("Cost of Living," page 566) says: "In the Middle West and Northwest, many towns have market squares, but these squares sel- dom contain market-houses. Such market-houses 76 MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE 77 as are found in several of the cities of Ohio are generally open sheds in the middle of public streets." In Europe, the long-established picturesque mar- ket-places are ever a source of interest to American tourists. In Rome, Friday at the Campo de' Fiori presents bargains in antique objects of art, jewelry, knick-knacks in metals, and even alleged second- hand ecclesiastical vestments. In Pau, one day brings fruits and general produce from beyond the Pyrenees in Spain, another live animals horses, cattle, pigs, birds, dogs and cats. In Leicester, Eng- land, twice a week the asphalt-covered square in front of the time-worn municipal building is en- tirely taken up with stands on which are exposed every article of household or personal use for which sale is possible. In Antwerp, besides two markets in buildings constructed for the purpose, nineteen are held in open squares and similar locations; five open every day, six every day except Sunday. In Zurich, an open-air market is permitted twice a week, fronting jewelry and dry-goods and other stores, in the principal business street of the city, every stand being cleared away at noon, and half an hour afterward the street, with no trace of the market left, is restored to general traffic and the promenade of fashion. In Montreux, the street- 78 MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE cars have freight trailers, to carry passengers' bas- kets from the big open market-place. In Bordeaux, many open-air markets occupy the same public areas they did a century ago, the vendors at the close of market hours removing to one side their portable counters, awnings, and other paraphernalia the market-places thus becoming parks. In Ham- burg, two large squares with adjacent streets are regularly used as markets daily during certain hours. Types, these, of the people's open-air markets. I have visited them in all the cities mentioned. In the crowds are many buyers from the poorest classes, their outlay, in the aggregate consider- able to the dealers, usually counted out in carefully handled small coin. Though the talk among re- tailers having well-to-do customers runs that "pur- chases nowadays are mostly over the telephone," or that "marketing is commonly done by servants," the observer, in this country or abroad, may any- where take note of the large proportion of people having apparently ample means who, practicing the domestic economies of their parents, walk along the stands, or the lines of "basket women," in the open market, comparing prices, buying sparingly and carrying their purchases home. MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE 79 In Boston (Massachusetts Report) : "the out- door market-stands in North and Blackstone streets are resorted to by thousands of persons who buy but small quantities and then carry away in their hands what they buy." "The consumers who throng the Saturday retail markets buy, not from pro- ducers, but from middlemen, whether lessees of market stalls or pushcart peddlers, or commission houses, or agents of the Western packers turned retailers for the nonce." From the same official source come these points : "In 1868 the first mar- ket hall was opened in Berlin by a private company ; but the venture was short-lived, because it could not compete with the open-air weekly markets in its vicinity." "In New York, Philadelphia, and Balti- more, standing places in the spaces around the mar- ket-houses are allotted to farmers and gardeners, who are required to pay a small daily fee for oc- cupying them." Lawrence Veiller's Commission wrote in its report to Mayor McClellan: "From time immemorial in all countries there has been pro- vision for open-air markets of one kind or another for the sale of food, especially fruit, for the poorer people, and it was undoubtedly in accordance with this custom that licenses to peddle in New York's streets were originally granted." 8o MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE Why the open-air market is not so common throughout the United States as the public square, or even as the public thoroughfare, need not long puzzle students of this phase of economics. Im- mediate and definite private interests have stood in the way of a distantly attainable public good. In both small and large communities the local retailers want all the provision and grocery trade, and uni- tedly discourage the opening of public markets. In the larger communities, it is true, the market prob- lem is complicated by the location, first cost, and expenses in the administration of market-houses, as distinguished from mere market-places. But the general fact is that any field of trade or finance which may yield a living, or perhaps a fortune, will surely be occupied by as many business men as can foresee in it any possible profit to themselves. Com- bined, they will find reasons for keeping out public management or control of the field they occupy, and this situation they maintain as long as the body of the people are indifferent to their own interests in this respect or see no method worth while by which they may substitute their lesser per capita common profit for the business men's large personal gains. These and other general truths pertinent to our MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE 81 subject are illustrated by the recently opened Des Moines free market, the reformed Indianapolis market, and several open-air squatters' markets in New York. Mayor James R. Hanna of Des Moines wrote me, January 24, 1912 : ."The Council opened a lot adjoining the City Hall to gardeners, farmers, etc., and also a neigh- boring street for several blocks. On the opening day there were about two dozen wagons, with a number of different products. This number in- creased very rapidly until it reached three hundred wagons, with a large variety of vegetables and prod- uce. Prices immediately 'hit the toboggan,' as the press pleased to put it, and the result was that the grocers had to make corresponding reductions in order to compete at all. Prices were reduced from 20 to 50 per cent, and even more in a few instances. . The open market-place was the only mar- ket we had during the summer." The ordinance (July 21, 1911) which established this market designated certain streets to be used in connection with it, and made it lawful for others to be similarly occupied when necessary. No charge was made vendors for their space mark this sig- nificant, fact though power was given the City Council to establish rentals. One section of the market-place was allotted to producers and another to "peddlers, hucksters, and others." The markets 82 MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE were open from early morning to 10 130 ( 10 in sum- mer) Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays. The shameful history of Tomlinson market in Indianapolis included produce ring transactions which practically closed its stalls to farmers and small retailers until Mayor Shank brought to bear upon it the methods of an "open" as well as "open- air" market. He says (Washington "Post," Feb- ruary n, 1912) : "The commission merchants were holding the prices up by representing to the pro- ducer that the Indianapolis market was glutted and at the same time representing to the consumer that there was a great scarcity." The stalls of Tomlin- son market had been subject to barter and sale by stand-keepers in the manner of dealers in real es- tate. Farmers were hindered from huckstering in the city streets. Mayor Shank writes: "Any or- dinance or rule which makes it hard for the garden- er to peddle his products from house to house throughout the city should be changed, and he should be given all the encouragement possible." In New York, "Catherine Market" became offi- cially a thing of the past when ten years ago its old buildings were torn down, after the market it- self was stricken from the diminishing list of pub- lic market-houses. But, as a matter of fact, the MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE 83 people continuing to buy and sell on its site and in the vicinity have kept its name alive. A faithful history of Catherine Market would illustrate the course of the whole market problem for New York as well as the city's changes in population. Estab- lished in 1786, it was for a century one of the prin- cipal local retail markets. In 1860 it contained fifty- eight booths under cover, besides the space occu- pied by open-air vendors. The change in the neigh- borhood is shown in the contrast between the swarms of the poor-looking buyers and sellers who congregate there at present on Sunday mornings and the people thus described in a periodical, "The American" (April 6, 1825), under the caption, "Proof of the Comfortable Situation of the Work- ing Classes in our City" : "I took a station at Catherine Market, which is the great emporium for the mechanics and laborers on Saturday evening, to offer a joint and trimmings to any one who appeared to be in want. At the end of two hours, I observed but one individual whose external appearance warranted my offering the boon. He answered (in reply to my application) that he received ten shillings per day wages, and that he had in his pocket $5 of the week's earnings to buy his Sunday dinner. I counted upward of 870 men and women who passed me to buy at the market in the two hours." 84 MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE On Sunday morning, March 17, 1912, a philan- thropist's embarrassment, on the contrary, might have arisen from uncertainty as to how few of the men, women or children in attendance at the mar- ket as I then saw them would not without ques- tion have accepted a proffered "joint and trim- mings." Foreign born, with a sprinkling of re- spectable looking negroes, the majority were evi- dently of the hard-working and ill-paid poor. Counting wagon-men and pushcart and basket men and women, keepers of the shops open about the market and assistants, there may have been present in all five hundred vendors. The market area took up the old Catherine market slip and site, with a block in South, another in Market, and part of a block in Water street. The crowd present at 8 o'clock I estimated at about 2,500. As purchasers were coming and going continually, the total num- ber during the morning was possibly 10,000 per- sons. Here are certain points regarding Catherine mar- ket-place, with reasons for establishing similar mar- kets throughout the city: (i) It is open the year 'round. Bad weather is no insuperable obstacle to open-air buying and selling among the working people of New York. (2) The positions in the MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE 85 market are under the rule, "First come first served.'* Two policemen present on duty told me : "We don't interfere on that point, or in fact hardly at all. We let them fight it out among themselves, and they finally agree somehow." Considerable room for self-government can be left to vendors. (3) The market is open at a time when there is no general traffic in the streets it occupies. There are many spaces in New York below Sixty-second street, convenient to our million, which might be put to a similar use at proper times. (4) The per- sistent existence of this market proves its value to consumers. In every crowded quarter of the city, a similar one might, on a fair trial, prove of equal value to numerous economical buyers. ( 5 ) In open- air buying, the slim pocket-book makes no apology. All, buyers and sellers, meet on a level in a com- mercial democracy. The fine shop, with the over- dressed sales-person, is unattractive to proud inde- pendence in plain clothes. The European peasantry and town laborers alike are accustomed to the chaf- fering, the picking and choosing, the features of a fair, in the market-place. (6) The attendance at the Catherine Market includes persons well clothed and otherwise apparently not among the needy. People in comfortable circumstances are often not 86 MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE above small savings. With a spread of the open- air system their numbers could increase. (7) The wares and provisions on sale at the Catherine Mar- ket include, at one part, fresh fish of various kinds (eels and lobsters alive) with oysters and clams; at another part, clothing (new and second hand), hats, caps, men's furnishing goods, women's dress goods and millinery; then oilcloths, kitchen ware, curtains and other household goods (some second- hand) ; vegetables, apples, oranges, bananas, etc., mostly in the Catherine slip; Italian groceries, gar- lic and sweets. (8) The bakeries and groceries and other shops of the vicinity stock heavily for the Sunday buying of a foreign patronage. The open- air market "creates a commercial atmosphere in the neighborhood." (9) Many of the vendors come a long distance. Of a certainty, as in the smaller cities, producers would find their way to any open market promising a profit. The areas of the vacant land in and about Great- er New York that might be occupied by market gardeners, had they direct access to consumers, is suggested by the numerous "truck" patches near foreign cities and by Pennsylvania farmers driving twenty miles to the town market. The Assistant Superintendent of the famous Newark open mar- MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE 87 ket says that farmers come to it forty miles, bring- ing a load of produce and carrying back to their locality various articles bought in the city. Just as in Catherine Market, the open-air Sun- day morning markets of Antwerp sell, among other articles, second hand clothes, old books, metal rem- nants and rags, flowers and furniture. So also the small-park markets of Amsterdam, every day. In Lyons, France, "bazaars" are held every morning of the week in one of the squares or on the quays, the merchants hand-cart men and women. Their stock, as described by Consul John C. Covert ("Mu- nicipal Markets") includes "ribbons, laces, straw hats, cheap clothing, all kinds of remnants, any- thing in short that can be easily transported and sold at a low figure." "These perambulating mar- kets are useful to the poorer classes," says the Con- sul. "Large numbers of women and servant girls make them the place for their small purchases ribbons, a bit of lace, a remnant of silk, artificial flowers, dishes, an odd cup and saucer, and small articles which they might have trouble to find in a store." Many similar illustrations might be given of the uncovered open-air markets of Europe and Amer- 88 MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE ica. They belong to the people's present age, as much as the ballot-box. "Paddy's Market" in New York, on both sides of Ninth avenue, between Thirty-eighth and Forty- second streets, is open every week in the year. The deductions from the fruit and vegetable selling at Catherine Market are applicable here, with the im- portant addition that, a better stock being on sale, many of the customers are well-paid wage workers, boarding-house keepers, and other persons comfort- ably situated. The lower East Side open-air mar- ket streets Orchard, Allen, Ridge, Mulberry tes- tify to the variety of nationalities that find street selling and buying a convenience and a profit. Dime- savers are in all grades of bank depositors. Both Mayor Shank and Mayor Hanna tell of bargain hunters coming to the new open markets in auto- mobiles. Mulberry, now a short-cut automobile street, sees many a sale, especially of clams, Italian fruits and other rarities, from pushcart dealers to up-town patrons. The social problem being worked out in the New York open-air markets presents one phase especially significant. That is, these markets are illegal. They are only "tolerated." They have left the city ordi- nances behind, antiquated, unsuited to buyers and MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE 89 sellers and inapplicable to the general conditions of metropolitan life today. One dead law, for exam- ple : "The city cannot grant permits to erect stands in the public streets" (Cosby's Code, page 15). But at these street markets and elsewhere the stands, perhaps on wheels, are numerous before one's eyes. The code, or legislative authority, has from time to time been successfully invoked to abolish open markets of the city those at Tenth avenue and Fifty-second street, at Varick and Carmine streets, and in upper Second avenue. "The business men didn't want the peddlers here," a workingman told me at the vacated Carmine market space. "Did you?" "Certainly; they sold cheap." A "Paddy's Market" standkeeper said : "We were driven away from Tenth avenue by the shopkeepers, but in two weeks they wanted us back, with the crowds we attract." In these cases a general benefit was ended through private interests. But in other neighbor- hoods, where public opinion has been strong enough, as we have seen, the desired local market-place has survived the prohibitory law. Whatever may be the letter of the New York City Charter or ordinances at this moment forbid- ding the use of public streets as markets, a funda- 90 MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE mental American principle, sound enough to prevail on an important occasion, was laid down by Josiah Quincy, Jr., in 1866, when the question was raised whether the area of the market-place adjoining Faneuil Hall in Boston should legally be extended. He wrote : "The terms of the act, so far as they relate to the taking and the indemnification of the owner, will be precisely the same with the terms used in former turnpike acts. Indeed, so far as it respects the power exercised, it will be in terms the same as if, instead of streets and a market, the proposition was to lay a turnpike from the east end of Faneuil Hall 1 80 feet wide." . . . "But is a public market, in fact, a thing of public use? A question of this kind is precisely the same as whether a pub- lic highway is a thing of public use?" "What is a public market but a place where all the citizens of the commonwealth may meet for the purpose of the sale and purchase of articles of produce and sub- sistence?" The Faneuil Hall market-place extension was ac- cordingly made, and it has ever since remained both market and street. In the light of this precedent, and the general facts just cited, our million consumers south of Six- ty-second street, whose interests and rights we are considering as illustrative, can with sound reason demand that certain streets and open spaces, and MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE 91 even the asphalted small parks, in their part of Manhattan, should, at certain hours of specified days, be used for market purposes. Free open-air markets would be the idea. No army of functionaries; that fact is established in the market-places which our New York people have established contrary to officialdom. The present street markets, each with ten times the retail ven- dors in any one of the market-houses, get along without officials. A few policemen and "white wings" are enough. And, as in Des Moines, no rentals whatever need be charged. Nobody thinks of having to pay a rental for walking or driving in the streets. Officials speak of possible rents put- ting proposed new market-houses on "a self-sup- porting basis," or "making a clear profit to the city," which was formerly the official notion of bridges, but bridge tolls have been generally abol- ished. Rental for open-air market positions, if anything more than nominal, would keep away small casual vendors and serve to establish a mo- nopoly by the big dealers, with probably forms of favoritism. When certain town libraries of Mas- sachusetts charged subscribers $3 a year, not one- quarter of the people patronized them. But when made free the public in general flocked to them. 92 MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE The rental theory for street space has no just standing. Anybody with anything legitimate to sell ought to be given opportunity to offer it on the common grounds, whenever not obstructing their more urgent general use. The home producer of preserves, of clothing, of embroideries, of toys, of anything that one's neighbor might wish to buy should not be interfered with when placing such things on sale publicly, under fair health and traf- . fie regulations, in a free market. Curiously, in New York our public library system will trust any man, woman, or youngster, coming from any quarter, with five dollars' worth of books, but our public market system refuses to trust poor people to sell a dime's worth of anything without the cost and other difficulties of a license except when a big crowd buys and sells in the streets despite the law. Auctioning brings prices to meet immediate de- mand. In Pennsylvania market-places, the auction- eer's cry is heard all during the market hours, as he sells household articles. If fruit and vegetables can be sold as they are at auction, wholesale, in large quantities on the New York docks, there can hardly exist a valid reason for not permitting sales by the same principle in people's open-air retail mar- kets. MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE 93 As the methods for saving through conserving and buying continue thus to develop, the possibili- ties of a total reduction of perhaps a quarter or a third in the cost of marketing for the family begin to come within sight. Also, opportunities for some of our million consumers to make an occasional dollar as vendors. The production in small quan- tities by many people is encouraged astonishingly when, with little or no burden imposed on their commerce, home producers can meet consumers publicly in buying and selling. In the Tuesday open-air market of Berne, with 80,000 inhabitants, are to be seen more than 2,000 peasant and town vendors, perhaps the majority "basket women" whose stock of eggs or similar small products is worth on the average perhaps two dollars. Pro- ducing for market, it is to be observed, leads to producing for one's self or family. No part of our scheme for free open-air markets is to cost the city one dollar for new plant or addi- tional official bureaus. Pending the slower process- es of obtaining permissive legislation, nothing more is suggested than to add to the areas of toleration already existing. VI. PUBLIC MARKETS IN THE UNITED STATES HURTFUL TO "BUSINESS." ONE of the stock subjects of talk among com- mercial travelers, suggested by their daily observa- tions, is the slow and irregular spread of civil in- stitutions. Massachusetts has a free public library in all of her thirty cities and in nearly every one of her 330 towns; but other of our States have not one to a county. In the libraries of advanced cities, even the children who take out books are given di- rect access to the shelves, to choose and carry away ; but many a rural visitor to the same places keeps his hand on his pocket-book as he walks the streets, convinced by stories of crime current in the country grocery that folks in town often steal. Certain States have in many counties excellent roads; but parts of the Union have poorer highways than would be tolerated under any government in west- ern Europe. New England, New York and the Northwest have the savings bank highly developed ; but in other parts of the country the savings bank in its exact sense is almost unknown, "savings" de- 94 MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE 95 scribing any sort of small banking. The building and loan association has flourished in only a few States, though its work is generally known. How far behind Germany is America with respect to working-class "compensation" ! Similarly, the pub- lic market, while from early days a familiar feature to communities far apart, has had but a feeble growth in our country as a whole. When "Why ?" follows a review of these uneven developments in civilization, interesting verdicts are pronounced by cynical travelers upon the indiffer- ence and lethargy of the masses wherever the com- mon good is concerned and upon the aptness of shrewd and self-seeking active spirits to "get the best of it" in every community. It is, if not a reproach, "a curious commentary" on New England, the land of steady and econom- ical habits that it has in only a few places taken to the public retail market. The traveler makes comparisons as he stands one week watching a busy market in the public square of a Pennsylvania town after having seen the week before the grocers of a Connecticut village charging their customers ring prices. Amusing to this class of observers were the discoveries made by the daily press, when "the higher cost of living" was a fresh topic, of the 96 MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE great things done through the municipal market ex- periments in Des Moines and Indianapolis things that in principle have been going on regularly in a goodly number of towns and cities elsewhere in the United States for a century or two. A schedule of inquiries sent by me in January, 1912, to many Secretaries of State brought illumi- nating replies from New England. To the query, "Is there a system of public markets in the towns and cities of your State?" the reply in four cases was "No," or "We know of none." Connecticut replied : "There are no systems of public markets in the towns and cities of this State, except those conducted by private enterprise." To the inquiry, "Has any general work been published on the sub- ject in your State ?" all replied "No," except Massa- chusetts, which said, "Have not seen or heard of any such." Yet only two short years had elapsed since the very competent Massachusetts "Commis- sion on the Cost of Living" had issued its valuable report of 752 pages, containing more pertinent mat- ter on American public markets than was to be found in all reports or other reference books on the subject theretofore issued. The significant point of testimony in this instance is the imperme- ableness of officialdom to other than perfunctory MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE 97 duties. A volume of equal importance on gas- works, or street-car operation, or any phase of bank- ing, would certainly be accessible to every private undertaking interested, and consequently known to every manager. It may here be added that, though the benefits of public markets for the smaller cities were dwelt upon in that Massachusetts report, at this writing only the first step has been taken in that State to put a new public market in operation, in accordance with the Commission's well-designed recommendations. The Secretaries of State for New Jersey, Vir- ginia and West Virginia replied to my inquiries that they knew of no system of public markets in the cities and towns of their respective commonwealths. Delaware mentioned the Wilmington market; New York and Maryland merely replied that the mar- kets were not under State control. None of the Secretaries knew of any report or other publication on the subject. "It may be noted," says the Massa- chusetts report, "that most of the public retail mar- kets of the country existing at the present time are found within the limits of the thirteen original States and in Ohio and Indiana." The scarcity of information as to markets to be obtained from State officials or bureau reports well 98 JV1ARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE illustrates that what is, or ought to be, everybody's information is nobody's, and that needed public in- stitutions are often unprovided. But the benefits of "farmers' markets/' especially of those in the towns and cities of the agricultural districts of Pennsyl- vania, are well worth the study of economists and the public. These markets have long been success- fully operated in many places now having from 10,- ooo to 100,000 inhabitants Carlisle, Harrisburg, Lebanon, Easton, Allentown, Lancaster, Williams- port, Reading. The market building accommodates principally butchers, bakers and dealers in butter, cheese, eggs, and poultry. In the open market square and in adjoining streets stand farmers' and hucksters' wagons, in which is exposed for sale produce mostly grown in the surrounding country. Thus producer and consumer are brought face to face. Effects of the market lie not only in keeping prices at a normal point but in encouraging produc- tion. Stiff combination among the vendors is dif- ficult because of their number and of the wide open door to new competitors. The townsfolk usually provide for a free competition, preventing, in their own interest, costly licenses or the adoption of mar- ket-house rules which might hinder country people attending as sellers. Assured of his opportunity for MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE 99 a sale, a working farmer or gardener, or even a woodchopper or day laborer, needing very little cash for his living, will in his odd hours raise poul- try or vegetables for market, or bring to it his extra pork products, dried corn, fruits or loads of fire- wood all of which storekeeping retailers, if they were the sole purveyors to the community, could refuse to buy and sell except on terms yielding the middleman's usual good percentage of profit. Though the cold-storage of the cities has deprived consumers of the very low summer prices formerly customary for eggs, butter, and poultry in these Pennsylvania markets, the local grocers are still governed in their prices for other provisions by the rates ruling on market days. Through the simple economic principles seen in these facts, the price to the buyer is brought down to the point at which the producer gets enough to encourage him to con- tinue producing, while nothing goes to unnecessary handlers of his product. It could hardly be expected by promoters of mar- kets that, except in a season of unusually high prices, farmers or other vendors would at once flock to a newly established market in a town not having had one previously. "Attending market," a sort of side occupation with many small producers, is a pursuit ioo MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE naturally of slow growth, followed, as a rule, only by hard-working men and women. The careful housewives of the town are mostly the buyers. The public market is thus "a people's" institution. Fash- ion, or imitation fashion, or near-snobbery, disdains the admission of saving dimes that is made by carrying a market-basket in the street. The New York State Commission's Market Committee (page 68) says of the Rochester market: "It is not pat- ronized, however, by the better class of people" a condescending form of statement coming from aristocratic public servants to a democratic con- stituency ! Neither is the public market a business man's in- stitution. On the contrary, it hurts "business." It cuts away fat profits from grocer, butcher, and baker. It brings no advertisements to the local newspaper. It is in cases an injury to real estate values, for were the trade of its stalls and street stands distributed in private grocery and other stores the owners thereof would be enriched by cap- italized rentals. Storekeepers may be heard com- plaining that the money carried away by market- ing farmers ought to be left with the business men of the town. "The commercial interests" of a com- MARKETS FOR THE )PFOPL u munity do not write reports lauding the local public market as a social benefit. Of the 158 cities in America having 30,000 in- habitants or more which reported to the Census Bureau in 1907, only 54 made returns on public markets. Not more than 25 had "receipts" muni- cipal revenues from markets to the amount of $10,000. Thus is seen the field throughout the United States yet open for the spread of this in- disputably beneficent popular institution. As to retail open-air markets in New York, there seems to be, from the facts we have reviewed, the possibility for a gradual growth of a serviceable up-to-date system. Certain suburbs of the Greater City offer favorable sites for initial experiments. The Staten Island "Advance" has suggested that a market at the ferry-house at St. George would have its advantages to the "commuters" passing through it daily ; they might give their orders to stallkeepers on going to their work in the morning and take away their purchases when homeward bound in the evening. Jersey suburbanites do so at the old Wash- ington retail market. The "Advance" mentioned facilities for an attendance at St. George of farm- ers from the island and pushcart men from Man- hattan. Its plan, as thus explained, was not over- MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE ambitious or costly. For indoor markets, could not both the New York Central and the Pennsylvania railroads find space in their great new Manhattan stations, near, perhaps underneath, their waiting rooms, for retail markets ? At the Reading Termi- nal Market in Philadelphia, which has 842 stalls, Saturdays bring an attendance of as high as 60,000 persons. New York's railroads may yet take an important part in the city's transforming marketing methods. A number of the outlying districts of Greater New York Bath Beach, Bay Ridge, Brownsville, Flat- bush, Flushing, points in The Bronx present some- what the same opportunities for local public retail markets as do the lesser American cities. In or near several of these districts are areas of uncultivated lands on which intensive crops might be raised for the local market, once sales were assured. A begin- ning might be made in establishing any one of these markets by giving free scope to pushcart and wagon hucksters, as well as to market-gardeners and others, to hold open-air markets on two or three days of the week in the streets, or in open spaces owned either by the city or the transportation com- panies, at points where the stream of travelers or other probable customers pass on their way. Or, MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE 103 privately owned vacant lots might be so used. An open-air market would in time indicate through its growth or failure whether a covered market were needed in any particular case, and if so what ought to be the character of its facilities for service. Coming nearer the heart of the city, Manhat- tan's various bridge approaches afford the space and .covering for several district markets. If free- dom were for a while given wagon-men, pushcart people, and vendors in general to occupy, during the early morning hours of two days a week and on Saturday evenings, some such spaces as well as a number of the small parks and wider street areas of Manhattan, the points most successful in attract- ing buyers might indicate where market shelters, which perhaps could be used also for other public purposes, should finally be erected. Perhaps in- deed very probably housed markets would not be needed at all. New York, unlike Paris or Berlin, has inhabitants of many nationalities. It is not a single city. A conglomeration of "colonies" forms its working class districts. Each "colony" might find special uses for its own neighborhood market- place. For none of these suggested innovations would appropriations from the city be necessary at the beginning. io 4 MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE We have been looking at the facts which warrant the small beginnings in markets that may safely lead up to permanent establishments. Up to the present, however, suggestions made by various persons in this field have come almost exclusively in the con- trary form of Napoleonic conceptions such as ter- minated at Moscow. It cannot be assumed that municipal market- houses, as distinguished from mere market-places, may be. created like "cinemas" in any and all of our cities with a probability of success. With a city's growth, the advantages of the public market-place, uncovered or partly under cover, may be overcome by the disadvantages of location, of official blunder- ing, and of restrictions imposed on stallkeepers struggling under heavy expense to cope with other methods and conditions of selling developed in re- cent years in our American communities. The Pennsylvania markets usually get along with a sin- gle market-master, assisted by a laborer or two on market days. Indianapolis has shown us how, when a city reaches a population of 235,00x3, graft, ring rule, and mistakes of administration may nullify the usual advantages of a public market, at least until a reformer in the Mayor's chair plays Czar and auctioneer, to the dismay of the middlemen MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE 105 "combines" and the equally objectionable bureau barnacles. There is no puzzling complexity in the case to be mastered before seeing why public markets in our big cities fail. Open-air markets go out of exist- ence when the police club away from it the attend- ing vendors. Covered markets decay through sev- eral equally plain reasons, which we may get at by looking for a moment at something of the discour- aging story of New York's vanished system. New York had a market system until recent years since 1656. A pride of our citizens during many decades of its existence, and in its day when the city lay mostly below Fourteenth street amply proving its value, in time, as the city and politics waxed, the markets waned. Once in a while re- formers wanted to know why. Investigations were had, somebody was blamed and something recom- mended, and then the public slept again. The rec- ords show this story repeated for more than half a century. In 1859, when Thirty- fourth street was far uptown, George W. Morton, City Market In- spector, reported: "I have alluded to the growth and inadequacy of the market accommodations in the upper portion of the city, the insufficiency of which has led to the io6 MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE establishment of small markets or meat shops, and to the sale of meats, vegetables, etc., by dealers in family groceries, etc., the additional profit to these dealers inflicting an unnecessary additional cost to the consumer. ... If convenient markets were located in the upper wards I am of opinion it would prove of advantage to all parties. . . . Market gardeners and others would proceed directly to these markets to secure a sale. No new markets have been opened since 1830." In "The Market Book" (1861), page 453, comes this passage : "The present old dilapidated market-houses here are certainly a disgrace to the city of New York, and have been for the last fifteen years, and there is now no encouragement even to attempt to better them, in the erection of new buildings, while we have inefficient public officers to direct or superin- tend. Nothing can be done to accommodate the public unless there is a chance to make something out of it. . . . If a movement for public accom- modation is suggested, out comes the conservative or opposition press, to show what would legitimate- ly cost $150,000 would, if conducted by these ineffi- cient officers, cost the city $250,000 to $300,000. . . . The great mass of confusion and corrup- tion, the crowded state, and especially the want of system which now and for a long time have dis- graced some of our public markets . . . have been produced by the selection and appointment of inefficient public officers/' MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE 107 In 1873 the Superintendent of Markets was Thomas Farrington DeVoe, for many years a butcher-stall keeper at Nos. 7 and 9 Jefferson Mar- ket. Author of "The Market Book," just quoted, and other works relating to marketing, DeVoe is the one conspicuous figure in the history of New York's markets, both as official and writer in the interests of the buying public. In his "Report Upon the Present Conditions of the Public Markets" (1873), writing to Andrew H. Green, Comptroller, he says : "The first and great fault has been with the city authorities, by their not providing buildings that would be a credit to our city, or otherwise the pres- ent buildings should have been kept in proper order and repair. The city should have not only replaced these with suitable erections, but also placed one or more such in every ward of our long neglected city, and in places that would be most convenient to our citizens, so that provisions of every kind used for human food could or should be forced by law to be taken into these several marts, where they should be properly inspected or supervised daily, which can only be done successfully in large quantities thus collected and exposed. "In a populous city like New York, the residents should be protected, as well as have equal accommo- dations served to them in all public markets, and I would suggest that measures be taken to establish them by selecting a number of practical men from io8 MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE our several public markets to assist in locating such buildings where most required, or at points most accessible to the greatest number of citizens." In "The Market Book" (page 402), DeVoe wrote : "Prior to the year 1825 one clerk of the market attended to the duties of the collection of money, and in fact had the whole charge of this market and five others, without the aid of a 'Superintend- ent of Markets', viz. : Greenwich, Spring Street, Centre, Essex, Grand Street, and Gouverneur Mar- kets. ... At the present time we are saddled with a clerk to each market, besides collectors and a Superintendent." In the same vein, March, 1912, testifying before Governor Dix's Food Investigation Commission, President Carl Koelsch, of the Merchants' Asso- ciation of Washington Market, complained : "The city manages the public markets very badly. The Superintendent estimated the annual expense of cleaning and sweeping Washington market at $10,- ooo. I would take the contract myself at $5,000 a year and make money. There are a lot of city em- ployes standing around and getting in every one's way." Maladministration of the market-houses, it is thus seen, has for half a century been one cause for the failure of New York's municipal market MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE 109 system. City officials frequently admit, or declare, this fact. In the report of the Assistant Sanitary Superintendent to E. M. Grout, Comptroller, Jan- uary 19, 1903 ("City Record"), criticism was of- fered of the division of authority exercised by the Superintendent of Markets and the Superintendent of Public Buildings. On the same point, the State Commission's Market Committee, 1912 (page 23), says that the Borough Presidents supervise the gen- eral care of markets, the Street Cleaning Depart- ment sweeps them, the city Comptroller fixes and collects the rentals, the Weights and Measures De- partment inspects the scales and measures, the Board of Health inspects milk and provisions, and the District Attorney looks after undue charges, dis- criminations by carriers, and complaints against combinations and monopolists. Several of the offi- cials, in my interviews with them, 1912, spoke of the chaotic situation regarding licenses. Imagine a railroad run on such official "co-ordination"! The fallacy of trying to show that a market "pays," in the sense of yielding current interest on the city's investment in it, has mixed up the book- keeping of New York Market Superintendents, from long before DeVoe's day. While in 1912 the Superintendent officially reported, in accordance no MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE with the methods of bookkeeping coming down from his predecessors, that New York's market system in 1911 incurred a deficit of $86,656, he later stated in the newspapers that this amount was made through errors in capitalizing sites, the true loss being only $27,000. But beyond maladministration are other funda- mental causes of the decline of city market-houses, causes not confined to the experiences of New York. One is the difficulty of so locating new houses as to give the best continuous accommodation to changing neighborhoods. Another is that the mar- kets do not bear the same relation to consumers in general that they did a generation ago; such insti- tutions as the pushcart, the private central stores and the telephone to the grocer having come up to take away basket-carrying customers. A third fac- tor, perhaps of the first importance, has been change in the source and methods of supply. New York's daily provisioning now comes from an area that covers, in several respects, all of America, and in a few respects the entire world. Car-load lots, even train-load lots, of a single kind of fruit or produce, coming hundreds of miles, have taken the place of nearby farmers' truck-loads of varied greens, as seen fifty years ago. Proposals for improving city MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE m marketing must include adaptation to these new conditions. Either of the three last-named weakening influ- ences would be sufficient to account in good part for New York's decadent public market system. On the first point 'maladministration not only has the city, through the inefficiency of its government, been unable to reach out into the new wards to keep up its markets with the growth of population, but it has been a wasteful loser both in the location of the one considerable new market it has built in the last century and in the slowness with which it has lopped off its manifestly old and well-nigh useless markets. The grand modern market misplaced thirty years ago at the foot of East Seventeenth street at a cost of $800,000, having at the end of a few years only sufficient stalls rented to bring in a revenue of $800, became the stables of the Street Cleaning Department. Catherine, Franklin, Centre, Clinton, Tompkins, Essex, Gouverneur, and Union markets, decades after they would have been trans- ferred to other uses had they been the property of private corporations, were abandoned or torn down, some to be replaced with buildings urgently needed by other city departments. As a contrast, the big New York Central Railroad's West Thirty-fourth ii2 ^lARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE street market, when it failed to pay, went out of commission speedily. With regard to the public market-houses now remaining, the old Washington market retailers deal largely with down-town res- taurants and New Jersey commuters; Fulton mar- ket has lost more than half its trade in twenty- five years; Jefferson is almost abandoned, while at the West Washington-Gansevoort Market and the Wal- labout Market in Brooklyn, the trade is almost en- tirely at wholesale or in large lots. Thus we get a glimpse of what new local munici- pal market-houses would have to contend against in New York, even were they well placed to start with, and economically administered in the first flush of reform. Besides, the stallkeepers would be handi- capped by restricted space. Their expenses for cart- ing goods from the wholesale centres, and for what- ever they should deliver, would be much the same as those of retail storekeepers. Without immediate facilities for cold storage, they would be unable to lay in heavy stocks ahead. From our observations of the effects of freedom for the pushcart and the semi-weekly or tri-weekly open-air market it may reasonably be expected that, with this method alone of bringing consumer near producer brought into operation, New York's prob- MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE 113 lem of marketing, and of its market prices of food- stuffs, would be so changed as to cause radical alterations in the plans for costly market-house systems now officially, or semi-officially, before the community. Let the masses in the city have oppor- tunity to help themselves. Let the small street deal- ers and the open-air market-people, who would quickly appear, show the part they can play in civic and domestic economy. Before building public market-houses, the prob- able influence on their business springing from or- dinary mercantile forms of marketing foodstuffs which are now developing must be duly weighed. The large private markets of New York have per- haps made only a beginning with their possibilities. Co-operation, so often a failure, may yet catch our wage-workers. VII. CUTS MADE AND TO BE MADE IN THE HIGH COST OF MIDDLEMEN. BY having under our eye a classification of the usual items in family expenditure, we shall the bet- ter see the economies in purchasing provisions through new marketing, mercantile and co-opera- tive methods. The percentage of outlay for the average of 1,189 normal Massachusetts families in 1903 ran thus (Eighteenth Annual Report, United States Commissioner of Labor) : Food 40.90 Lighting 1.27 Rent 20.95 Sundries 20.02 Clothing 13.12 Fuel 3.74 100.00 The food budget alone averaged $370.20 for 253 Massachusetts families in 1901, according to the Federal Commissioner. This is higher than his es- timate of $326.90 for 2,567 workingmen's families in different parts of the country for the same year, but which, he says, became $374.75 in 1907 on the rise of prices. On the basis of the $370.20 in 1901 114 MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE 115 he gave as follows the percentages for the various articles of food purchased : Beef 21.8 Molasses 0.7 Hog products 12.8 Flour and meal 6.7 Other meat 4.3 Bread 2.2 Fish 5.3 Rice 0.5 Poultry 3.5 Potatoes 3.0 Eggs 3-9 Other vegetables 2.7 Milk 8.0 Fruit 2.7 Butter 8.7 Vinegar, pickles and Cheese 0.7 condiments i.i Tea 0.8 Other food 3.9 Coffee 1.2 Sugar 5.5 100.00 (Of the beef, about 40 per cent was for salted kinds; of the hog products, about 55 per cent for salted and lard. Half the meat could therefore be sold without ice-box plant.) This table shows that at least 40, and perhaps 50, per cent of all the articles it represents, even if not including fresh meats, milk, bread and the dry groceries, might be put on sale in open-air markets. A reduction of 25 per cent on retail grocers' prices for the articles sold would yield to New Yorkers having a food budget of only $400 a saving of $50 a year. Grocers' prices would be affected by the market cut. Granted, the Commissioner's table may be wanting in fine shades of exactness for in- stance, vegetables taking a percentage which seems n6 MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE low, and ice and table liquids not among the items. However, as official data it is a basis for estimate. The reader may correct on his own experience. Granted, as well, that the 25 per cent might prove in the end no more than 15; it is worth while to save $30 a year through one point in management. Next, as to classes of provisions some of which may not be bought in open-air markets. These with others generally are on sale in the large pri- vate markets rapidly developed in recent years in both European and American cities. The very men- tion of this form of market excites the hostility of small retailers. They see in it somehow the same destroying enemy that hand-taught industrial wage- workers confront in the labor-saving machinery which takes away their jobs and leaves them among the unskilled. The leading types of this market are the provision section of the department store, the large retail provision house, and the chain stores, all having almost an unlimited area of delivery. The New York State Commission's Market Com- mittee (page 10) gives these two points among its findings : ( i ) The addition to the cost of products when handled by wholesalers, jobbers, and retailers is approximately 40 to 45 per cent. (2) The addi- tion to cost, due to operation, including delivery, in MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE 117 stores of the department type seen by the commit- tee, is only 1 8 to 20 per cent. These big stores are spreading in America, as in many European cities, notably in Paris and Berlin. Must not a large part of their saving of more than one-half in handling finally pass over to the consumers? The large modern private market holds decided advantages for retailing over the small grocer, butcher, baker, and delicatessen dealer. ( i ) It buys in the quantities which command the lowest purchasing prices, a source of profit former- ly open only to the wholesaler or large importer. "We sent one of our buyers to the west coast of France," said the manager of one of the department stores to me, "where he bought ten thousand dol- lars' worth of sardines and other small fish and had them boxed especially for us. We made a 'drive' of them when they arrived here, giving the public the lowest price ever known, and the transaction paid us." In another of these stores the manager said: "Here are thousands of boxes of macaroni, sold us by an importer, at our price. The public at once gets the benefit." I was conducted through several of these great private markets in New York. In their storage- rooms, apart from the stock exposed for sale, were ii8 MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE piled, ceiling high, newly arrived foodstuffs in boxes, barrels, and crates, in amounts to be reck- oned only by tons or thousands, a force of laborers active in unpacking goods and carrying them to the sales-rooms. The manager, at each of the stores visited, in pointing out the huge quantities of vari- ous articles in stock, told where they had been bought, in Europe or America, by what experts in each line, and what were the means of acquiring them cheaply, either in point of purchase or trans- portation. Cash terms, buying a dealer's, or manu- facturer's, or producer's entire stock, and shipping by car or cargo lots these points of themselves in- sured a profit. Besides the storage-room at their sales-houses, some of the greater establishments have enormous warehouse space on or near the river piers. One claim made by all the managers was positive: "We eliminate a line of middlemen wholesalers, jobbers, speculators. Through us there is but one link, or at most two, between producer and con- sumer. More than that, our agents are constantly on the look-out for bargains, anywhere. When there is an over-production of Maine corn, or French wine, or Western eggs, or of a big pro- ducer's canned goods, preserves or pickles, or of another's marmalades, or chutney sauce, or jarred ginger, anything salable in our various lines, we MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE 119 buy heavily. For certain staple goods we make contracts seasons ahead, a benefit for the men who thus supply us, for their steadily employed work- men, for ourselves, and our customers." (2) This modern market has its special features. On one or two floors, each a vast hall, the market- ing housewife finds all the usual varieties of food- stuffs. The salesmen make a note of anything not in stock called for by customers. Any grade, or brand, or weight, or size, or quality, according to the kind of goods sought, may be asked for. At "order tables" the housekeeper, with the help of a pile of samples, may sit and check off her purchase list. A force of switchboard girls take orders by telephone. Customers are instructed in buying by floor-walkers at each section, or in economizing by specialists at "demonstrating booths," or in cooking by a professional cook at a model kitchen. Lunch- eon, to suit all purses, may be had at several count- ers. Said a manager : "Observe that our clerks and salespeople are quite continually busy. When the 'phone girls are not taking down orders coming by wire they are writing out in duplicate the orders already received. When the packers are not doing up goods, they are unpacking or writing up their books. Customers, in person or by mail or 'phone, are thus being wait- 120 MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE ed on, our time not wasted in waiting for them. As to our relations with patrons, we tell them, in print and by word of mouth, the absolute facts about goods, and rely upon maintaining the trade of in- telligent people on that plan. We cannot afford to practice barking, or chaffering, or substituting, or having two prices, or selling under weight or in poor quality. You will find all the big stores wholly independent of the inspectors of any of the city or Federal departments. Our business is in the open. We court publicity, advertise, show our goods un- reservedly to experts in every line. The pure food laws are welcome to us; we anticipated them; we have observed their spirit for years. We try to educate our customers with regard to qualities and weights, or measures. We advise them as to the best times to buy, according to season or market fluctuations. No other line of retailing anything that the public buys is today on a higher plane than the provision department of the large stores." (3) The distributing system of the big private market, especially when merely a part of the gen- eral delivery of a department store, covers an area of country, and hence a body of customers, not possible to be reached with equal cheapness by minor dealers. Some parts of Manhattan, Brook- lyn, and Jersey City are thus covered by one big store four times a day. At least one delivery every twenty-four hours reaches all points within twenty miles of the central house. Three times is an order MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE 121 usually taken to a customer's residence on failure to deliver it at a first and a second call. The drivers and other delivery men are in uniform; the wagons bear the name of the firm owning them; sanitary or otherwise safe methods of packing are observed examples of devices to fix responsibility and in- sure confidence. Finally, "We take back anything which a customer may return, alleging dissatisfac- tion," said one of the managers. "It is a part of our advertising. We do not lose by it. We have found that in general the public is sincere and honest." These points of desirability to consumers explain the rapid rise in New York of the large private provision markets. In general, they are yearly add- ing to the variety of their stock. Some now deal in fish, poultry, fresh meat, fruit and butter, cheese and eggs, besides the various kinds of preserves and other fruit products in jars or cans. The big new store's social office is comparable with that per- formed by the restaurant and hotel companies de- veloped in the large cities, mostly in the last twenty- five years. In the "central" provision store, in the "chain" of restaurants, in the "line" of hotels, alike, the patron learns to rely on freshness and whole- someness in the eatables, discipline in the service, 122 MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE attractiveness of plant and its appointments, and general responsibility on the part of the manage- ment. In the standard of wares and service lie their dividends. From the sort of railing against these market stores which one occasionally hears, it seems shock- ing to some minds to propose patronizing a big house in preference to a little one. Perhaps an effect, this, of attempts by small retailers to turn public opinion against their great rivals. First avowing their peculiar trade ethics, as explained by a Washington grocer, before the Lodge Committee (Report, page 807), when he said that "it wasn't right" for a wholesaler or a jobber to sell to a con- sumer by the case, sack, or barrel, at wholesale prices, the small dealers apply rules of like import to stores whose fault to them is merely great size. Or, it may be that, in the eyes of some classes of social reformers, whatever is big is "monopolistic." Yet, of a certainty, such good people will travel by rail rather than by stage-coach, take Sunday news- papers whose large circulation insures many pages of varied reading instead of struggling virtuous little reform weeklies, and buy cheap clothing made in a factory employing a thousand hands in prefer- ence to handing over a stiff price to the custom MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE 123 tailor around the corner who cannot touch ready- made "reduced figures." As to monopoly, the big store enjoys no legal privilege or franchise, the foundations of monopoly. And now a word for an infant step in consum- ers' association. While fresh meat is on sale at some of the big stores, and might be had in open- air markets, at prices lower than the small butcher's, much of the difference between the wholesaler's price and the retailer's can directly be saved through the combination of a few buyers. Twenty heads of families, representing 100 consumers, by club- bing together can buy a side of beef, or a dressed pig, or a whole mutton, and on dividing it among themselves make a considerable saving. It is fre- quently assumed that the packing houses forbid their agents to sell to others than retailers, hotel- keepers, and similar heavy buyers, but while super- intending the buying for from sixty to seventy-five persons for the better part of a year I procured sides of beef and other meats in similar quantities without difficulty. Dr. C. F. Langworthy, expert in charge of government nutrition investigations, gives encouragement on this point : "By buying in large quantities under certain conditions, it may be possible to procure meat at better prices than those 124 MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE which ordinarily prevail in the retail market. " Mr. I. T. Pryor, addressing the Texas Cattle Growers' Association, two years ago, said : "Thousands of retail butchers in this country sell one-half of a beef or less each day, and must make sufficient profit on this small quantity to meet the large ex- penses incident to city life." Our veteran ex-Sec- retary of Agriculture, James Wilson, testified, as to meat, before the Lodge Committee: "We found that the retailer added 38 per cent, on an average, in fifty cities, more than he paid the wholesaler." Twenty heads of families Twenty Neighbors, let us call them in an informal organization, might jointly manage much of their marketing to a com- mon advantage. They could be co-religionists or co-nationalists, as Jews or Italians, whose customs require certain foods not usually in demand by the general public. Or, they might be members of the same church or school of social reform, or fellow trade unionists, or simply neighbors. Supporters of temperance principles, having no drink bill, would have the surest play for joint economies. Twenty Neighbors could meet once a fortnight, or even a month, in one another's homes, saving office rent. There need be no paid officers. In every group of twenty wage-workers or other persons striving to MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE 125 gain a living, experience will testify, there are in- variably several men and women ready and anxious to perform unpaid altruistic labor. In fact, certain forms of duty in such a group could pass from one to the other down almost the entire list of members. All would be inclined to gather points of informa- tion for the common benefit. Twenty Neighbors on coming together could be- gin their mutually helpful marketing at once. No need to wait for unwieldy organizations of bril- liant "prospectus" promise, nor for the blessings to be showered on us by our next municipal admin- istration! They could let one or two, or more, re- liable wagon or pushcart fruit and produce vendors know that cash and fair criticism awaited delivery of orders at their several homes. They could have a postcard system, operated by the secretary, of notifying members of passing bargains in necessa- ries. They could listen to the little grocer should he promise to do as well by them as the big store, and permit him to back up his word with material proof. They could hear talks on pure foods, on labor-saving kitchen devices and methods, and on the experiences of fellow-members in buying. For advisory purposes, the group might at times com- 126 MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE municate with other organizations of consumers, and with producers as well. In a spirit of mutual helpfulness, instead of under the feverish influence of partisan politics or the motive of unfair combinations for individual gain, they might listen to discussions of the tariff, of an improved parcels post, or of municipal and other wholesale markets and cold storage warehouses, or of a State or national department of markets, or of the various extensions of true co-operation and labor co-partnership, or of co-operative banking, farming and profit-sharing. Attention might be given to the practicability and social value of such methods as Mr. Edison's proposed slot machine market-house, or of the Rev. Dr. Peters' philan- thropic selling depot, or of various plans for wage- earners' co-operative workshops. With success and experience, groups of Twenty Neighbors might de- velop into co-operative societies or at least form part of a Federation of Consumers. In Manhattan, among our million, Twenty Neigh- bors could today turn the tables on several classes of middlemen who to so large an extent have con- sumers in their clutches. Buying in wholesale quan- tities and subdividing among themselves, they could, in a single experiment of cutting up a side of beef MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE 127 in twenty parts of equal value, at once illustrate the gains by the process, test possibilities in simple co-operation, and set interested middlemen to think- ing. Their plan of co-operation might develop in- definitely. The first Secretary of the Woolwich Royal Ar- senal Co-operative Society, today with more than 26,000 members and two and a half million dollars in assets, told me that for several years at the be- ginning he kept the society's store in a single room in his dwelling, while working as a machinist in the arsenal. Twenty Neighbors could give mail order houses a trial, acquaint their members with the artifices more or less common among retailers, send committees to pure food and similar shows, wield some influence on public opinion through letters to the press, summon before them unfair dealers, study the package goods trade, and collect reference books relating to food and marketing. The middle- man fears the instructed consumer. A society of Twenty Neighbors could, at any time, with positive and immediate effect, decide what articles of household consumption not to buy. As an example, it could, according to the season or the known stock in the hands of producers, refuse to pay more than its own price for certain staple 128 MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE commodities. It could aid in practicing whatever is valuable to masses of consumers in the "let alone" policy. It could, to the extent of its patronage, re- verse the present principle of fixing prices in retail- ing, which, according to the manager of a Boston fishing company, testifying before the Massachu- setts Commission, is "that dealers are governed largely by consideration of what the customer will stand." That is, it would grant its custom to a dealer only on his putting down his prices as low as he could stand. Purveyors would compete for whatever custom it should influence. In "Co-operative Movements Among Farmers," ("Annals, American Academy," March, 1912), Prof. E. K. Eyerby, Massachusetts Agricultural College, speaks of farmers' co-operative societies which, "while nominally unsuccessful, had yet caused the middleman in his struggle for self-pres- ervation to lower his prices very greatly. He had, for example, been obliged to reduce the price of reapers from $275 to $175, of threshers from $300 to $200, of wagons from $150 to $90, of sewing machines from $75 to $40. Potential prices from the co-operators were able to keep permanently low prices that were intended to be so only temporarily." The French "Ligue des Consommateurs" has to its MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE 129 credit a series of victories over fraudulent, exorbi- tant, or tricky public purveyors of all sorts, even compelling a score of the theatres of Paris to mod- ify some of their time-honored grafts on playgoers. Twenty Neighbors might buy direct from either a single producer or an association of producers, in city or country. In a group of twenty is usually at least one person who knows of a farmer, or poultry raiser, or general provision man, who can ship his products through to consumers, in hampers to in- dividuals or in bulk to a group. The New York State Department of Agriculture in 1911 asked sev- eral hundred farmers and residents of our larger towns and cities for detailed information* as to di- rect trade between producer and consumer. Of 217 farmers replying, 158 reported that they had re- ceived better returns by direct sales than by other means, 24 were in doubt and 24 gave negative an- swers. Of 231 consumers, 121 reported a saving by direct purchases, 36 no saving, and 35 were in doubt. These reports, covering unsystematic indi- vidual efforts, contain promise for group work sys- tematized. Moreover, when one is acquainted with the associated buying and selling of foodstuffs in Europe especially in Denmark, Ireland and Switz- erland such reports as this from our New York 130 MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE Agricultural Department but testify to the field for progress which we, half educated in this respect, have yet before us. A group of twenty as a unit for a larger organi- zation, temporary or permanent, has advantages in promoting confidence, in making members ac- quaintances, in presenting barriers to disintegrating influences, in protecting one another against being committed to wild propositions or to any ventures foreign to the purposes of the organization. It would be interesting sociological testimony, the story of Twenty Neighbors for a single year. The group's experiences might answer many questions as to individual betterment in financial standing, in things learned, in happiness, in character. The big thoroughly equipped foodstuffs store dealing with customers in an unlimited area has stricken from the list many a petty middleman. Co- operation, the elementary principles of which are illustrated in our "Twenty Neighbors," has in some countries diverted profits amounting to tens of millions annually from the pockets of middlemen to those of consumers. Can co-operation do the same in America? VIII. IS CO-OPERATION COMING? HINDRANCES. CO-OPERATION, on the British system, is a con- sumers' movement. In setting up a co-operative society, a body of intending buyers organize them- selves to conduct a business of their own, usually at first a provision store, and, acting through a committee elected from their membership, they re- verse the order of the steps taking place in initiat- ing ordinary private undertakings, the customer in these having last and least interest. To begin ac- tual work the co-operators themselves supply the capital, in small shares, usually $5 ; then they hire, direct, and supervise the manager of shop details and his assistants; they decide from time to time what commodities their store shall have in stock; they watch the trend of sales; they take the risk of experiments; and they reach out for new custo- mers, that is, new members, who also must be- come shareholders. At stated periods, usually once in three months, the co-operators divide their accumulated cash surplus over the sum of all costs, 131 i 3 2 MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE capital having been accorded current interest. Each shareholder's dividend is paid on the amount of his purchases during the quarter, all buyers drawing at the same rate of percentage. What is this dividend? It is not profits. In a purely co-operative store, this point is to be borne in mind, sales are made only to shareholders. Their object in fixing the selling prices so as to bring in a sum beyond the probable total outlay for the stock (wholesale cost, interest, rent, taxes, light, heat, salaries, etc.), is not the absurd one of trying to make profits from themselves, but simply to form a guaranty, as co-operators, against loss. The sales as made are but a division, in small lots, among common owners, of commodities previously bought in large lots through their working capital. The net balance over the original outlay is but an excess from the advances in cash made by members when buying at retail. The only equitable method for dividing this excess is in proportion to the value of each co-operator's purchases. In other words, the co-operator's dividend evidently is but the comple- tion of a final return to him, first in goods and then in money, of the total of his successive payments. The dividend, savings through co-operation, serves as an indication of the minimum profits the MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE 133 individual dealer might have made from the co-op- erators on the same amount of purchases. As such, it promotes thrift. Its distribution is a stimulus even to selfish participants in the co-operative move- ment. But the highest satisfaction in co-operation is its conjunction of equity with business. Here is a principle embodying the possibilities of a social evolution. Voluntary co-operation, to make a mod- est claim, may yet occupy most of that vast field of commerce which includes distributing to the multi- tude the ordinary necessaries of subsistence, the manufactured supplies of the average household, and the ordinary articles of clothing for the family. Further, with the firm footing already obtained in this field in some countries, co-operation has exhib- ited potentialities for progress once denied it by the spokesmen for conservative political economy and by the leaders in commerce and manufactures. Merely to understand the principles of true co-oper- ation, and see it in practice, brings about a moral revolution in the individual observer, taught in the common experience of life to regard business as largely a grab and a gamble. The development of co-operation as now carried on in Great Britain is the story of the Rochdale Pioneers' Society, the parent association, repeated 134 MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE by other societies many hundred times; that is, adoption of the one correct co-operative principle, then small beginnings, and afterward a steady growth. In 1844 twenty-eight poor Rochdale weavers on strike started subscribing threepence a week toward sufficient capital to set up a co-operative store. When their number had reached forty and their capital 28 ($140), they hired a small room and "stocked it with those things which were most nec- espary." "So meagre was the stock, so dimly lighted the store, that they felt ashamed to take down the shutters." The men of that little band were in a humble rank of wage-workers. The leading citizens of their community would never have dreamed of placing one of them in a position of public responsibility. But in their discussions as to how they might suc- cessfully conduct their co-operative store, they de- cided to embody in their rules certain equitable, if not wholly new, ideas. The principal of these, put into immediate practice, were "the customers to be the sole proprietors" and "dividends in proportion to purchases." Financially and morally these ideas have proven among the soundest that ever gave backbone to any business system. That original MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE 135 Rochdale Society has today 15,000 members, and its annual trade amounts to $1,500,000 and its divi- dends to $250,000. At the forty-fourth annual Congress of the British Co-operative Union, held at Portsmouth, England, May 27-29, 1912, returns were received from 1,531 societies, of which 1,407 were distribu- tive and 112 productive. Springing from the same movement, special co-operative organizations were reported as dealing in insurance, allotments, small holdings, motor service, and cottage buildings. The total number of all shareholding members, as given in the year's report, was 2,760,591, an increase over the previous year of 98,732, and in five years more than half a million. As one member may buy for a family, the individuals thus represented are fully ten millions, perhaps twelve, one-fourth or more of the entire population of Great Britain. Other statistics in the report : Total annual trade of the productive and distributive societies, $580,- 000,000; an increase in ten years of more than 75 per cent. Capital of the retail distributive socie- ties, $175,000,000; dividends $60,000,000; capital of the two wholesale societies (English and Scot- tish), $11,500,000; trade, $178,000,000; dividends, $5,000,000. Value of production carried on by 136 MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE distributive societies $60,000,000; value of invest- ments of co-operative societies in house property, $38,500,000. Productive co-operative societies numbering 114, with a capital of $24,000,000, and having 30,629 employes, had a trade, in 1911, of $62,000,000. Aggregate expenditures of all the societies in salaries, wages, and establishment charges, exceeded $45,000,000. Number of em- ployes, more than 100,000. (The Board of Trade Report, which includes societies not in the Union, gives considerably higher figures for all these items. ) The British co-operators own ocean steamships and other vessels by the score and railway freight cars by the hundred. They have purchasing agen- cies in many of the principal cities of the world; they buy in advance crops of thousands of acres, tea and coffee in the Orient, fruit in the European Continental countries, and wheat and other prod- ucts in California. The British Wholesale Society grants the follow- ing advantages to the workers it employs : Healthy work-rooms; trade union wages in all cases where unions exist; the best wages in the neighborhood where there are no unions; short hours (5,407 women and girls work 48 hours or less a week) ; MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE 137 payment of wages in illness or during holidays; working dresses for women and girls occupied in packing goods; dining-rooms, where meals are served at moderate prices ; arrangements for recrea- tion and amusements ; annual picnics, at which each employe present receives a gift; and a savings fund to which the society contributes handsomely. Within the last twenty years, and with increas- ing rapidity the last ten, the British system of co- operation, with certain modifications necessitated through national customs and conditions, has had a remarkable development throughout the European Continent. In Germany there are now almost as many co-operators as in Great Britain; in Italy, France and the Scandinavian countries are mem- bers by hundreds of thousands; and even in Aus- tria, Hungary, and Russia are numerous flourish- ing societies, mostly in the towns and cities. The co-operators of all countries are united, though somewhat loosely, in the International Co-operative Alliance. But, however wonderful the story that statistics reveal of its financial benefits, the proven moral merits of co-operation surpass all others in social value. Co-operation has substituted for the idea of providential nabobs in commerce the idea of a 1 38 'MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE self-sufficient democracy. It has shown how and wherein the people can do for themselves, origi- nate business, quicken trade, attract custom, employ talent, eliminate the wastes of unnecessary competi- tion, and withal declare substantial dividends. Its committeemen, in performing gratuitously their duties, render a public service. Co-operation is not in politics. It asks no privileges. It seeks no in- terference with any man through force of law. It leaves equally free every road for talent and enter- prise. It teaches dreamers their impracticabilities, tries out reformers, promotes among members a neighborly feeling. It lifts the mass; not the stock gamblers, nor shrewd advertisers, nor produce-ex- change market-riggers. Every co-operator is a partner, equal to any other. All members may vote on every question at society meetings. Co- operation reduces the number of middlemen, abol- ishes their successive profits, cuts loose from over- advertising, and suppresses the puffery of alleged commercial geniuses. It effectually does away with the idea that in common business there lies any foresight in management, talent in organization, or skill in catering to the public not connected with dishonesty -beyond the powers possessed and evoked in an association of ordinary upright men. MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE 139 It brings to light enormous reserves of varied men- tal and moral force in the wageworking classes never coming into play in establishments dominated exclusively by a firm or an individual. It contra- dicts the dictum: "Poor and therefore weak." It offers convincing evidence that "capital and labor are not essentially antagonistic," since within the co-operative organization both capital and labor are the instruments and possession of associated work- ers. Co-operation changes the psychological atti- tude of men toward one another; the mutual help of fellow-members supplants the mutual hostility or sinister rivalry often prevailing among competi- tive merchants or workingmen. Every co-operative society creates a social, edu- cational, and recreative centre for a working-class community. The co-operative halls of Great Brit- ain are hospitable to every speaker with a promis- ing idea, to ambitious youth seeking mental growth, to free speech, liberty of thought, and all reasonable innovation. A co-operative society must have the grace of individual and collective self-preservation; for, just as its members prevent the adulteration of the food they sell themselves, prohibit misrepre- sentation of their own goods, and enforce a one- price rule, they also conserve decency and avoid 140 MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE extremes in their public discussions. Through their common sense they stand well with the world. All true ! Most true of co-operation across seas. And what of America? The United States has so little co-operation in the British technical sense that what exists hardly constitutes a movement. It is to be doubted that there are fifty genuine distributive co-operative so- cieties in the entire country. The various systems commonly styled co-operative usually possess finan- cial advantages for their own members over non- members, their dividends being simply business profits distributed among the shareholders of a joint- stock company. Examples: The co-operative building and loan association is but a bank, the larger share of profits often accruing to the non-bor- rowing shareholders. The co-operative dairy is a productive enterprise for profits, its advantageous sociological feature while it lasts, for concen- trated possession is the end of many dairies be- ing ownership in many hands instead of a few. Co-operative irrigation is either gang-labor for a division of wages or a union of landowners hiring wage-earners. Co-operative fruit-selling as at pres- ent conducted is at times especially profitable to producers through market manipulations as against MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE 141 consumers. Co-operative telephone, baking, butch- ering, and factory ventures are quite uniformly nothing more than joint-stock affairs, the shares held in small denominations by perhaps many per- sons in the beginning, and often but a few in the end. The Federal Department of Agriculture found in a census in 1907 85,000 farmers' "co-operative societies" of these various kinds. But of all such "co-operation" it is to be said that, while the bene- fits of their profits may be spread to a larger circle of persons than if only a few "capitalists" were the owners, to employ the word co-operation to designate them is to cause the term to lose the specific and definite and ethical meaning attached to it by the British co-operators. In the Report of the Central Board of the British Co-operative Union for 1911 it is stated that the Chief Registrar of the United Kingdom recognizes "1,396 organizations which did not ap- pear in our statistical return, the number being made up of workingmen's clubs, land societies, agricul- tural societies, small holdings and allotment so- cieties, banks, etc." I follow this precedent in re- jecting all forms of association not accepted by the Co-operative Union. There has been much effort to set up a co-opera- 1 42 MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE live movement in the United States. Every decade since the 18405 has seen at least one enthusiastic wave for co-operation pass over the country. No need to recount these movements here. The rec- ord of their rise and fall may be found in the city libraries. The failures of so-called co-operation in this country have been so numerous and regular that, with the mass of wage- workers and the gen- eral American public, the whole co-operative scheme as a social reform is in disrepute. Why should this be? This query poses a world problem. The reply may be contained, indefinitely and comprehensively, in the assertion that condi- tions in America are different from conditions in Europe. But what, precisely, are the most salient points of the particular social conditions in America that bear unfavorably on co-operation? (i) First of all is a factor in our general eco- nomic situation which, though to a much less ex- tent, has its counterpart in Great Britain. British society has social, or rather financial, strata, at top and bottom, in which co-operation is even today almost wholly non-existent. Among the wealthy the number of co-operators is hardly a sprinkling; among the "submerged tenth" and the very poor menaced by submersion the proportion is equally MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE 143 small. Co-operation has its stronghold almost en- tirely among the thrifty artisans, the well-paid and regularly employed laborers, and in general the social elements similarly situated financially. Col- lectively, the miserably poor have neither the moral fibre nor the little savings to set up and maintain by cash payments a co-operative store. As a class, the well-to-do find it more to their satisfaction to exercise choice or whim in dealing with miscel- laneous private traders than to pin themselves down to a local co-operative society. They order their household supplies through servants ; they buy their luxuries from various cities or even countries ; they come and go from place to place; or they are too vain or too fearful of putting in jeopardy their social standing to confess the small economies ex- pressed in dealing at a co-operative store. Besides, they may find opportunities to employ their extra capital in ventures that pay better than co-opera- tion. They want profits. Their point of view, that of unqualified individual self-interest, is generally shared by the "gentry" and the professional and business classes, down to the pettiest salesmen of the retail shopkeeper, the penniless hangers-on of the aristocracy, and the meanest of "poor relations" 144 MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE living in expectancy of inheritance or preferment, and imbued with the anti-social spirit of caste. In taking a broad view of society in the United States, we see that a considerable proportion of our wage and salary workers, especially those of cer- tain occupations requiring an education beyond that of the laboring masses, are financially on a level with those people "of the middle class" in Great Britain who are regarded as in quite easy circum- stances. They exhibit this fact in their general habit of seeking purely personal satisfactions in their buying. Note these contrasts: The British co-operator, in dealing at his store, saves ha'pennies; as a type, the well-placed American wage or salary worker doesn't trouble much to save nickels, or perhaps even dimes. The customers of a co-operative store commonly buy in person and carry home their pur- chases; American butchers and grocers, even in country towns, run delivery wagons, and many housekeepers won't take the trouble to leave their own doors to give their orders. A large propor- tion in our American born working classes have too much money, too much self-centred hope, too much false pride, too many diversions, too many ambitions, to be pushed to the point of trying to MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE 145 co-operate to save on a purchase a bootblack's fee. The exclusive but virtuous key to co-operation is a copper saved; the typical native American work- ingman's purse is lined with silver, or he believes it will be, tomorrow. (2) And here is another set of contrasts: Ex- cept in a few large cities, the usual first invest- ment of a thrifty American wage-worker's savings is in a home of his own, or in a town lot. A build- ing and loan association in permanent operation, a comparatively low price for his homesite, a wide choice in location (today through the suburban electric lines), and cheapness and facility in trans- ferral of land-ownership in all these points lie advantages to the American incomparably greater than are usual to the wage-worker in Great Britain or on the Continent. These opportunities invite the saving of dollars instead of shillings, and the American standard of wages for the native-born in many cases double that of the European standard often yields the necessary dollars to the man hungering for the comfort and independence to be found under his own roof. To the individual hav- ing a few hundred dollars the inducements of a co-operative store are far less than an investment 146 MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE for himself in a town lot charged with the possi- bilities of unearned increment. (3) Here is a very great contrast: In America, to the outdoor worker who has health, sturdy char- acter, and even small means, it has always been an easy thing to turn to the soil for a living. Besides, ownership of acres has ever in this country its brilliant promise of speculative value. A bit of vacant suburban real estate, bought on the install- ment plan, has collected many a dollar from the land-gambling American wage-earner. For all Europe, in a comparative diagram of working-class outlay, the black line representing this item of ven- ture would not equal in its length the slim breadth of an exclamation mark. (4) And another contrast: In America, the or- ganized workers hold themselves ever ready to push wages upward. The promise of an increase of wages through a trade union has left the promise from a co-operative store secondary. Thrifty union members hold their extra money ready to fall back on during profitable strikes. (5) American wage-earners habitually travel far and wide over our continent, to better their jobs, to change their trade, or even to enter into busi- ness. Little of this among our British brethren. MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE 147 They are comparatively imprisoned as to space, ac- cess to the soil, change in occupation, or taking, through strikes or otherwise, any considerable in- creased share in the national production. (6) In the great cities and the large industrial and mining communities of America, a serious hindrance to co-operation is heterogeneity of popu- lation. The people of different nationalities are separated in colonies. The slow fusing in the melt- ing-pot does not usually bring neighbors of dif- ferent race and language to the point of a neces- sary mutual confidence. In Europe the "prole- tariat" of each nation has its traditional "solidar- ity." (7) In Europe, the classes that make up the co- operative movement are in general stay-at-homes. A man may live in the same town, or the same street, as did his great-grandfather. In America, the artisan follows up attractive prospects, or is driven by industrial changes, from place to place. To him "transition is opportunity," and sometimes necessity. (8) In Europe, also, movement from one finan- cial level to another comes in the career of only a small percentage of the population. In America, nearly all native workingmen have a hope of in- i 4 8 MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE dividual betterment; many have forged ahead; masses have lifted themselves through the trade unions. Continued and rapid changes in methods, machinery, and business organization send men up and down at a rate rarely equaled in other coun- tries. The possibilities of increasing their share in our enormous annual production of wealth allure all alert men to take risks. Why, then, should the strong and capable among them anchor themselves to a slow struggle for petty economies in compan- ionship with people of the tup-penny ha'penny grade? Why bother to save farthings when, some day to come, one may reach out and take dollars? Why become manager for a co-operative store at a clerk's salary, never even to be doubled, when one may enter the race for himself and possibly come out among the famous winners? Citations, these, from the American gospel of business, by which the ambitious worship. Other sets of facts bearing on the probable suc- cess of co-operation in America: (9) Some investigators of this subject have reached the conclusion that "conventional profits" of household goods are on a smaller margin in America than in Europe. In other words, com- petition in trade in this country is the more acute. MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE 149 Department stores, mail order houses, installment firms offer the customer inducements not to be matched by a budding co-operative store. (10) Especially, the system of seasonal bargain sales, when goods are "sold below cost," would be difficult with co-operators. American women as purchasers are keen and restless bargain hunters, wits sharpened in many a shopping campaign. They go from side street basements to palatial depart- ment stores, even in the smaller cities, seeking "leaders," "reductions," "remnants," "job lots," "trading stamps," or "snaps" or "lucky finds" of any kind. (n) American wholesalers put big stocks of goods in the hands of retailers on liberal com- missions, or on low terms or long credits, taking risks beyond those common in the wholesale trade in Europe. (12) In New England, the charge was made at the trial of a defaulting co-operative manager (who had been imported from England) that the whole- salers had "bought him up" ; in the city of Wash- ington four years ago a wholesale association stifled an attempt at distributive co-operation on the part of government employes by refusing to sell goods to their store; co-operative buyers of meat in Har- 150 MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE lem last autumn complained that individual rivals were influencing the packing houses against them. (13) In America, the problem of trust owner- ship of commodities and trust manipulation of their wholesale distribution takes precedence, in the minds of most public leaders, of any problem in retail- ing. They think that co-operation can await its due turn. (14) In America, vain promises of social mar- vels, to be wrought in a day of judgment through politics, have kept the working classes in a fever at times of commercial crises when setting up co-opera- tive stores might have been their positive gain. In several of our cities and industrial centres the wage- workers are now in the political miracle-working frame of mind that obsessed the Socialists of Ger- many twenty years ago. The latter, in the last fifteen years, have wholly changed their tactics regarding co-operation, as they previously did with relation to trade unionism. In 1896, the Socialists of Ham- burg had hardly touched co-operation. Today they have co-operative societies that include more than 30,000 members, administering a great wholesale central establishment and many branches, besides slaughter-houses and building associations. In 1896, on meeting some of their leaders in Edinburgh MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE 151 at the British Trade Union Congress, I heard them talking revolutionary politics; in 1909, on visiting Hamburg with Samuel Gompers, I found that the same persons, still Socialists, had become promi- nent among the co-operatives, enthusiastically carry- ing out voluntary plans for improving society. (15) The American is characterized by quick- ness of comprehension, eagerness to make ventures, and readiness to go ahead without over-attention to details or to what seem to him the unessential or the petty features of a grand idea. But rough- and-ready methods are unsuited to co-operation. Bigness of scheme at the start is a danger. Confi- dence among the masses is of slow growth, and without it the basis of co-operative effort is inse- cure. The disregarded flaws of petty profit-mon- gering, undemocratic management, and partial joint- stock operation have brought to an end many an American co-operative society accepted for a time as "the genuine thing at last." (16) Common abuse of the term "co-operative" stands at the present time in the way of possible American co-operation. Whereas in Great Britain, or in most of the Continental countries, when a co- operative society is started, a national Co-operative Union has generally given it recognition, in America 152 MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE any association may lay claim to being co-operative, no matter the counterfeit in its nature. In the course of years of travel, on looking into the opera- tions of scores of self-styled co-operative societies in America, I found few that were not either in- tentionally spurious or fatally defective in organi- zation, faults due to an uninquiring membership. Five out of six I visited ten years ago, or even seven years ago, are dead now, or have ceased to simulate co-operation. One in Lawrence, Mass., with a membership of more than 4,000 lived and died through the encouragement of a big cloth- mill company; another, in Manhattan, claiming 2,000 members, was, for its brief day, a medium for promoting the Socialist party. (17) In the larger cities of Western Europe co- operation has had but a slight hold as compared with the industrial centres in the country districts. Many of the ventures in the United States have taken place in the big cities, where the causes for failure bear the most heavily. (18) In Great Britain, productive co-operation has followed distributive, and slowly. In the United States, direct plunges into the difficulties of co- operative factories have been innumerable, with few successes. MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE 153 (19) The ignorance of Americans as a mass re- garding cp-operation is a sore subject for its few qualified supporters in this country. To understand co-operation as a social institution founded on fixed principles and requiring certain invariable methods seems beyond the nimbleness of the average mental- ity. Any pretty scheme launched on the public by clever promoters may be popularly accepted as "co-operation." A ludicrous example of this ten- dency was recently shown when at the formation of a so-called co-operative society a circular in- tended to aid the project was handed about, in which, as a clinching attractive argument, was a quotation from Beatrice Potter's "Co-operative Movement" showing that the shares of a London supply association had increased in value enor- mously in the course of time. The authoress had in fact cited the point to prove conclusively that the supply association was a gross departure in prin- ciple from co-operation, which permits no advance in the value of shares. (20) The lack of .confidence in organization of- ficials is a serious difficulty in forming co-operative societies in America. "The buyer is the weak point in British co-operation," declares a lawyer-like "friend" of the movement. The idea is disagreeable 154 MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE enough to dash the enthusiasm of the inexperi- enced. When it is then found that in England whis- perings against buyers is not an unheard-of thing, that shady transactions have indeed at times been traced to them, faint hearts with little faith fall away from the cause. The experience of both the Old World and the New in co-operation has been ignored in the great majority of the numerous "reduce-the-cost-of -liv- ing" co-operative schemes put forth the last year or two in the United States. Few have been worth the investment of a farthing. Such projects as fol- low Rochdale co-operation, or the associate buying or selling of small groups federated, may deserve attention. Those that suggest big corporations, with a staff of officials, may be left by the wage- workers to succeed, if they can, in Wall Street. The floating of companies for every conceivable purpose is a practice as common in America, and as shrewdly followed, as the science of all 'round lying in the far East. "Here's a better scheme" is an announcement that in this country always ob- tains listeners and too often investors. It has broken down many a fair attempt at co-operation. We are offered "an improvement on the Rochdale system," or "a variation from it necessary in MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE 155 America," or a "profit-sharing form of co-opera- tion," all equally alluring and hollow. Upon one of my library shelves is a heap of letters, leaflets, pamphlets, prospectuses, a foot high, labeled "re- cent frauds, follies, and failures of so-called co- operation." Americans have yet to learn that quali- fied co-operators grounded in principle, instructed as to methods, in touch with the world movement must be developed first and co-operative estab- lishments afterward. But while these perhaps unwelcome counts and considerations may be only too true, is it not pos- sible that in our great population there may be some millions perhaps ten or even twenty to whom the co-operative movement may finally appeal? Is it not a duty of those Americans acquainted with the European movement to preach its genuine principles and see that they are not overlooked by the American public when questions of working- class progress are under discussion? British co-operators, reviewing the history of co-operative effort in America, are in accord in saying that the one common fault with nearly all of America's experiments in alleged co-operation has been that they were not co-operative at all. They have been communistic, as with the Fourierist 156 MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE phalansteries, with Ruskin, with Topolobampo ; or part co-operative, part laborite, and part political, as with the Knights of Labor in the '8os; or self- seeking joint-stock enterprises, baited with the title of co-operation. It is not to be forgotten that co-operation was a constant and disheartening failure in Great Brit- ain until its moral foundation was discovered and built upon. One example of a class in thousands of failures: In 1834 the kingdom had no less than seven hundred societies, organized to promote Owenite communities. Ten years afterward only four of them were in existence. Owen's schemes attracted enthusiasts for a time, but could not out- wear everyday discouragements. They were im- practical. Have all the disasters to alleged co-operation in the United States possibly served the purpose of clearing the way in the American mind to an ap- preciation of the only true and lasting principle of genuine co-operation, equity; to a knowledge of its principle of growth, confidence; and to a per- ception of its principle of self-government, democ- racy? Or are Americans, heedless of the lessons of failure, to go on indefinitely listening to promoters of smart or magnificent schemes, each proclaimed MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE 157 as "something better for America than the British system of co-operation, " while this, the only suc- cessful working-class co-operative method, contin- ues to spread over the face of all Europe? IX. THE RETAIL MARKETS OF PARIS- ONLY THE OUT-DOOR SUCCESSFUL. PARIS presents a wider and more varied range in methods of marketing than any other of the great cities. In seeing what Europe may teach New York in this respect, it will repay the inquirer to visit Paris first. The "basket woman", frequently seen in the nar- row streets of unfashionable Paris, brings the pub- lic market in a rudimentary stage to the homes of people of small means. In this market, as in all others, is seen the play of the interests principally concerned those of the seller, the buyer and the public authority. As seller, the basket woman is in the poorest class of ambulant street peddlers of the city. She usu- ally vends fish, fruit, flowers, or green vegetables. Her stock as she sets out on her route from the wholesale market may have cost her from a dollar to five dollars. She serves transient as well as regu- lar customers as she goes from house to house and street to street. She knows her part in the business 158 MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE 159 of huckstering. She is aware that she must sell cheaper or better fish, for example, or save her patrons, in time or convenience, more than any other vendor, of any class, if she would retain her trade. In her own appearance and in the handling of her stock she must respond to the ideas of fit- ness prevailing among her possible customers. In Paris it is to the point here to make the observa- tion she is usually obliging, tactful, cheerful and honest, a person one may deal with confident of satisfactory service. Second in this market, the consumer bargaining with the basket woman has in mind prices and qualities offered by other vendors, great and small. The consumer becomes a buyer only on being cer- tain of obtaining the desired commodity at the lowest possible outlay. Third, the public authority, in Paris, whatever the written law, extends toward the basket peddlers a generous toleration, within limits. They must not create any nuisance, through ringing door bells, in- vading private premises, littering the streets or loud crying of wares. The business of this primary market is con- trolled by the commercial principles prevailing in all markets, whatever their extent. The seller ever i6o MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE offers his goods as low as he must not invariably as low as he can and he practices his professional arts to attract a possible customer. The buyer seeks the best at the least price in money or time, or irksomeness. The public authority guards, or should guard, the general interests not a simple and well understood duty even in the case of street peddlers, as varying policies in this apparently mi- nor respect have given rise to vast differences in the development of the many public and private agencies for food distribution, and in the general cost of staple commodities as bought by the masses, in Paris, Berlin, London and New York. The basket woman may become one of the ven- dors in a tolerated curbstone line of basket people. One of the best known of these cheapest of markets is held daily in the Rue Montorgueil, which runs from the Central Market Halls north toward the Grand Boulevards. Here at times are ranged along the curb on one side of the street as many as a hundred women, with a few men, each offering for sale a small stock of fruit or market-garden prod- uce. The police toleration ends at noon, when the vendors move off. An officer on post in this street estimated the average daily earnings of these lowly tradesmen at forty to sixty cents. A shop- MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE 161 keeper, not dealing in provisions, looked on their traffic favorably. "They attract a crowd," she said, "which is good for our business." From the basket to the pushcart grade of vendor is a considerable step upward in the ranks of com- merce. Cart, scales and price-cards constitute a pushcart dealer's equipment. The Paris pushcart people have full civic recognition through special laws, carried out by the police. Licenses are free. They are issued preferably to necessitous persons having families, rendering the traffic a form of public assistance through work. A pushcart ven- dor must be a French citizen, at least thirty years of age, resident two years in Paris; he (or she) must carry a metal badge, renewable yearly, and a notebook containing his (or her) photograph. The cart is restricted in size; it must bear a num- bered plaque; it must not be drawn by an animal, nor may it carry advertisements. The pushcart peddlers may circulate freely from sunrise to mid- night in all the streets except a certain few re- stricted, including those for several hundred yards about the Central Market Halls, and also except in the street space within one hundred meters from the district markets and within forty meters from 1 62 MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE stores selling merchandise similar to their own. They must not enter houses or courtyards, either to sell or to deliver their wares. With respect to location while selling, they are classified in two divisions, one authorized to do business within an inner circle of the city, bordered by the newer ring of boulevards, and the second in an outer circle, reaching thence to the fortifications. With respect to standing at fixed stations, they are also in two legal divisions, one having assign- ments to permanent places and the other obliged to keep moving except during a sale the latter provision, in an indefinite number of cases, a dead letter, consequent upon understandings between shopkeepers, police and pushcarters. Licenses may not be hired or lent but the license-holder may have an authorized aid or substitute. The permits are well distributed throughout the city, partly through the benevolent care of ward political lead- ers. The total number of licenses is given year by year in official reports as 6,000; but the Police In- spector of Street Traffic told me he sees his way yearly to issuing 9,000. Special permits being also granted in season for vending ice-cream, holiday goods, non-spirituous drinks, etc., the number of MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE 163 live tickets for street peddling, in one form or an- other, has at times reached 18,000. Carts can be hired, ten cents a day. One effect of the city's liberal policy with peddlers, and of the fruitless outcome of arrests, is an indifference of the police to minor infractions of the peddling ordinances. "It is well to close one's eyes once in a while," ex- plained a patrolman to me, as he failed to observe some poor basket peddlers operating in a regular street market. The value of a full pushcart load of fruit or vegetables may run from six to twenty dollars; the average daily gains of the vendors is popu- larly estimated at from a dollar and a half to three dollars. The lines of pushcarts legally stationed at authorized points, or through an understood fic- tion "obliged through their continuous custom" to remain by the half -hour along some of the busy streets, such as those leading to the railway sta- tions when the commuters are going home, make up at least sixty pushcart markets, each with from ten to a hundred carts, in operation every day in the streets and open spaces of Paris. These irregular pushcart markets, however, have no connection with the established municipal open- air general provision markets, of which there are 164 MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE thirty. All but five of the latter have been established since 1873; fifteen, in fact, since 1885. They came into vogue twenty-five years after the housed retail system was established. They are distributed in fifteen of the twenty wards of the city, the greater number in the poorer districts. Some are in city squares; others in the central roadways of boule- vards; others in narrow streets, on the sidewalks; a few under elevated stretches of the Metropolitan Railway, though this location is not favored owing to drafts and dampness. In all, the thirty have 6,296 stands fruit and vegetables taking up 2,600; meat 540; butter, cheese and eggs 430; bread 77 ; delicatessen 308 ; fish 402 ; manufactured merchandise 991. The vendors, at two and a half to a stand, would thus number more than 15,000; but many of the holders have stand-rights in more than one market, though not in two markets in one day. Twelve of the thirty open-air markets are held three times a week and eighteen twice. Sunday is the best day. The obligatory payments for a stand, two meters by two (a meter is 39.37 inches), in- clusive of rent, cleaning up and pro rata assess- ment for a flat canvas roof which extends over a row of stands, runs from fifteen to twenty cents a MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE 165 day, with option to hire also tables and side and back curtains at eight cents. The several parts of the stand equipment are furnished by a contrac- tor, who collects all dues. The number of stands in the open-air markets is restricted, and in 1912 only four had places vacant. A stand is an own- er's property, subject with its good will to inheri- tance. French writers on the subject expatiate on the prosperity of these marketmen. One hears that some of the standholders own market gardens near Paris, buy in large quantities at wholesale at the Central Markets, or order direct by rail from the country, to supply themselves and other stand- keepers or corner grocers. They are also reputed to be rich owners of Paris tenement houses, gov- ernment bonds, etc. ! In station of life they are provision dealers, quite apart from the pushcart caste. Official reports give the waiting time for vacant places in each open-air market, usually a mat- ter of years, in cases twenty. The standing appli- cations for places on record last year were more than 17,000. Every point in the operation of a Paris municipal outdoor market is subject to official regulation. The contractor may not begin arranging the stands or erecting the covers until a certain hour the 166 MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE evening before a stated market day. He must ob- serve a prescribed uniformity in the dimensions of the stands and in the height of the continuous cover, which is of canvas, "fortified" at every half- meter by a scantling, its supports iron rods planted in dents in the asphalt paving. He must set about removing his equipment and cleaning the market site and streets a quarter of an hour after the market closes. The vendors must be French citi- zens; they cannot sublet their stalls; they may sell only the commodities named in their permits. They must unload their wagons before market hours, haul them off to their stables or to street stations apart from the market movement, and not reload until market closing. They must keep in full pub- lic view their tables or chopping blocks on which are prepared commodities for customers. They may not hang up on their stands any sign or ad- vertisement, except a plaque having on it the own- er's name and address. They may not place ob- structions of any sort in the public way; must not "bark," nor call passers-by away from other stands, nor go in front of their own stands to serve cus- tomers. Nor may they act as guides to the mar- ket, or distribute business cards bearing an outside address. Buying for resale in the market specu- MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE 167 lation and transfer of stock from place to place within it are prohibited. How boxes, barrels, bas- kets, litter may be disposed of is prescribed. Most of the commodities must be sold by weight, those to be sold by the piece, bunch, or measure being named. The signal for opening and closing the market is the official bell; the usual hours are from nine o'clock until three. For the enforcement of the rules the only public functionaries usually visi- ble are a few policemen. Acts calling for their intervention are rare. The value of the stock on a stand runs as high as four hundred dollars. Some of the butchers keep five persons busy, cutting and serving the meat and receiving the money. A part of the fruit and vegetable supply is hauled direct from the market- garden country near Paris, but most of it is bought by the vendors at the Central Halls. Much of the meat, especially veal, comes from country butchers. Poultry and rabbits are cut up in parts for sale by the pound; the dressing of poultry in the markets is prohibited, but rabbits are killed and skinned at some of the stands, buyers paying three cents extra per pound to be thus assured the meat is fresh. No matter what the weather rain, snow, or thermometer at freezing the outdoor markets are 1 68 MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE busy; generally they are crowded. The attendance is mostly by people of the working class, though in several of the west-end markets Breteuil, Neuilly, Pont de 1'Alma many well-to-do house- wives attend, their maids with them to carry their purchases. Few buyers have a basket. More con- venient is their shopper's bag of wide-meshed net- work, with a double valise handle. Excepting the large fruits and vegetables, goods are usually put up in wrappers by the vendors. Buyers almost in- variably take their purchases home themselves. The market authorities recognize four categories of vegetables, all good. Likewise, the other com- modities on sale have their varying qualities, sev- eral frequently on a single stand, their different prices indicated on the price cards, in the absence of which customers are apt to pass by. The general level of the quality of the stock varies in different markets, according to the length of purse of "the average customer" in each. As to prices, they are influenced by several factors, apart from usual market conditions of season and supply. The city duties are an important factor. Then, within five minutes' walk of any open-air market, are push- carts, singly or in a line, and close at hand, brought to life through the "commercial atmosphere" of MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE 169 the market, are rows of shops, their stock com- posed in part of the same commodities as those in the market; the cafe sidewalks become for the day flower markets, if nothing more ; any private vacant lots near a market are fully taken up with tempo- rary stands. The vendors of "perishables," in and out of the regular market, wish to avoid carrying any of their stock away. In case of a surplus, the last moments therefore bring a scramble for the remnants of stock at cut prices. The proportion of all the foodstuffs sold in Paris that is handled by the pushcart and open-air market vendors is not officially known. But inasmuch as estimate was made for me at the Bureau of Statis- tics for France that the value of the fruit and vegetables annually consumed in the city is at least $35,000,000 and may be $50,000,000, if the num- ber of peddlers and open-air standholders dealing in these commodities be assumed to average no more than five thousand per day, it would require only a daily sale by each vendor of eight dollars' worth of stock (total, $40,000) to amount to more than $14,000,000 a year. Roughly, then, a third of the retail dealings in these commodities, it is quite certain, is by the street methods indicated. It may be much more. The market and peddler 170 MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE sale of common flowers is in larger proportion. The open-air meat, poultry, butter, cheese and eggs stalls, though numbered by the hundreds, dispose of a smaller proportion of their respective goods than in the case of fruit and vegetables. Paris has ten open-air retail flower markets, hav- ing 680 stalls occupied : besides, basket women sell flowers in the streets. At the wholesale flower market of the Halls, 97 places are taken up by dealers in the flowers of southern France. Besides the officially recognized open-air markets are several tolerated Sunday morning markets in streets immemorially given over to the sale of mis- cellaneous articles the incongruous displays of the Rue Mouffetard, the "flea" market of the Rue St. Medard. Just outside the city line the forti- fications are "fairs" such as that of Bicetre, held several days a week, at least one of them having, on more than a thousand places in line, an astonish- ing collection of miscellaneous things salable that would require a goodly volume to catalogue. A low estimate of the number of licensed regu- lar open-air retail vendors of Paris would be 20,- ooo ; it may at times be 30,000; while a census of the tolerated irregulars no authority has attempted. As we have seen, there are 9,000 pushcart vendors, MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE] 171 many having substitutes, more than 6,000 open-air market stands, all having assistant salespeople, and numerous occasional license holders. Besides are 1,300 keepers of kiosques, booths, and handcarts not selling provisions. Not in this count are the waiters for 10,000 outdoor cafe and other tables and peripatetic attendants for 19,000 shop sidewalk displays ! Next in the list of the various forms of Paris markets come the public market-houses. This di- vision of the municipal system, which includes the Central and district "halls," was for the most part completed fifty years ago in the '6os. Of the district houses there are now nineteen owned and operated by the municipality and four owned by it but operated privately through conces- sions. All, with but two exceptions, are in a state of decadence, despite the efforts of the market au- thorities to contrive means for making them popu- lar or to reduce the expenses of their maintenance. One, the twentieth, was closed in the spring of the present year. From time to time parts of several have been turned over to other public uses to the army, to the fire department, to the city laundry service. In six of the houses, the tenants of 700 stalls were two years ago accorded reduced rates; 172 MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE in three, half rents were given for the summer months. In connection with others, outside stalls were opened in the streets. Notwithstanding these helpful measures, the vacant stalls last year, out of a total of 3,231 yet remaining, numbered 1,189. The gross receipts of fourteen of the municipal houses failed to equal five per cent on the value of their sites and buildings, with operating expenses yet unaccounted for. In this financial situation, these market-houses call for little special consid- eration here as to methods of operation, which, in fact, mainly consist merely of dividing them into small stalls the unit two meters by two lighting and cleaning the establishment, and leaving the rest to the stall-holders. Says the most recent French writer on the markets of Paris (Robert Facque, 1911): "The district halls are doomed to disap- pear." As the public market-houses of Paris have gone down, its merchants' modern grocery and provision houses have come up. The simple grocery of fifty years ago has become a market, with every sort of produce in one salesroom or a series of rooms, in the hands of a single proprietor. Even in the smaller stores, one line of commodities after an- other not kept in the old-time dry grocery has been MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE 173 added vegetables, poultry, meats, delicatessen, etc. The big provision store, with a delivery sys- tem, deals largely in luxuries, choice "bottled goods," or the canned and potted fruits and pre- serves that have become necessaries, not commonly found in the public markets, thus especially attract- ing the moneyed class of buyers. Forty of the leading general provision stores of Paris carry on a business of more than $200,000 a year each, as reported by the retail grocers' secretary, and the annual sales of one firm, having four great houses in the city and numerous branches in the country, amount to twenty million dollars. While the open- air markets, the pushcart vendors, and to Some extent the co-operative stores of Paris, have been luring customers away from the district market halls, these big newly developed private provision stores have taken a large share of the same pat- ronage. Every observer of the methods of selling pro- visions whom I interviewed during a half year in Paris placed the open-air markets, together with the pushcarts, far above every other form of ser- vice for the masses. X. THE "CENTRAL HALLS" OF PARIS- COMPETITORS ILLEGAL. THE Central Market Halls of Paris are situated in the heart of the city. Being a quarter of a mile from the River Seine and a mile from the nearest railway freight station, they are not well placed for today's speedy methods of transporting coun- try produce from afar. The "Halls" consist of ten square pavilions, uniform in design, ranged in two equal rows. Each pavilion covers a floor area of about fifty yards by fifty. They are separated by wide street-ways, all, with one exception, roofed in. Thus six pavilions are massed under one set of roofs and four under another. Except the brick foundations, reaching ten feet above the ground, and having numerous "grill" openings, the pavilion walls are of iron and glass, as are the roofs, in the style of the London Crystal Palace. There are no upper stories or galleries, only the ground floor being available for trade. Storage room is in the basement, but its actual uses are few, such as stow- ing away baskets and packing cases. There is no cold 174 MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE 175 storage space in any of the city property ; the "per- ishable" provisions coming to the market being mostly sold the day of their arrival. An electric light plant and a municipal laboratory take up parts of the Halls, below and above ground. In all, the area occupied by the pavilions and their covered ways is, roughly, eight and a half acres equaling that between Seventh and Eighth avenues and Forty-second and Forty-fourth streets, New York. Of the ten pavilions now standing, the first was opened in 1857, most of the others before 1870, the last in 1898. There has been a city market on the same site, or in the immediate locality, since the twelfth century. By two writers of books on the markets of Paris, the cost of site and improve- ments of the present Halls is put at $13,000,000. In the open, bordering on the Halls, and adja- cent in the streets leading to it, some slantwise, forming broad spaces, is held in the early morning daily (except Monday from September to May) the principal wholesale fruit and vegetable division of the market. As a whole, the many connected parts of the street roadways given to this purpose are called "the Square," a name coming down from the remote time when the adjacent square of the Church of the Innocents was occupied on market 176 MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE days by country produce growers. The Square may be extended at will in all directions, indefi- nitely, by taking up additional adjoining street space. The provisions to be sold at the Halls, either in the Square or within the pavilions, begin arriving at eleven o'clock at night, brought by wagons either from the railway stations or from the country about Paris or by a minor local freight track running direct to the Halls from a market gardening dis- trict near the city. Three-fifths of the supply comes from the railway freight stations. In the Square each seller, if a regular attendant at the market, takes possession of a station he rents by the month, or, if a transient, goes to a place as- signed him in the order of his arrival, the growers in an inner and the dealers (who must be owners of their loads) in an outer zone. Much of the produce of one kind cauliflower, beans, peas goes to its particular part of the Square for the convenience of buyers. All goods must be unloaded and set down on the pavement, much being in crates or bags. The draft animals and wagons of the marketmen are taken in charge by official guar- dians and until reclaimed by their owners stood in streets just beyond reach of the market traffic. By MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE 177 this removal there is a triple gain in available market space, and consequently in concentration, safety, order, cleanliness and general convenience. According to the official reports, the Square sells more than 50 per cent, in weight, of all the pro- visions arriving at the Halls. Since 1907, a con- siderable, but variable, adjoining part of the open Square, dependent upon the amount of consign- ments of fruit and vegetables to the licensed com- mission men, is fenced in with the pavilions and the covered ways, and by a fiction of the adminis- tration included in official reports with the market Halls proper. One effect of this change has been to confuse comparisons, in the annual statistics of the markets, between the proportions of the busi- ness done in the Square and in the pavilions. Ac- tually, nearly 60 per cent of all the sales of the Central Markets, in weight, take place in the Square. Many of the stores and warehouses of the vari- ous streets facing the Square are occupied by un- licensed commission men. Jointly, these places of business are known as the "Free Halls/' the firms in them not being subject to the market regulations. The President of the Association of Free Commis- sion Dealers in Fruits and Out-of-Season Vege- 1 78 MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE tables says its eighty members sell by wholesale or retail two-thirds of the shipments of their special- ties which enter Paris. Free dealers in meat and in butter, cheese and eggs, and in other com- modities are in the neighborhood. A decline in the sale of the city meat pavilions is attributed by the chief director of the Halls to the operations of the wholesale butchers of the vicinity. The only large cold storage house in Paris, that beneath the Prod- uce Exchange, adjoining the Halls, is owned by a company, its consignments chiefly meat. The free commission men's advantages over the market- house licensed commission men lie in the posses- sion of warehouse storage room, in giving credit, in delivering sales by wagon, in economies in handling goods, in either buying outright from producers or selling on commission, in soliciting business unrestrictedly and especially in encourag- ing foreign importations, and in keeping in hand a mixed stock, such as nuts, preserves, canned goods, and similar commodities, not regularly sold or pro- vided in the Halls. Besides, their sales are not confined to the market hours; they thus can save time for their clients; they hold over produce not finding a ready sale in the market. They represent "grand commerce" rather than "small commerce." MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE 179 They are accredited with introducing to Paris the Spanish orange and the Florida grapefruit. Their relations with shippers and buyers, not being sub- ject to official supervision, are devoid of red-tape formalities. "It is incontestable," says the author of "Les Halles de Paris/' "that their transactions tend to increase." Several writers on the subject say that their competition with the licensed mar- ket-house men, whom they spur up, is profitable to the public. They themselves complain that the ad- ministration discriminates against them and seeks to put them under the market-house rules without conferring on them any benefits. During market hours those of them fronting the Square may not in displaying their stock take up more space than half a meter from their house wall. They say it is an injustice to permit provision dealers not hav- ing stores or warehouses to take places in the Square, while they are excluded. They have suc- cessfully denied the right of the authorities to im- pose on them the market commission license, plead- ing that other commission merchants selling mer- chandise of various kinds throughout the city are not subject to such prescriptions. Within the Hall pavilions, one-third the entire stall space is occupied by retailers. As in the dis- i8o MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE trict markets, titles to the retail stores are non- transferable. In general, the rules are the same as for the open-air district markets. But the Cen- tral retail markets are open every day, the hours from four in the morning to eight in the evening. In the main fruit and vegetable pavilions, where the stallholders are nearly all women, are 283 stalls, two meters by two, 40 being occupied by flower vendors, and in another pavilion the fruit and vegetable stalls number 82. The majority of the retailers in all the pavilions, except that for meat, are women. Although street vending, with its competition, is prohibited within several blocks of the Halls, the number of retail stalls in them is steadily diminishing. In 1901 1,164, there re- mained in 1911 but 841 occupied and 62 vacant. Row after row of little stalls, carrying stocks much alike, with quite unvarying prices, strike the ob- server as an economic anomaly. They present no especial inducement to the family custom of dis- tant residential districts. "Their sole advantage," said one of the market officials, "is in the fresh- ness of their fruit and vegetables." But even on this point there is doubt, since the heaps many deal- ers carry on their stands over night suggest that their extra storage stalls are kept replenished from MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE 181 the remnants or a glut in the Square. These re- tail stallholders are the market descendants of an- cient small cultivators who in this manner sold their produce in the city. Their number is being reduced in part by the administration of the Halls in increasing the wholesale space, and in part by the competition of vendors of all classes through- out the city, many of whom practice improved methods, and most of whom, by common report, offer their patrons more civil treatment than the Hall women, who have been known to employ freely a billingsgate of their own. In five of the ten pavilions, wholesaling and re- tailing are carried on under the same roof, but in two compartments. There are two classes of wholesale stallholders. In the smaller class are 154 dealers not commission men who buy and sell on their own account. Their trade is restricted to two commodities oysters (17 dealers) and the "fifth quarter" the viscera of slaughtered ani- mals (137 dealers). All the other wholesalers, 437 operating 239 posts, are merely legalized sell- ing agents, working on commission. These licensed market-house commission men are subject to strict regulations ; thirty out of the sixty- two "articles" of the code relating to the Halls 1 82 MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE apply to them. They must be French citizens, have a clean judicial record, and give bonds for at least $1,000. They may not carry on a commerce in the commodities they sell, nor own a share in any pro- vision store or warehouse, in Paris or the prov- inces. If they falsify auction sales, severe penalties await them. At every post, or stall, must be kept in triplicate a record of its sales the book itself be- ing retained by the seller, one stub sent to the ship- per and the other going to the authorities. Each commission man (or firm) holds for a year a post proportional to his business for three years; he cannot sublet; he may sell at auction or direct to single buyers, as instructed by the shipper; he can- not deliver on orders, but must bring to the Halls all goods shipped to him ; he, or his clerks, must an- nounce aloud the price after each sale and at once send the lot sold out of the pavilion. Every item is prescribed which he may enter in his charges against the shipper transportation, cartage, cus- toms and octroi duties, market dues, cost of weigh- ing, letters, telegrams, postal orders, porter's pay, unloading charges, and costs of storage! For the sale of meats, poultry and game, and butter, cheese and eggs, additional special charges are per- missible. Sales can be made only to persons pres- MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE 183 ent on the spot, and only of goods forwarded to the market by producers or shippers "goods from first hands" and not from speculators. No re- sales at wholesale of any commodities are permis- sible in any part of the market. The percentage of the sales at auction in the market commission men's dealings varies for the different commodities. In 1911 it was, for butter, 95.1; for soft cheese, 94.7; for hard cheese, 7.7; for eggs, 24; for meat, 19.8; for game and poul- try, 15.8; for fruit and vegetables, 17. No fish were sold at auction, though the two fish pavilions are among the most important in the Halls. The critics of the system of auctioning at whole- sale in the Halls say that the sales by this method are diminishing; that the process is slow, causing tradesmen to lose time; that the poorer qualities of several commodities, the leavings after the day's stock has been picked over, "gravitate" to the auc- tion benches; that, for instance, while only 17.6 per cent of all the sales of meat for 1911 came from the municipal slaughterhouses, the percent- age arriving by rail from distant places being 76.5, the proportion of the sales at auction was less than 20 per cent, usually the less choice cuts; that, finally, the buyers are quite invariably dealers, or 1 84 MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE hotel or restaurant men, and not consumers repre- senting families. On the other hand, the conviction is widespread among the public that the auctioning is the most important economic function of the pavilions. It is the regulator of all the market. Its prices are public, certain, recorded, not subject to dispute, secrecy or misrepresentation. They be- come known within a day to buyers generally, in city and province. Producers can judge by them the trend of prices ; consumers can know the profits of retailers. In reality, the prices of most of the direct sales by the commission men are governed by their auction sales. A large buyer, seeing the auc- tion price of a certain grade of any kind of provi- sions, will give his order direct at the same price. The auctioning system forestalls various abuses. Commission men cannot keep up market-rates through collusion; there can be no monopoly of commodities through holding them back from sale; the tendency of sellers to exaggerate the factors for dearness is counteracted by the opinions of a crowd of buyers who see reasons for cheapness: artificial interruptions to direct trade between pro- ducers and consumers are set aside. Several suc- cessive handlers of provisions are rendered un- necessary; no profit stands between producer and MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE 185 consumer nothing but the commissions of the seller, usually three to five per cent of the selling price. Typical of the care with which every step has by law to be taken by the licensed commission men is the daily verification of the current market rates in all the wholesale sections. At the close of business, the prices are officially "established" and made public by a committee composed of the prin- cipal Police Inspector and three of the commission men dealing with each commodity. The more striking processes of the Paris Central Markets as a whole illustrate rule and regulation striving sometimes, it is true, in vain to bring fair play, equality, and system to the scene of the scramble of a multitude for profit. The physical boundaries of the market end with the outer limits of the Square, but its direct commercial influence spreads to the Produce Exchange close by, to the "Free Halls" of the neighborhood, to the whole- sale quarter of the Boulevard Sevastopol just be- yond, to the great private markets, two of which lie within a stone's throw of the Halls, and through these and other agencies to all parts of France. The crop of beans in one province, and of cauli- flower in another, are sown and reaped with a view to the demand at the Halls. De Maroussem, sym- 1 86 MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE pathetic critic of the Halls, gives these points : The numerous gardeners within driving distance, ten to thirty miles, hold their produce back as they are best able, and maneuvre in their hunt for buyers, according to prices prevailing in Paris. Some of them, even on their road to the Halls, after passing the examination of the octroi officials at the gates, are open to selling their loads in the lump. Or, during the market hours, they will transfer their stock to petty speculators \villing to run the risks of fluctuating prices and this violation of the law. At the Halls or at home, any producer is usually glad to sell what he is hauling, or engage what he is growing, direct to a single buyer representing private market, or hotel, or speculator. On the ground, at the Halls, the three to five hundred wagons, according to season, arrive from the coun- try and the freight stations before the opening hour. The day's stock is unloaded and arranged before the bell rings 3 o'clock in the summer, 4 in the winter. But already the wise ones, sellers and buyers, have gained cognizance of the supply, its variety, proportions, and qualities. Picking and choosing, in the pavilions and in the Square, for the big stores, the great hotels, the high-priced res- taurants the aristocracy among the buyers has MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE 187 been going on actively; the illicit agents being the hall women, the porters and apparently green coun- trymen among the sellers themselves, delivery to take place after the bell. First choice thus gone, at highest prices, the day's values settle in accord- ance with common judgment as to the remaining supply and the yet active demand. The quantity taken of the run of the market by the known heavy buyers is the largest factor in setting prices. Word as to the current figures is passed around. Selec- tion by buyers then takes place on apparent qual- ity, acquaintanceship, or bargain finding. All the arts of sellers, every form of higgling known to buyers, are in full play. An hour before the clos- ing bell 8 a. m. summer, 9 o'clock winter an overstocked market sees a slump in prices. Half an hour more brings to the Square the petty specu- lators who will buy out the stock remaining to a country producer and playing off as his representa- tive sell it to late comers. In the last moments, a swarm of pushcart people and other small vendors capture what is left. A notable circumstance is the small amount of the entire stock brought to the market which is taken away unsold or put into storage under the Halls. Within the Halls, the procedure of the Square is to some extent fol- 1 88 MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE lowed, but there the hours for sales at auction and at retail differ for the various commodities. In the rush of the market the fine points of the code are sometimes overlooked. Official porters, in placing the transient sellers on their driving in, may favor the heaviest tip ; nor may they, or other guar- dians of the law, look too narrowly into questions of owner or agent, dealer or speculator. Buyers at retail may be accommodated by sellers at whole- sale. The opening bell merely signifies publicity of sales where there has been secrecy. The buyer must look sharp that the seller's weights and meas- ures do not get mixed, to the latter's advantage. The unsophisticated owner of a heap of produce in the Square had best keep it, all of it, constantly under his eye. It is well that many of the various commodities are in packages, duly lettered as to origin, grade, trade mark and owner. The Halls attract idlers, "runners," porters, "shoestring" peddlers, keepers of soup stands; in its vicinity are scores of restaurants and hotels, cheap and dear, honest and "shady." A curious feature one of many is the hundred or so of vendors of "little heaps" of greens of all sorts, mostly old women, and of second hand goods and cheap knicknacks, who are allowed after market MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE 189 hours to display their stock on the sidewalk in front of several of the pavilions. In its management, the market employs a large force. The Prefecture of the Seine is represented by 322 outdoor agents, from Chief Inspector down to weighers and guardians, and the Prefecture of the Police by a market squad of more than 100 officers and 30 veterinaries and inspectors of sales. Besides, there are 608 official porters, with 400 aids; then there are 3,000 registered porters not in the guild, to do the carrying outside the Hall precincts. There are 90 egg candlers, six meat markers, and a number of laboratory inspectors and employes. Attached to the markets or off in the City Hall are bureaus in which the commis- sion men's stubs are revised, accounts in general checked up, daily bulletins of the official prices current verified and published, the city's books of the management kept, and an annual report made out containing statistical summaries for all the market plants of the municipality. Employers and employes in every branch of trade in the markets are "syndicated." Thus unofficial regulation helps out the official! The rents for places at the market run from six cents a day for two square meters in the Square to igo MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE six dollars a week for a post in the wholesale meat pavilion. Besides are tolls on the quantities sold. The total wholesale business of the Halls proper, while not declining in the same measure as the retail, fails to keep pace with the growth of the city. Already in 1893, De Maroussem recorded a large actual falling away in their sales of meat, fruit, oysters, cheese and butter. While the popu- lation increased more than 200,000 from 1901 to 1911, the wholesale market sale of meat, game and poultry, and butter, cheese and eggs remained nearly stationary. The causes for decline usually assigned in official reports are outside direct sales, especially to the big stores, and the illegal markets carried on at the railway freight stations. Direct sales are promoted through improved facilities of communication and transportation; produce-ex- change methods are supplanting those of the mar- ket-place ; products are bought, on sample, in large quantities deliverable at future dates. The rail- way freight stations are called by the Hall officials "interloping markets," as no unofficial wholesale market-places are permitted in the city. However, if a dealer orders a car-load of garden stuff from the country and at the station sells half of it to another dealer, that, the railroad managers say, is MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE 191 not their business. Thus, a rival market to the Halls finds a foundation, clandestine but substan- tial. The cumbrous and over-elaborate official man- agement of the Halls occasionally evokes from the Paris press the epithet "chinoiserie !" Which sig- nifies to Parisians that in China the false motions of omnipresent bureaucratic administration have paralyzed efficiency, brought a train of evasions of the law, and muddled results. XL THE MORIBUND BERLIN MARKET SYSTEM ITS LESSON FOR NEW YORK. WHEN "the public market system of Berlin" is mentioned, the impression given is naturally that of a single large municipality, comprising the en- tirety of a massed population, having market-houses methodically distributed throughout its area. This is not so. Berlin is only one municipal corpora- tion in an aggregate of many. Its boundaries, im- aginary lines, join those of crowded built-up sub- urban municipalities, the streets continuous. Where Berlin ends and suburbs begin may be learned only on inquiry. Berlin proper has two million inhabi- tants; the suburbs have nearly two millions more. The limits of Berlin the city have a freakish ir- regularity marked off in the course of time on no consistent plan within the greater metropolitan area. Why Charlottenburg, with nearly three hun- dred thousand inhabitants, its streets running into those of Berlin, its general appearance that of newer Berlin, its people served by Berlin trades- 192 MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE 193 men, should not be a part of Berlin, can be under- stood only on knowing the development of the two municipalities, now apparently one city and really one place. The market system which we have to consider is that of Berlin only, the heart of the total urban agglomeration. Berlin has experiment- ed with one system of markets; its suburbs with a totally different system. Berlin's system was established between 1886 and 1893. The wholesale market was erected not far from the centre of the city proper, and the district markets, in view of their expected patronage, were well placed within the city limits. All the market- houses are substantially built of red brick; their retail stall arrangement is rows of vendors' places, two meters by two, the usual public market plan; some parts of the buildings that could not be util- ized as stalls were fitted up to bring in revenues as stores, storage rooms and cellars, and even dwell- ing apartments. Storm doors, stove heating, plenty of running water, "sanitary arrangements" are fea- tures of the market outfit. The operation of the system has brought no official scandal. To bolster up its business, open-air markets were forbidden, and in 1898 the sales of street peddlers near the halls, and in fact in all the prominent streets of 194 -MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE the city, were totally suppressed. All was favor- able to the undertaking, if setting up carefully planned market-houses, conducting them with Ger- man system, and completely shutting off public competition with them were to be the chief factors of success. Berlin's Central Markets are two brick buildings, not of imposing proportions, considering their pur- poses, standing side by side in a closely built-up street, one given mainly to wholesale and the other to retail transactions. The two houses front on rather a narrow thoroughfare and in the rear join, above a yard, a spur of the city elevated road which serves the market's freight-car traffic. Discharge of train loads is along an outside platform into the halls. On the remaining sides of the buildings space is wanting, considering the street traffic in connection with the markets. Together, the two buildings have a floor area rentable in stalls equal to two-fifths the stall space in the pavilions of the Paris Central Halls. There being no adequate out-door place for market-gar- deners' wagons, sales are almost wholly from the dealers' stalls in the interior. Thus the total sell- ing space becomes less than one-tenth the total of the Paris Central Market Halls and Square. The MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE 195 rents, however, in the two Berlin houses aggregate $350,000 as against $600,000 for the ten Paris pavilions or $800,000 for the pavilions and the Square. The monopoly of the city of Berlin in its wholesale market is protected in its integrity. Rentals are put up to a point which, short of driv- ing tenants away, makes probable the avoidance of a deficit in the annual operations. In the interior of the halls, the wholesale stalls fail to suggest by their size possibilities of a rush- ing metropolitan business by the holders. The rows of retail stalls are of the common type. Each hall has a gallery on all sides. In one are offices of the administrative force, but most of the gallery space is occupied by sample farm implements, produce cases, or other objects in storage, and not as deal- ers' stalls. The various uses of the two buildings, known as No. i and No. la, in the system, are to be seen in this official estimate of their receipts for 1912: For cellar room, No. i, 44,000 marks; No. i a, 27,500 marks; restaurants and restaurant- keepers' dwelling apartments, i, 25,200; la, 16,175; cold storage room, la, 43,000; various spaces (counting-rooms, selling posts for middlemen, out- side places, "niches," and others), i, 101,705; la, II >459; P r ra *a special rents, i, 720; la, 720; 196 MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE water, i, 14,300; la, 300; regular standholders, i, 576,000; i a, 680,000; transients, i, 63,000; la, 93,000; cleaning market police station, .1, 440; use of market railroad freight station, i, 160,000; i a, 160,000; pension assessments, i, 140; la, 140; unclassified, i, 3,486; la, 3,476. Total, i, 989,- 391 ; i a, 1,035,770 marks. The annual expendi- tures for 1912 for the two halls, inclusive of inter- est on outstanding bonds and amortisation and "writing off" (15,310 marks), were to be, for No. i, 704,849; No. la, 708,109 marks. The excess of receipts over expenditures therefore was to be, No. i, 284,542; No. la, 327,661 marks. Total, 612,203 ($153,000). No accounting is made in this esti- mate for the paid-off capital of the investment in the buildings. Nor has a reserve fund been formed to meet the large outlay in removing the market soon to a new site. The finances of the system are further considered in Chapter XIV. Auctioning is the one significant feature of these wholesale markets. Large spaces are set off for the six licensed and regulated commissioners. Late in the day the meat and poultry auctioneers are busy. The crowd in attendance is not apparently made up wholly of dealers, as women, perhaps boarding- house keepers, buy five chickens or a heavy piece MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE 197 of meat and carry their purchases off themselves, usually in the German black oil-cloth marketing bag. The assistant inspector, who on one occasion showed me over the market, assured me of the importance of the auction sections. This point seems to be undisputed. The American Consul- General at Berlin wrote in a report March 6, 1909: "Although it is estimated that they (the auction- eers) handle only about one-fifth of the total wares received at the Central Market Hall, it is neverthe- less conceded that they indirectly prevent the ex- tortion by the private wholesale dealer upon the producer or dealer on the one hand and upon the consumer or retailer on the other hand." In 1911 the auctioneers sold, among other commodities, two million "pieces'* of game and poultry. Of the ten district halls in operation in Berlin, in 1911 two had stall space rented to the extent of 98.4 and 91 per cent, respectively, although a fall- ing off in both had taken place from 1909, when TOi.2 and 96.6 per cent was reported. For the other eight halls the percentage rented ran, 1909, 55.7; 1910, 50.8; 1911, 46.5. These are the aver- ages for the whole year. The halls generally pre- sent one-half to four-fifths of their stalls bare. The market space shown by the reports as occu- 1 9 8 MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE pied includes the stalls in which have recently taken place the municipal sales of fish and meat. In Octo- ber, 1911, on a city appropriation, a municipal busi- ness (or philanthropy) in cheap sea fish was be- gun. On the one hand, the market management made contracts with coast fishermen, or dealers, for the supply, and, on the other, contracts with stall-holders for the sales. The management as- sisted in the selling by bulletin and poster adver- tising and by means of huge canvas signs in the market halls indicating the location of the favored stands. At the beginning the number of the munic- ipal market fish dealers was 65; in March, 1912, 29 remained. The municipality has also begun, by means of an appropriation of 400,000 marks, the sale of fresh meat. Contractors in Russia, benefited by a special reduction in the tariff, furnish most of the supply, and stall-holders in the markets, to the number of 178, began carrying on sales on a 10 per cent commission. The outcome, not yet accessible in the printed reports, evoked from the Chief Inspector the opinion that if the poor of Berlin should not buy this municipally provided meat they could not be in a serious state of dep- rivation. The Chief Inspector of the Central Markets MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE 199 recognizes as a fact the rapid decadence of the dis- trict market system as a whole, and also the failure of housed market-stall selling to bring the prices of food to their lowest reasonable level a small percentage above producers' prices. Summarized, these are his explanations: In the last twenty-five years the methods of the Berlin private provision dealers have changed; many now have what may be called markets, small or large. The big stores of a certainty possess over the public markets the advantages they advertise. Next, the rapid spread of Berlin and the suburbs has driven the market- garden areas far out from the public halls ; no pro- vision for the accommodation of producers while selling exists in the city, about the markets or else- where. The market stalls, once occupied by pro- ducers, now have in them simply dealers middle- men striving for profits in buying. These deal- ers represent to producers that the market is al- ready overstocked, and in selling they tell consum- ers that products are scarce and dear. They have a trade understanding as to the level at which prices may be kept, according to season, and rather than break this syndicate scale by a pfennig they will let offerings by the producers rot and go to the river dump. United, they have a sort of monopoly 200 MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE in the market business. They are not tactful with purchasers and they give no credit. They fail to take account of newly developed forms of compe- tition. Consumers of the poorer class living a long walking distance from the market-houses save time, and perhaps money, in dealing with neighborhood grocers who will sell at market prices ; recently, also, co-operative stores have taken a share of the trade. Families who buy through the telephone deal with the big stores, where also the women get their pro- visions when shopping for other goods. In his official report for 1911 this inspector mentions as competitors of the public markets the numerous provision stores in every quarter, the big stores which carry a large choice of stock, the private market, the street vendors, and the close-at-hand open public markets of the suburban towns and cities. When reminded that the municipal market system of Berlin had been the subject of much laudatory descriptive writing by certain sociologists, in and out of Germany, and that the verdict of time, after a thorough trial, had been certainly against the dis- trict halls as a whole, the chief Inspector expressed the conviction that the trial had been a fair one and the outcome instructive of better methods. MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE 201 The halls had been well placed, well conducted, well protected; the recent experiments as to in- creased rentals and municipal selling of fish and meat had no doubt attained their best possible re- sults. The error had been in theory, not in prac- tice. He was now convinced that the true munic- ipal principle was the encouragement of street selling, including adoption of the open-air system of Berlin's suburbs. Even with the ruinous dis- crimination against them, the street hucksters of the city wagon men and pushcart people now numbered about 1,400. He had decided that theirs was a business beneficial to the masses. In its policy heretofore the municipality had differed with the imperial authorities, who favor selling in the open. He would much like to see, especially, fruits from America and the Southern European coun- tries sold from carts in the streets of the city. The children could and should have the nourishment of the banana, as yet dear in Berlin and having little sale among its poor. Imported fruit generally was "double the prices" in London. An effective part of the street peddlers' traffic was the speedy sale of any surplus coming to the market; in twenty- four hours, for example, they had sold out an over- supply of apples, which otherwise would have re- 202 MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE mained on the hands of shippers or wholesalers. Thus produce was not lost to the public. When questioned as to the remarkable develop- ment of the big provision stores of Berlin, the Chief Inspector said that it was true that some of their prices were lower than the market stall-hold- ers' prices, while their stock was of greater variety. They were doing work that the public markets had been intended to do. Their proprietors could af- ford to lose on their provision departments, in cases using them as advertisements. The Inspector also spoke of the temporary open-air markets, which from time to time spring up on building sites in Berlin, where old houses have been demolished. His bureau had in vain combated them, as injuri- ous to the market-house system. From evidence thus coming from men daily in contact with the market operations, as well as from the printed annual reports of the "Magistrats" who direct the management of the market-houses, it is seen that the advantages of the semi-weekly or tri- weekly open markets over the daily retailing in the market-houses help bring to the latter their ruin. The fact gives a reasonable air to the query whether the Berlin district market system might not yet be saved by selling the houses, or putting them to other MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE 203 public uses, and promoting open-air markets, like those of the suburbs, in the broad streets or squares near their sites. The interview with the Chief Inspector, it is plain, resulted in his giving, in his words and printed reports, a summary of the stiff fight that has been made for the life of a misfit social insti- tution -the housed district permanent market. This has had on its side in Berlin German organization and administration, accompanied with ruthless de- struction of rivalry; it has had, conspicuously, regu- lation, accounting, bureaucratic efficiency. But it was based on "the wrong idea." The official con- ception failed to cover all the conditions of the field the housed market was intended to fill. The very arrangements for competition among stall- holders promoted their combination. The suppres- sion of open-air selling created the opportunity of the big store. Of this rival, whether the provision store proper or the provision section of the department store, Berlin has witnessed in the last twenty-five years a growth unparalleled anywhere in the world. After casually visiting several of these great es- tablishments last February, as on previous visits to Berlin, I had an interview, prompted by a schedule 204 MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE of queries, with one of the proprietors of the largest combined system of department and chain stores in Europe, his family having 52 establish- ments in Germany (three in Berlin), 20 in Bel- gium, and 1 6 in Holland. He recited the list of familiar facts relating to the growth and continued success of his type of enterprises namely, world- wide purchases on an enormous scale, an efficient unit organization directed from a single centre, speedy adaptability to changing external conditions, such as lopping off non-paying establishments and finding out promising points for new ones, while within transferring employes, enlarging or reduc- ing a force as business demands, etc. In compari- son with public markets, any one of his big stores delivers purchases, saves customers time in buying, has on sale grades and kinds not seen in the public stalls, has the provision section under the same roof with the general store, commands the services of trained sales-people, insures weight and quality, etc. This big store proprietor, on being shown the official daily bulletin giving the prices of the cheap fish in the municipal markets, sent for one of the Berlin daily papers containing his own advertise- ment and pointed out that he was selling fish of the same kind at or below the market's own quoted MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE 205 prices. He remarked that, whatever the quality of the municipal fish, those he had on sale had passed the judgment of experts, just as his meats were examined by his own veterinarians. Besides, he showed, he had in the day's list choice fish that the municipal market stalls never sold. He was obliged, to hold his customers, to sell the finer grades even when the price at the sources of supply forbade any profit. This dealer's statement is borne out in a United States consular letter, October 10, 1912: "In certain of the large Berlin department stores which have fish departments there is, however, but little difference in the prices of fish handled by the city and by the retailers." The interview with the proprietor closed, a com- petent guide took me through every part of the vast provision section of his main establishment in the salesrooms, restaurants and kitchens, in the bakery, the storage halls and packing rooms. Or- der and cleanliness everywhere; neat, well-drilled salesmen, saleswomen and waitresses; appointments of polished nickel, of glass, of marble; floors mo- saic, walls glazed brick, ceilings white metal. In contrast, primitive, of a certainty, becomes the barnlike district hall, with its plain red-tile floors and rough- wood fittings and its rows of cramped 206 MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE stalls, their one-grade stocks pitifully small and their attendants, in many cases, plainly the poor survivors of a languishing trade. One point, alone, marks the difference in methods between the big new store and the little old store of the public mar- ket. In the former, the price of every article on sale is indicated by a card; in the latter, the price card is often absent just where it should give de- sired information, the fact suggesting that here it requires close bargaining to bring the best price to the buyer with nerve. An enlightening circumstance: The officials of the Berlin district market halls, in their report for 1911, speak of the closing of Hall No. 10 as due to the change from residential to business occu- pancy of the quarter in which it is situated. But within a few minutes' walk of this market the rapid development of two department stores, with their great provision sections, has taken place while the public market has been coming to its end. The suburban system about Berlin is that of open-air markets, either in the streets or in vacant lots. I learned from various sources that such markets were in regular operation in Maybach- ufer, Boxhagen, Friedenau, Lichtenberg, Steglitz, Schoneberg, Wilmersdorf, Gross Lichterfelde, and MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE 207 other suburban municipalities or their subdivisions. On unbuilt private property, in Born street, Fried- enau, I found in the open, February i, 1913, the day after the heaviest snow-storm of the winter, a market of nearly two hundred stands in active oper- ation. Each stand, or several together, had a can- vas awning; all were fitted with electric lights. Tables, the arrangement of the stock, and the ap- pearance and methods of the vendors traced a close resemblance to the out-door markets of Paris. Both provisions and manufactured goods were on sale. Bread, poultry, game, feathered and four-footed, the usual run of meats and delicatessen, were in plenty. The average of the qualities ran high. The general appearance of the dense crowd of buyers indicated a well-to-do neighborhood; the houses in the locality were not the abodes of the poor. In Lichtenberg, after dark, the same evening, I saw an open-air market of forty to fifty stands ranged along the curb in a side street. All the usual market commodities were displayed. The stock was of a cheap order. The buyers were of the poorer working class. Business was lively. Among the most injurious of the competitors with the Berlin district market-houses, as stated in the "Magistrats' " report for 1911, is the out-door 208 MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE market of Maybach-ufer, Neukolln. In operation within a mile of two of the Berlin "halls," it has left these with, respectively, only 43 and 35 per cent of their stalls occupied. It has cost Berlin far more than Paris to learn the value of open-air markets for the masses. The tax on its population, through dearer methods of selling produce, has been many million marks a year. XII. RETAIL MARKETING IN LONDON THE OLDEST PLAN AND THE BEST. IN London, any person who has for sale a mar- ketable household article, perishable or non-perish- able, is at liberty to go in the streets and offer it to the passers-by. He need have no license or per- mit. Necessarily, he will be subject to the traffic and health laws. Every borough legislates as to its own "market streets" and restricted places, but so few are the latter that to the sojourner in London it seems that highway and byway are equally free. The Metro- politan police regulations applicable to street hawk- ers with "barrow, cart or stall," retaining their present form since 1869, are tersely expressed in six printed paragraphs, of two to four lines each. By these, the "barrow, cart or stall" must not be more than nine feet in length by three in breadth; such vehicles must not stand in the street side by side, but end to end; they must remain four feet apart; "costermongers, street-hawkers, and itiner- ant traders" must remove their carts out of the 209 210 MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE way of any inhabitant who has occasion to load or unload any vehicle at his door; carts must riot stand at a street crossing; vendors are liable to be removed from any street or public way in which they create an obstruction to the traffic or where they are a nuisance to the inhabitants. The section of the Metropolitan act prohibiting the deposit of goods in the streets does not apply to "coster- mongers, street-hawkers, and itinerant traders" so long as they observe the foregoing regulations. These points are the gist of the law today in prac- tice relative to ambulant street vending in London. That law governs a circle "of which the centre is Charing Cross and the radii are six miles in length." In London, in addition to his (or her) oppor- tunity to sell while going about in the streets, any person may attend as a vendor the open-air mar- kets held in no less than forty "districts" of the metropolis. Usually, these open-air markets are held Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays, continu- ing late on Saturday nights, while certain of them are open on Sunday mornings. All are operated without the governmental machinery licenses, rentals, obligatory stall equipment, special uni- formed inspectors, clerks or bureau employes com- monly deemed in the Continental countries essen- MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE 211 tial to supervision. The right to his stall-site is secured by a market-vendor under a commonly recognized rule of precedence. Whatever he needs of stall-covering, or other outfit for his stand, he may rent from any contractor, as he would, and can, hire help. The street stand-space for the mar- ket is usually not limited. The newest arrival takes last place. These markets are in many cases for manufactured articles as well as for products of the soil. Fruit and vegetable stands may alter- nate along the sidewalk curb with others occupied by butchers, postcard vendors, or crockery or hard- ware dealers. Attempts of administrative authorities at inter- ference with London's traditional street-market customs have been in vain. In 1893 and again in 1901 the London County Council Public Control Committee investigated the existing street markets with a view to reorganizing them and housing their stallkeepers. But in the end no change was found expedient. The reports of these two investigations are illuminating as to the unalterable facts, but their recommendations, with their drawings of pro- posed market-houses, now rest among the archives of Utopians. In 1893, the number of the "unau- thorized" that is, free street markets was 112, 212 MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE with 5,292 stalls; in 1901, no, with 7,055 stalls. Of the latter, 4,529 stalls were for perishable goods and 2,526 for non-perishable. In 1901, 19 street markets in London had each more than 100 stalls. Seven of these had each more than 200; one had 575. Of the 5,292 stalls in the 112 markets in J 893, 79 belonged to shopkeepers and 4,502 to costermongers. On this point, the report reads : "We desire to emphasize the fact that these figures only apply to the stalls . . . and do not include isolated stalls or barrows, although many of these may keep fixed positions." Other interesting state- ments of the report are : "It will be found that the street markets are in nearly every case placed in the midst of or adjacent to working-class districts." "The unauthorized street markets of London un- doubtedly fill a most useful purpose. They are practically confined to poor and crowded neighbor- hoods, and are largely the means by which the sur- plus produce remaining unsold in the authorized markets are distributed amongst the poorer classes. Costermongers are keenly alive in ascertaining when produce is at exceptionally low prices, and are always ready to purchase and distribute an al- most unlimited quantity when that is the case. By this means the humble consumer is frequently able MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE 213 to purchase food at a lower price than it has been quoted wholesale at the authorized market, as the costermonger is enabled to resell his goods at very low profits, his expenses being small." "The only semblance to retail markets which exist in London are the informal markets established by the coster- monger in the public streets, which, as is well known, are quite unauthorized." Speaking of the dead Columbia Market, the report says : "It was originally intended for a general market, but failed to attract dealers, chiefly because costermongers prefer freedom from restraint or regulation, and immunity from rent or other charges, which they enjoy in the streets." In 70 cases, the attitude of the local shopkeepers toward the more important street markets was ascertained: "In no less than 60 cases a large majority of the adjacent shop- keepers is in favor of the retention." In six cases there was indifference; in four hostility. An in- quiry by the investigating committee brought out from the London vestries and district boards an opposition to registering or licensing vendors in the unauthorized markets that could not be over- come. No proposal to license the ambulant costers was even mentioned. The two investigations evoked the usual points of the opponents to street 214 MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE vending nuisance, litter, impediment to traffic, etc. But as a final result no change whatever could be made. Not even the "one experimental market shelter" the Chief Officer asked for was erected. His well circulated maps, plans, proposals, and or- dinances nicely printed are today in demand among public records becoming scarce. The cos- ters and their customers that is, the masses of London know what they want in the way of markets. The London open-air markets have in the course of time adapted themselves to the needs of their respective groups of customers. A cheap grade of temporary costermonger markets, such as that of Leather lane, spring into existence at different points of the metropolis at the noon lunch hour of factory employes and office boys, to dissolve when their usual customers have gone back to work. Poor people's permanent markets, like those of White Cross, Charlton and Berwyck streets, are held in neighborhoods East End, northern or central long known also for their cheap shops of every kind. Sunday morning markets have been held for generations in several localities, especially in the East End, most of them famous for their spe- cialties. Petticoat Lane not a "lane" in fact, but MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE 215 a series of streets and small squares has as its "leaders" clothing, haberdashery, trinkets, cloths and factory-made odds and ends; Club Row has a bird market and a dog market rather an expen- sive one, with pedigreed dogs; Bethnal Green road has a cycle market. On Friday, in Caledonian road is a remarkable collection of "second hand" articles, many of them evidently having had a line of successive owners. Apart from all these marts, to some of which bargain hunters crowd by thou- sands, are the high-grade open-air borough mar- kets, held semi-weekly or tri-weekly, where prod- ucts of first quality are in demand by the multi- tude, including people having well-lined pocket- books. A direct result of London's reasonable freedom of the streets for ambulant and stationary vendors, the circumstances of proper time and place ob- served, has been the development of marketing con- ditions which have established a solid starting point for all other forms of retailing provisions. With streets free to vendors and free trade a national principle, and without the clog of licenses or simi- lar burdens, London's system of marketing, pub- lic and private, may be accepted as approximating to the natural conditions of commerce under equal 2i6 ^MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE rights. The basis for the system being free indus- try and free trade calls at the very start for equal rights in the highway. Abandon that basis and the result would be the instability of every method of selling built on the stilts of restriction. With these factors of freedom firmly established in the customs of the people, all methods of retailing be- come secure in their foundation. It is evident that, in a city which has its streets closed to "pushcart" vending and to open-air markets, costlier methods of marketing are given an artificial opportunity to develop. The "protection" of closed streets with- drawn would put in jeopardy whatever business had depended on it either public market-house or private establishment. Hence projects for "co-oper- ation," for improved methods of retailing, for eliminating certain categories of middlemen, take secondary place in logical arrangement to recog- nition of the right of all the members of the com- munity in the highways. Were those rights opera- tive, many commercial schemes to reduce the cost of living might prove superfluous; selling in the streets would set them aside. The just start is the first question. As a fact, London's use of free market sites is accompanied by certain significant circumstances in MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE 217 other local retailing systems. The metropolis has fewer co-operative stores than any other equal population in the kingdom; the provision section of the "big store" has less development than in any large city of America or France or Germany; the retail market-houses of fifty years ago have gone out of existence, and all the new ones recently built have been failures ; American fruit in London streets is cheaper than in New York stores. These facts, taken together, indicate a factor in selling which influences alike all other forms. That fac- tor cannot be other than the seller in the open the competitor, supplanter, survivor of so many other middlemen. The relation of cause and ef- fect exists between the large volume of trade done by the street vendor and the small volume done by his various classes of rivals. These assertions are worth while examining in some detail. The annual statistical returns published by the British Co-operative Union show for London a noticeably small proportion of co-operators to popu- lation as compared with all other parts of the king- dom. Mr. E. O. Greening, a co-operative official, in 1899 worked out the proportion of co-operators to population in the fifteen commercial cities and 2i8 (MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE towns of Great Britain, except London, having a population of 100,000 and upward (including Man- chester, Birmingham and Sheffield), to be one to nineteen. In London, it was one to two hundred and fifty. Extraordinary efforts had repeatedly been made, at great expense, to envelop London in the national co-operative movement. Since that time there has been somewhat of an improvement, but the proportion for London remains not a tithe of that for the rest of the country. Mr. Green- ing, in his paper, referred to "the exceptional com- petition in great cities" with co-operation. But in catering to the wants of the masses no other class of its competitors ranks in effectiveness with the street vendors. "The co-operators here have the costermongers and street markets as competitors," was repeatedly the reply to one of my scheduled questions in London, the same as was given at co- operative headquarters in Paris in regard to the latter city. In what he sells, the pushcart vendor does better for the people than the co-operative store. The provision section of the great department store set up in London six years ago by experienced Chicago merchants has been closed. Also, in the greatest of London's undertakings of this type, MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE 219 situated favorably in the northwestern district for a business with well-to-do "middle class" families, the provision section is a small affair as compared with similar divisions of the great retail houses of Berlin and New York. Varieties are there, espe- cially of the finer dry groceries, out-of -season fruits and vegetables, and imported luxuries for the table, but of garden produce or common market articles heavy stocks are not carried. As to the question whether the number of the lesser grocery stores of London is much smaller than if street selling were prohibited to the same extent as in Berlin, it would seem to the observer comparing without data that they certainly are. To decide this point by statis- tics would present difficulties; classification of es- tablishments in different countries may lack uni- formity. A retail grocery in Paris may have large sales of wine, in bottles or barrels, and in Germany of beer, while in London it would have neither. In its report, "Cost of Living in American Towns," 1911, the Commission of the Labor Department, British Board of Trade, deemed it worthy of no- tice that in New York "a common appendage to the grocer's or sometimes the butcher's shop is a permanent fruit and vegetable stall, often elabor- ately and tastefully arranged, which flanks the en- 220 MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE trance to the main establishment/' In England this sort of store might count two. Moreover, as to the financial struggles of a grocery, it is not its competitors only which may give it its quietus, but the unreasonableness of a landlord. A reduction in rent might let the grocer live. For this accom- modation there can be no statistics. With respect to retail market-houses, in 1861 J. Robert de Massy, investigating for the agricultural department of France the market system of Lon- don, reported eleven retail markets then in opera- tion. They were all in private hands. They were: Portman, Oxford, Hunger ford, Clare street, St. George's, Brooker, Mayfair, Paddington, Newport, Newgate, and Lambeth Walk. Not one of these is in existence now. Portman market at Maryle- bone, in the northwest, was a large venture ex- tending over many years. After being closed for a term, it was reopened in 1901 by Viscount Port- man and regained an appearance of prosperity sufficient to bring down upon it criticism from one of the schools of municipal reformers. In a leaflet, "The Scandal of London's Markets," the London Reform Union mentions Portman as one of the two markets which in 1904 were holding the five millions of London's population "at their merty" MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE 221 "in respect of the bulk of the food." The remedy was "to sweep away this monopoly." Portman market has since indeed been "swept away," not, however, by political reformers, but by the inabil- ity of its managers to make it pay. Within recent years, two noteworthy attempts have been made in London to set up housed retail markets on a large scale. Both were semi-philanthropic in their foun- dation. One of them, established near the "Ele- phant and Castle," in Walworth, on the Surrey, or south, side of the Thames, was backed by Sir Sam- uel Plimsoll. It failed. To the other, Baedeker's "London," for 1905 (page 34) directs attention Columbia market, Bethnal Green, "erected by the munificence of the Baroness Burdett-Coutts, at a cost of 200,000, for supplying meat, fish, and vegetables to one of the poorest quarters in Lon- don." In January last, my companion, a warden of the port of London, in a visit to East End mar- kets, said: "Columbia market is now a failure, shut up and derelict." I asked the provision manager of Whiteley's why market-houses failed. He replied: "First, stall- keepers cannot buy on the most economical meth- ods. They haven't the means, can't independently cover a big territory in their purchases, can't look 222 MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE over the quantities and qualities of different dis- tricts in the country and pick out what best suits a varied custom. They must take what the day's wholesale market is selling. They can do little in following the motto, 'Well bought, half sold.' Next, a housed market on the old style, with many little stalls, has no head, to buy and sell for all the vol- ume of the trade coming in and going out. A capable manager not only buys economically, but he organizes selling efficiently. He knows that most of his customers want to buy in the shortest time, and he has stock and salespeople ready for them. In a general market, with two or three hundred stalls, no one controls, directs, and plans for all. The losses in these shortcomings, with the neces- sary expenses of a stall, are enough to throw the balance the wrong way for the housed marketman. There may be additional faults in municipally owned and operated stall markets, but it is the sys- tem which is antiquated, even for the private ones. I do not prophesy that they will all disappear; I say, however, as a fact that I can name a number of them, in London and the provinces, which have disappeared." During more than a decade^ while municipal ownership was yet in the stage of optimistic inex- MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE 223 perience, its advocates in London were earnestly at work to house the costermongers and the open-air market people. "The London Manual" for 1906 thus described the results of their efforts to that date: "The City Corporation [one of the thirty subdivisions of the metropolitan district] has for many centuries been the market authority for Lon- don, but the London County Council [representing all the thirty subdivisions], whilst agreeing that the great central markets which supply the whole of London should be under central control, contends that the smaller retail markets should be estab- lished and looked after by the various local au- thorities. As a step in this direction, the London County Council, under its General Powers Act (1903), obtained powers [from Parliament] for the local authorities to promote shelters for street traders, and the local authorities are authorized to make a small charge for the accommodation. The local authorities will bear the whole cost of these structures." This, it may be observed, was written in the vein of confident planning for beneficial pub- lic changes habitual at that time with the compilers of the "Manual" a year-book of the collectivist municipalists. Model designs for the proposed cov- ered markets, as we have seen, had been published 224 MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE by the County Council. However, not only did rate-payers object, but the "costers" let the authori- ties know that they would not be relegated to stalls in "shelters," but would contend for their ancient rights to vend in the streets. The "municipaliza- tion of markets" came to naught. The commerce of the costermongers of London, singly roving the streets or together gathered in an open-air market, is accepted by the mass of Lon- doners as a metropolitan institution of primary im- portance. The "coster" has his place, in song and story, in verse and picture, as one of London's best- known characters. He is of the people; for the people. As to what may be the number of coster- mongers engaged actively at their occupation, with- in that circle whose diameters of twelve miles con- verge at Charing Cross, no authoritative statement can be made. As early as 1861 De Massy reported "probably 40,000!" He quotes a statement from a census of 1851 that "the costermongers, hawkers, the retail market dealers, and the stallkeepers" were then estimated at 30,000. At Scotland Yard, the Superintendent of Police whom I interviewed did not venture an estimate. He remarked that, besides costermongers, there are two other classes of street vendors, "certificated" MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE 225 peddlers carrying a pack, who pay a license fee of five shillings, and hawkers with horse vehicles, who pay two pounds sterling. These, strictly regulated, may not, for example, ring door bells; must be seventeen years of age ; must carry with them their "papers" giving age, height, and general descrip- tion. In 1911, the certificated hawkers alone num- bered 6,205. The New Yorker in London sees, with memories, the street vendors plying their trade where congestion is greatest. On Wednesday, Janu- ary 21, last, I counted in Ludgate Hill and Fleet street, between St. Paul's and the Law Courts, a distance of half a mile, more than forty curbstone peddlers, a fourth of them women, selling toys, shoestrings, matches, flowers, trifles by the penny's worth, and fifteen pushcart men, mostly selling fruit. Women flower vendors are at many shop- ping centres of London Regent street, Piccadilly, Oxford Circus, Westbourne Grove. As to costermongers' prices a general note, printed in "Dickens' Dictionary of London" for 1880, regarding wholesale prices at Covent Gar- den and the retail prices of stores and costermon- gers, remains good today: "Auctioneers stand on boxes, and while the more expensive fruits are purchased by the West End 226 MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE fruiterers, the cheaper are briskly bid for by the costermongers. Listen to the prices at which the fruit sells, and you will wonder no longer at the marvelous bargains at which these itinerant ven- dors are able to retail their fruit, although, perhaps, you may be astonished when you remember the prices at which you have seen the contents of some of these boxes marked in fruiterers' shops." That is, the West End shops sell dear. On the other hand, near the open-air markets, and at the points where on other than market days the push- cart men congregate, the petty shopkeepers' prices skim along close to those of the street. In London, as in Paris and Berlin, markets of all kinds, even the decaying market-houses, attract to their neighborhood stores selling the same com- modities as are in the market. These yield a liv- ing to clever tradesmen and a fair rent to land- lords wise enough not to squeeze their tenants dry. The outside grocer, or butcher, or provision dealer, competing with a market, in order to live must keep shop open every day all possible hours, have a good variety in his stock, deliver purchases, give credit, and "study to please." In London, as in Paris and also in New York, the story of proposed open-air markets being protested against by store- keepers in general, to be subsequently strongly ad- MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE 227 vocated by those nearest the market sites, is famil- iar. "In the Faubourg St. Martin," said a resident of that locality in Paris, "the provision store keep- ers first petitioned to have the street vendors for- bidden to come near them, and when that was done by the police they begged that they be permitted to return." In the Roman Road district, in Lon- don, the pavement of a street having been arranged for a costers' market the shopkeepers who were to be faced by it objected. The market being estab- lished at another site, a few hundred yards be- yond, the crowd of buyers followed it, and the objectors, finding their trade vanishing, hastened to invite the street vendors to come and be near them. But their opportunity was gone, the store property they rented or owned lowered in value. Another phase of the question is presented when it is the costermongers who insist on their rights to remain at a given point, as in the recent case of Farringdon street. Costermongers there were driven by the police from a line along the curb they had long occupied. They carried their cause up to Parliament, where they won. They are back at their old places. Working-class London in general, and much of middle-class London as well, buy the bulk of their 228 MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE perishable necessaries from ambulant pushcart ven- dors or at the open-air markets. The system is at once the most ancient and the most modern. It is the cheapest of all systems efficient, natural, demo- cratic, rightfully communistic. It often gives the masses double rations. XIII. LONDON'S MIXED WHOLESALE SYSTEM NO MODEL FOR NEW YORK. LONDON'S wholesale markets are not concen- trated, either in location or ownership. The Covent Garden market, for fruit and vegetables, is pri- vately owned, its proprietor the Duke of Bedford. At several of the railway freight stations are large "potato" warehouses, not officially classified as mar- kets, but at which produce in season potatoes, turnips, celery, cabbage is dealt in at wholesale. The City Corporation that is, the local authority for the ancient centre of London known as "the City," having a corporate existence and adminis- tration apart from the twenty-eight boroughs - has control of the entire public wholesale system, even of markets lying outside its limits, in several of the boroughs. The only "authorized" markets controlled by local authorities are a few minor concerns, chiefly retail in their dealings the larg- est the Borough Market, already mentioned, White- chapel Hay Market, and the far-off Woolwich Market. 229 230 MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE Covent Garden Market lies a quarter of a mile from the river, by which few of its supplies are carried, and so far from the railway freight sta- tions as to make the hauling from them by wagon a considerable item in cost. Its location is in every respect unrelated with present ideas of municipal efficiency. This generation of its sellers and buyers have inherited the habit of going there; to break the habit would require a social effort and heavy cash in buying out its owner's charter and prop- erty. The market was started through the act of a monarch, who nearly two centuries and a half ago bestowed through it an exclusive privilege on one of the nobility; in precise terms, Charles II in 1671 granted site and charter to William Duke of Bedford, whose heirs have since continuously "carried on the business." Its volume of trade grew with the population of London, though far from proportionately. But of recent years it has declined, especially in several branches. The area of Covent Garden is about seven acres, partly cov- ered with the historic "colonnade" erected in 1831 and other stall shelters strikingly incongruous in architecture. It was for many years hemmed in by narrow streets, making it difficult of access. To remedy this defect neighboring buildings by the MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE 231 score were removed, but neither the market nor its approaches have yet any room to spare. The con- gested quarter in which it lies is mainly given over to business, no branch of which today attracts the world of fashion. Nothing except the street no- menclature remains of the aristocracy which once dwelt on the convent square and in the neighbor- ing streets; no dandies or dainty ladies, such as those of Thackeray's day, come now to promenade in the galleries of the main building. Butlers, cooks, hotel managers, shopkeepers, flower girls and costermongers today buy the flowers and fine fruit in "the Avenue" and the "French market," the latter so called from the considerable part of its stock arriving daily from France, some of it from distant Nice. Buyers and sellers, elbowing one another in the early morning's pack, are hard- working people, intent on the trade that means to them their livelihood. The administration of the market is business- like. As at the Paris "Square," incoming wagons are discharged at once on their arrival and then driven away. The piles of produce rise high above the heads of the crowd. The costlier stock goes in the roofed buildings. The market hours are brief from dawn, or earlier, to eight o'clock. In 232 MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE one of the buildings is a hall in which the auction- eering of potatoes and other vegetables chiefly takes place. In inclosed squares on each side "the Ave- nue" are the fruit auctions. The number of mar- ket officials is small; their offices a few bare rooms in the low upper story of a corner of the main building. Superintendent, collectors, sub-collectors, office clerks, attendants, and constables are paid from "the estate." The number of porters is nec- essarily large, 700 to 800. They receive "tuppence a turn" from the produce owners for their labors. The tenancies of the stalls are weekly; the rents, twelve shillings to five pounds, inclusive of water, taxes, repairs, and general gas ; flower stands, seven to ten pounds a year; "pitching stands," fifteen to twenty-two pounds. The stands, however, are not of uniform size; some are in open rows, others separated by partitions, like street shops. Coster- mongers pay one shilling to enter the market. Cas- ual wagons pay a toll of half -penny a bushel; the highest toll, two shillings. The long lines of mar- ket-gardeners' wagons from the vicinity of London have yearly an increased average distance to travel, as the zones of possibly cultivable lands become more remote from the market. Many wagons, the MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE 233 marketmen say, come from points twenty miles from London. As to the amount of marketing business done at London's railway freight yards, or at water termini, no statistics are to be had. Obviously, direct orders, from town dealer to country producer, coming through these channels are not considered as part of the trade of any market; yet their prices, if not ruled by market prices, are affected by them, and vice versa. The splitting up among many buyers at the freight termini of shipments ordered by large dealers through mail, telegraph or telephone may be the result of previous combined orders or of a form of marketing on the spot. The fact of the arrivals of the goods is there; the facts as to their sale or resale are obscure; persons interviewed on this point recognized the facts and there their in- formation ceased new markets may not break in where protection of existing charters is likely to be enforced. However, nice discrimination between a "market" and a "depot" is required to put under the latter heading the sales of "potatoes and vege- tables" carried on at the big Great Northern and the Midland Railway freight stations. The central authority for the wholesale public markets of all London, as we have seen, is the 234 MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE City Corporation, which, to begin with, seems to an American an anomaly in local government, much as if the First Ward of New York were to own and direct our metropolitan hospitals. In 1911 "the City" had a night population of 19,657, a day popu- lation of 364,061 (persons actively engaged in the City during the day time), while the number of persons entering it on the census day was 1,077,155. But the London market system has come down with time, and not only have the reformers of this generation, despite their efforts, failed to remedy its incongruities, but they have been compelled to stand aside while these were made worse; the Lon- don County Council's attempts to readjust the wholesale market ownership and administration of the metropolis have for twenty years been frus- trated at every important point. The stubborn City fathers refuse to be reformed. In "the City" are situated : The London Central Markets, Smithfield, the most important ( for meat, poultry and "provisions," wholesale; with sections for fish and vegetables, wholesale and retail) ; Sat- urdays, retail for all commodities; Billingsgate and Billingsgate Buildings (fish, wholesale) ; and the minor markets, Leadenhall (meat, game, poul- MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE 235 try, and provisions in general, wholesale and re- tail), and Smithfield hay market. Without "the City" lie: The Foreign Cattle Market, at Deptford, down the Thames (for the landing, sale and slaughter of animals), the larg- est in the kingdom ; the Metropolitan Cattle Market, Islington, in the northern part of the metropolis (cattle, sheep, hogs) ; and two other markets worthy of being named only because of their decadence, Shadwell, in an East End borough (fish chiefly), and Spitalfields, in Stepney, East End (general, re- tail). These four markets are two to three miles outside the boundaries of "the City", owner and operator. Smithfield Market, as it is commonly called, officially "The London Central Markets," is half a mile north of St. Paul's Cathedral and the same distance northwest of Guildhall, the City's municipal building. Smithfield's area is nearly eight acres; its site has a history as public grounds and market- place dating from the thirteenth century; it was long in later times a cattle market, founded in 1614. Its present main buildings, sheltering the meat mar- ket, were erected i862-'68. These, together cov- ering three and a half acres, are 630 feet long, 245 feet wide, and 30 feet high. The roof is of glass, 2 3 6 MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE with iron beams. Besides a basement cold-storage plant there is in a substructure a freight station of 100,000 square feet, rented to the Great Northern Company and connected with several railways. The Poultry and Provision Market, which stands to the west next the main building, was opened in 1876; its dimensions are 260 by 245 feet. Beyond it is the General Market, built i885-'92, having sec- tions for fruit and vegetables, and poultry, fish, flowers and "provisions" (in the grocers' sense). The several markets, with their long brick fronts, form an imposing pile one of the monuments of London. The meat market is the largest in the world. It gives employment to 9,000 persons. The amount of the deliveries of meat in it have increased from 323,085 tons in 1892 (of which 69,495 were from "America") to 433,724 in 1911 (of which only 29,048 tons were "English killed" from Canada and the United States and 8,022 tons "chilled" and "frozen" from the same countries). The Report of the Central Markets Committee for 1911, by the way, says: "In the last quarter of the year the quantity of 'chilled' beef received from the United States was very small, and for all practical pur- poses may be said to have ceased ; also the numbers MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE 237 of live cattle from that country are rapidly becoming a negligible quantity." The proportion of the meat sold at Smithfield produced in Great Britain was 22.4 per cent ; in the colonies and foreign countries, 77.2. Nearly one-half the receipts of beef are South American. Of the total imports of meat to the United Kingdom, 41.3 per cent comes to Smithfield. The comparative importance of the Meat, Poultry, and "Provision" Markets at Smith- field with its Fish, Fruit, and Vegetable Markets is shown in these figures : Total rents for the former, 87,700; for the latter, 9,500; the tolls, imposed by weight, were, respectively, 48,191 and 136, the fruit and vegetable section being practically exempt of this charge. So, the meat market is the market. The operation of the market is simple. The weights of meats, poultry, and "provisions" deliv- ered by certain carriers and railway companies are merely "declared" when previously ascertained, thus accelerating delivery and lessening congestion of traffic, but otherwise arrivals pass over a weigh- bridge. Officially, the four sections of the Central Markets are thus tenanted: Eastern, 75 "sales- men"; Western, 69; Poultry and Provision, 45; Central General Market, 109. But actually there are 622 stalls, or, as locally named, "shops," 400 of 238 MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE which are wholesale. All lettings are weekly. The rentals average two pence per week per square foot of ground space. The rent includes water supply, desk and gas fittings and maintenance of steel meat rails and hooks, with floor space above the "shop" (where there is a lavatory). The tolls amount to one farthing on every twenty-one pounds sold, or one one-hundred-and-fortieth of the value. There is no Sunday market. Meat is received from one o'clock in the morning until one in the afternoon from April to September and an hour later the rest of the year; exceptions, Friday until four and five, and Saturday, the year 'round until eight, evening. No meat is allowed to leave the market until five in the morning. The Central Markets, taken together, are "the main distributive centre for the metropolis and surrounding places," as stated in an official circu- lar. "The tenants are chiefly commission men and carcass butchers. The former receive the goods and sell them on commission for the benefit of the sender. The carcass butchers buy and slaughter the cattle elsewhere, and bring them into their own shops in the market to sell. Other tenants again buy from both these parties and cut up the meat for the special purposes of the retail trade, MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE 239 thus enabling a butcher to acquire the parts best suited to his business." The Metropolitan Cattle Market and the Foreign Cattle Market, Deptford, are primarily obligatory centres of inspection for the public health depart- ment; they are for this purpose municipally owned and regulated stock yards and slaughter places; only secondarily do they possess the character of markets, although sales of the animals and the meat are their commercial side. At the Metropolitan, animals once within gates never pass out alive; so there is no spread of disease through separation after being herded together. At Deptford, every animal is inspected by veterinary officers on arrival and slaughtered within ten days. Were it not for these essential measures for the sanitary protec- tion of British cattle and the British people, the cattle markets of the metropolis might well be vari- ously placed and otherwise organized. In no wise are they examples for New York. The Metropolitan took over the live cattle busi- ness of Smithfield Market in 1855, and until 1872, when Deptford was opened, received cattle from foreign countries. Its supplies are steadily dimin- ishing. In 1903, the beef cattle arriving numbered 72,960; in 1911, 52,834. The total arrivals of 240 MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE "beasts," sheep, calves, pigs, and other animals, for the following six years show the waning im- portance of the market : 1903, 616,545 ; 1904, 606,- 179; I9S 562,632; 1909, 424,615; 1910, 422,- 642; 1911, 403,373. An official statement for 1912 attributes the decreasing business of this market to heavy railway charges for live freight, new mar- kets near London, non-compensation in cases of seizure for tuberculosis, and the development of the chilled and frozen meat trade. Prior to 1908 there were 23 private slaughter houses in the market; public ones are now provided, the tolls a head charge. The Foreign Cattle Market, Deptford, was opened January i, 1872. An impression of its operations is to be gained in these statistics : Area (Old Admiralty Dock), 30 acres; length of dock 940 feet; "lairage" accommodation, 8,500 bullocks and 20,000 sheep; slaughter houses, 66; chill-room space, sufficient for 4,500 sides of beef; average time for landing 500 cattle from a ship, 20 min- utes; number of shiploads of animals discharged in 1911, 213; number of steamers, owned by "the City," used in trans-shipments from ocean vessels, 3; number of beef cattle arriving in 1909, 122,223; 1910, 96,768; 1911, 99,078. The live cattle importa- MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE 241 tions from the United States, which began in 1879, numbered up to 1911, 3,144,400; largest number in one year, 1890, 157,631; the decline has been steady from 1905 (145,210) to 1911, 71,366. In the thirty-two years since the opening, the num- ber of sheep arriving has been 330,540; pigs and calves, negligible. Number of persons employed, 1,900. The Billingsgate Fish Market, wholesale and re- tail, the oldest market of "the City," situated on the Thames, apart from all other markets, has been in existence more than a thousand years, according to "A Statement of the City of London," made Oc- tober, 1893, to a royal commission. The arrivals on business days during the last three years have averaged more than 600 tons; total arrivals for 1909, 196,321 tons; 1910, 198,934; 1911, 194,477; but each year usually brings an increase 1902, 156,357; i93 l6 3>897; I94 I74,6o6; 1905, 157,- 336. The market reports classify the fish as "land- borne" (brought to the market by the railways) and "water-borne," the number of vessels arriving with fish in 1911 being 1,765. In 1911, the percent- age of land-borne was 62.2; of water-borne 37.8. The Superintendent, in his report for 191 1, remarks : "Keen competition with consignments direct to the 242 MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE fishmongers from the coast is very manifest amongst the trade generally." Billingsgate imposes both rentals on stalls and tolls on weights, the lat- ter bringing in one- fourth the revenue of the former; besides are a dozen lesser items for gas, water, offices, etc. nothing, apparently, being "thrown in" as at Smithfield. Billingsgate, offi- cially included in the London market system, is an undertaking separate from every other part. Leadenhall Market, in the heart of the City, near the Bank of England, is on a site used as a market for four hundred years. Closed for some years, it was reopened in December, 1881, at a cost of 247,800. It is a general market; no tolls are levied; the volume of business is unknown. Pub- licity regarding it is made mostly through its fi- nancial reports, to be dealt with subsequently. Lead- enhall today is a historical accident. Shadwell Market is now out of use. The City Corporation has decided to convert it into a recrea- tion ground, as a memorial to the late King Edward. Spitalfields Market is interesting, not so much as a market as an illustration of the prevalence of an- cient law over present convenience in certain of London's public affairs. In 1682 Charles II granted to John Balch, his heirs and assigns, the right to MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE 243 hold a market "in or near a place called Spittle Square" and there the market has been held ever since. A Mr. Horner bought the lease of the mar- ket in 1882 for 84 years at 10,000 a year. To improve it he pulled down 133 houses on its site which had produced 7,000 a year rent. About the time when Mr. Horner had put his new market in order a railway company began to set up a market within a few blocks of Spitalfields, and on his bringing suit for infringement of charter the com- pany pleaded a charter issued by Edward III, in the fourteenth century, in which it was said that "no market within seven miles round about the City shall be granted by us or our heirs to any one." Mr. Horner, to defend his rights, was obliged to carry his suit up to the House of Lords Charles II vs. Edward III, the favor of a monarch dead for two hundred and fifty years against the gift of a monarch dead for five hundred years ! Mr. Horner won. The area of Spitalfields market is two and three- quarter acres, of which about an acre and a half is covered by a structure of glass and iron. The number of regular stands is 118; tolls, two shillings a wagon, one and sixpence a cart; a sixpence off to stall-renters. "Potatoes and roots" pay one shill- 244 MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE ing a ton; fruit one penny a sack or box, a half- penny a bushel, twopence a crate. The clerk of the London County Council has reported: "The tolls charged at Spitalfields seemed to be more reasonable than those charged at the Borough Market and Co- vent Garden." For years, in the municipalizing period, the London County Council was petitioned for relief from time to time by persons, perhaps politicians, alleging grievances against Spitalfields; the market being "without metes and bounds," tolls were imposed by its owner on the vehicles bringing produce and standing in the streets about it, the market itself having insufficient accommodation. Mr. Horner several times asked the Whitechapel District Board to take the market over. In 1898, the Lon- don County Council decided to seek Parliamentary powers to acquire, by agreement or compul- sorily, its freehold and other interests, and the next year a provisional contract was entered into with the freeholders for purchase of their interests for 170,000 and 1,250 for costs. But the City Cor- poration interposed, pleading its antecedent market rights. After the clashing City and County had maneuvred in Parliament and in committees for several years, and the Borough of Stepney had taken on it an option of a lease, the market free- MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE 245 hold in 1903 became the property of the City Cor- poration, the purchase price being 180,201. The City is now negotiating for the stall leaseholders' interests. Spitalfields has nothing to teach New York except that it made money for Mr. Horner and now loses money for the City. Just beyond the edge of the territory covered by Covent Garden's charter rights, extending six miles and three-quarters in all directions, two consider- able wholesale fruit and vegetable markets have been established one at Stratford, to the north- east of the metropolis, founded by the Great Eastern Railway Company, the other at Kew Bridge, to the southwest. The latter came gradually into being through the market-gardeners of the district making sales at the bridge on their way to Covent Garden. They found this selling was legal, sold out on the spot if they could, and thus shortened their day's work. So the market "was born and grew." In this review it is seen that what London has done in establishing and operating wholesale mar- kets affords little guidance on the subject for New York. The major legal influence in maintaining London's system, private and public, as it is, is "the dead hand" ; the next powerful is the national policy of protection to public health and to the meat ani- 246 MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE mals of the kingdom. The present-day conception by Londoners of what their metropolitan wholesale market system should be has had little or no in- fluence. Certain of the operating details in the mar- kets are worthy attention. But as a whole New York may best learn from the system what to avoid. XIV. DO MUNICIPAL MARKETS "PAY"? A PUBLIC market has a two-fold character. First, it is a social institution; secondly, it is a financial undertaking. It may be of benefit to a community without being remunerative to the municipality. That is, a market might "pay" in a figurative sense as the East River bridges "pay" Greater New York, while in the proper sense capital invested in it might be sunk. The vital purpose of a market, whether wholesale, housed retail, open-air retail, or pushcart, is to put producer and consumer in the closest relations possible. The financial result to the municipal treasury is a minor consideration. Any project for establishing wholesale markets in New York might be seriously damaged should judgment be passed upon it solely in the light of the evidence as to whether the other capitals of our civilization comparable with New York are earning an interest on the investments in their wholesale markets, not to speak of their entire mar- ket systems. For, assuredly, on this point London, Berlin, and Paris each' gives little encouragement 247 248 MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE to the investigator who will look beyond the mere tabulations of the annual receipts and expenditures in an official report and examine all the accounts from the beginning, or for the series of years hav- ing a direct bearing on present values and opera- tions, as he would those of a private undertaking. During the last twelve-month three pamphlets, is- sued from official or semi-official sources, advocat- ing municipal wholesale markets in the five bor- oughs have been placed before the New York public, and the statistics of markets given by the authors for this country and abroad have been widely ad- vertised as data for assistance in weighing the wholesale market problem seriously. These pam- phlets are "Municipal Market Policy/' by the Presi- dent of The Bronx, and "Modern Municipal Mar- kets" and "A Terminal Market System," both by a member of the Advisory Board of the New York Terminal Market Commission. In offering correc- tions to these pamphlets I shall refer to them as Nos. i, 2, and 3. Relative to Covent Garden, London, No. 2 has this : "It is in the ownership of the Duke of Bed- ford, who makes a huge profit out of it, though he and his father have spent $730,000 on modern buildings." Of the same property No. 3 says: "As MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE 249 it is under private ownership no figures are issued, but there is known to be a huge profit on the mar- ket." Last January, at the office of the Bedford estates, the attention of the management being called to this assertion, an interview brought me these authoritative statements : "Covent Garden Market is private property. No reports of its fi- nances are made public. No particulars relative to its income or outlay are divulged. Its accounts can not be strictly separated from those relating to the property surrounding it, all being a part of the Duke's estate. The improvements of the streets in the vicinity have a relation to the revenues of the market. There is no publication giving authorized reports as to its recent receipts and expenditures.'' The representative of the estate further mentioned these points : ''The conditions of selling in the Co- vent Garden Market are much changed in the last forty years, and especially the last twenty. The larger buyers purchase on samples shown in the market, the produce being then delivered direct, the market thus losing the tolls. Ordering by tele- phone is common, not only between customers and shopkeepers in or out of the market, but between dealers in town and those in the country. Changes are continually taking place in methods of trans- 250 MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE portation and sources of supply. The metropolis now covers much ground that was formerly given to market gardening for Covent Garden, and with the removal of the gardeners or their quitting the business the market has been detrimentally affected The gallery is no longer the fashionable promenade of forty or fifty years ago. This is typical of the general changes." The representative said it would be useless to try to ascertain the present profit or loss on the market. "Nothing is divulged," he re- peated. At the market itself and in the neighborhood, I interviewed standkeepers and permanent shopkeep- ers. They could tell of many changes in the mar- ket, of a positive falling off in its business propor- tionately to population, of the passing of the Lon- don produce dealers from the market and the com- ing of foreigners. The retail trade in foreign prod- uce has nearly vanished. As to a "huge profit" all were doubtful. Several spoke of the possible value of the site of seven acres for other business. An official of the County Council whose position brought him in contact with the general market situation of London said that he knew of no cur- rent reliable financial statement regarding Covent Garden. M. de Massy, in 1 86 1, wrote of it: "The MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE 251 gross proceeds amount to about 10,500, two-fifths of which is absorbed by the expenses of operation/' In a chapter of Charles Booth's ' 'Labor and Life of the People," 1891, Mr. E. C. Grey wrote that the average annual receipts of Co vent Garden were then 25,000 and the expenditures 10,000. "But," he added, "against the 15,000 remaining 150,000 has been spent in buildings alone since 1828 and much has been done toward widening the streets and in pulling down houses to enlarge the area around the market." The London County Council market investigation of 1893 gave the market a net income of 24,660 on the operation for the year 1889. This did not include interest on the im- provements, the expenditures for which in the last century were 150,000, nor on the site value. The Duke of Bedford's inclination to part with the mar- ket may be significant. He has offered four times to sell it to the City Corporation, to the old Metro- politan Board, and twice to the London County Council in the early days of its municipalization ven- tures. But it is still on his hands. The facts ac- cessible fail to indicate its "huge profits." Of the public market systems controlled by the City Corporation, pamphlet No. 2 says: "On Smithfield markets there is a profit to the City of 252 ^ARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE $100,000, Billingsgate brings in a surplus of $40,- ooo, Leadenhall $5,000, and allowing for losses on the cattle markets there is a net gain to the City of $156,000 a year." No. 3 gives the same figures, closing in these words : "On the entire municipal market enterprises of the City there is a profit of $156,000." Inasmuch as the argument of the three pam- phlets in view is addressed to the New York public for the purpose of proving that city investments in terminal markets here could be expected to "pay" as the authors allege they have paid in London, that public is entitled to know the facts in the matter as they actually are. In an official statement given out at Guildhall in 1912 is this paragraph: "All the Corporation markets have been reconstructed during the last half century, and the capital expendi- ture on the markets since that time has amounted to nearly 4,000,000 sterling." Therefore, if the markets have a profit of $156,000, they must earn that amount, net, over operating expenses, deprecia- tion, expenditures for maintenance and interest on investment. No profit comes to a private under- taking until it has met these debtor items. But in a "Statement to the Royal Commission," issued by a Guildhall City Council Committee in MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE 253 October, 1893, is this passage: "Up to 1892, on Corporation Markets (reconstructed or enlarged since 1854) the market accounts show an expendi- ture of 30,000 beyond receipts." In this state- ment the values in the properties existing previous to 1854 were not taken into account. The question now turns on whether profits of the system since 1892 have made up the previous losses. In 1902, the City's appropriation to buy Spitalfields took 180,201, raised by a bond issue. This market has since been operated at a steady loss; in 1911 its expenditures in excess of receipts were 2,807. In 1905, the appropriation for the purchase of Shad- well was 140,844; in 1911, its deficit on the year's operations was 1,335. ^ was closed as a market last year, a failure. In making it a recreation ground, what did the loss to the City market system then sum up, in annual deficits and first cost, on this entire transaction? While Leadenhall Market is credited in 1911 in the books of the Chamberlain with receipts of 849 in excess of expenditures, the outstanding loans on the market proper being 99,- ooo, his books for the market department carry a separate item of 148,000 relating to the Leaden- hall "approaches." An addition to Billingsgate Fish Market, the "Billingsgate Buildings," was made in 254 MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE 1890. For years it was in part unoccupied, its steady losses paid by the old market. "For the first time since the opening in 1890, the whole of the standings were occupied by dry and shell fish men" reads the report for these buildings for 1911. The average annual deficit on the Metropolitan Cat- tle Market, which after its removal to Islington from Smithfield in 1855 amounted for years to 6,- ooo, was paid from "the City's cash" ; in 1892, this deficit was 14,579; in 1911, 5,071; in 1910, 5,- 662. The deficit for the Deptford Foreign Cattle Market in 1911 was 3,642, and the excess of its liabilities over its assets was 170,379. For the Deptford railway a separate account appears in the report; receipts, 1901, 499; outlay, 6,835. As to the present financial status of the entire City mar- ket system, the Chamberlain's report for 1911 shows nearly 4,000,000 in loans outstanding. To wit: Formation of the Metropolitan Cattle Market, 400,000; completion and slaughter-houses, 78,- ooo; London Central Markets, 1,968,700; Billings- gate enlargements, 278,500; Leadenhall, rebuild- ing, 99,000; Leadenhall, avenue approaches, 148,- 800; Spitalfields 180,000; Shad well 140,000; Foreign Cattle Market, 587,700; total, 3,881,- 300. In 1902, the loans outstanding amounted MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE 255 to 3,137,800; in 1907, before the purchase of Shadwell and Spitalfields, the amount was 2,707,500. In the operation of the system for 1911, including interest on loans, the receipts were 35,300 in excess of expenditures. To get at "profits" deduction must be made from this sum of the interest (40,000?) on the "re- constructions and enlargements" paid for and on whatever values remain of the property existing prior to 1854, unless the theory should prevail that when a public utility is paid for it ceases to be a financial undertaking and becomes a social institu- tion, which involves the complicated notion that the percentage of the debt paid off is social while that to be paid is financial ! Besides, to be accounted for are depreciation (heavy at Deptford), and possibly items on the margin between strictly market ac- counts and other accounts in part relating to them but carried in the Chamberlain's books under other headings. At the City Clerk's office, when one of the officials told me that the Corporation markets last year paid 35,000, he qualified the statement by saying "it took no account of the investment ex- cept interest on loans." The fact is that, of all the City Corporation's unmethodically scattered composite market, slaugh- 256 MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE ter-house and animal-protective system, only three undertakings have now a yearly balance on the right side of the ledger in 1911, the Central Markets, Smithfield, 45,300; Leadenhall, 849; and Billings- gate, 8,664. Equally is it a sweeping fact that these balances do not cancel the losses on the City's other market undertakings and meet average com- mercial returns on the investment. There is no profit in the London system as a financial enter- prise. Were not the wholesale meat sales perforce centred at Smithfield, and the fish sales at Billings- gate, with monopolistic rents and tolls, the system might collapse. Next, as to Berlin. Pamphlet No. i says : "For the year 1910 the total receipts of the markets amounted to about $838,446, and the total expendi- tures for administration, interest and sinking fund amounted to $763,468, leaving a surplus for the year of $74,978." No. 2 states: "On the entire enterprise, when all charges have been met, there is a profit of over $135,000 a year." And No. 3 re- peats this statement. But the official reports for 1909, not quoted in either pamphlet, gave a deficit on the year's operation of the market system of 4,904 marks! It is true that for 1910 the excess of receipts over expenditures became 295,910 marks MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE 257 (quoted in No. i); and for 1911, 485,394 marks. How the deficit of 1909 became a surplus in the two years following is thus explained in a paragraph of the official report for 1911: "The increase of the receipts is, however, not the consequence of a better occupation of the market halls, but only by reason of the increase of the rents of the stands which went into effect in July, 1910.'* That is, with sadly diminishing social benefits, apparent fi- nancial profits became possible to the management through a rack-rent squeeze. Comprehensively, here is the financial situation of the Berlin market system of two central and thirteen district halls, according to the official esti- mate for 1912 : Two district halls closed, failures (a third to be closed May i, 1913) ; three others showing yearly expenditures greater than receipts; four others together showing the slight balance in favor of receipts of 39,136 marks; two others, to- gether, a balance of 132,466 marks; the two cen- tral halls, 612,203 marks. The total receipts over expenditures, 329,208 marks $80,000. In the four years, 1909-1912, the average book "profits" would be less than $70,000. But this showing ignores the 10,500,000 marks invested in the system on which there are no outstanding loans and conse- 258 MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE quently no annual outlay. Again comes the query, ought not the investment be earning an interest? In private business, we keep in mind, capital repre- senting paid off loans is expected to earn current interest if remaining invested in the undertaking. It is live capital, not dead. It is property. The in- terest of 10,500,000 marks at 3^2 per cent, the rate paid the Berlin market loans, is more than 360,000 marks $90,000, making the average annual loss of the system for the four years $20,000. But it is hardly to the credit financial credit of the mar- ket system that Market Hall No. 3, disused as a market, is rented at 95,000 marks a year as a beer concert hall, or that other market halls are deriving revenues from various tenants whose business has little or no relation to marketing. Finally, the central halls are to be vacated, and, at a cost estimated at millions of marks, a new set of buildings erected where, is uncertain. One pro- posed site is far eastward, adjoining the city slaugh- ter-houses; another far to the northwest, near a railway station each a long distance from the pres- ent body of customers. What will the new central markets cost? What will be the volume of their sales? What influences will contribute to their success or failure? A problem there. In calculat- MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE 259 ing for the future, it is to be kept in mind that the present system has been bolstered up through sup- pression of non-paying adjuncts as well as of rivals no "square," no open markets, no competing pushcarts. But this policy is now to be abandoned. With opportunity to sell in the open, how many market retailers will pay the present high rents for stalls? On the whole, the truth is that the Berlin market system failed as a going concern in 1909, when it showed a deficit, but was given a new lease of life through the monopolistic municipality increasing the tax on its helpless market tenants while systematic- ally depriving several of its legitimate municipal rivals pushcarts and open-air markets of exist- ence. The Berlin system offers to New York no example to copy, either as a social or a financial institution. We now turn to Paris. Pamphlet No. i, refer- ring to the "large profit that the markets annually yield the city" quotes "one authority" name not given as stating that in 1906 it was $1,498,241. No. 2 says : "Paris, with a population of 3,000,000, has spent over $10,000,000 on its Halles Centrales and thirty district markets, but the average yearly a6o MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE income is $2,100,000, of which about half is profit." No. 3 makes the annual profit "about $1,000,000." The $2,100,000 "yearly income" (1911) was not derived only from the Central Halls and the (fifty- five, not thirty) district markets (alleged cost "over $10,000,000"), but was the gross receipts of the entire system under the market bureau of Paris, whose various plants cost more than $30,000,000. These plants are: The Central Halls, the cost of which was $13,000,000 ("Les Halles Centrales de Paris," Jules Vigneau; "Les Halles et Marches Ali- mentaires de Paris," Robert Facque) gross rev- enues in 1911 less than $800,000; twenty district market-houses, present valuation more than $3,000,- ooo (16,180,000 francs) ; the municipal cattle mar- ket of La Villette, opened in 1867, ground, build- ings, and railway sidings, $5,000,000 (De Lover- do) ; La Villette slaughter-houses, at the building of which five municipal slaughter-houses which had cost $4,000,000 were vacated, and for the recon- struction of which $8,000,000 has been recently asked ; the Vaugirard slaughter-house, cost $3,000,- ooo (Report, fimile Massard, to the Municipal Council) ; and the wine warehouses at St. Bernard and Bercy, the cost of the latter $5,000,000 ("La Grande Encyclopedic" ) . But, besides all these MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE 261 plants, the streets of Paris contributed $400,000 of the $2,100,000 receipts of 1911 $200,000 being from the stationing and guardianship of market- men's teams in the streets, $100,000 fees from the thirty-five open-air markets, and $100,000 fees from the Central Market "Square" ("Rapport Annuel de 1911 sur les Services Municipaux de 1'Approvi- sionnement de Paris," page 195). To ascertain the net income of the total invest- ment in the system, 10,581,889 francs being the gross revenues of 1911 (the amount quoted in pamphlet No. 2), would be a complicated task. Would it not involve deducting a part of the $400,000 coming, not through the outlay of the market department for plant, but from costs de- frayed by the street department? Then, it would be necessary to determine which of the numerous market officials, some being from the Prefecture of Police and others from the Prefecture of the Seine, are paid from the market revenues and which from the city funds, and also what current expenditures are charged up to the market and what to other bureaus. On this point, Councillor Maurice Quen- tin noted ("Rapport sur le Budget," 1906) the fol- lowing expenses not classified with the market out- lay: Central administration, cleaning markets and 262 MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE their streets, carting away refuse, and pay of the market architect's staff, the special market police, the inspectors, the veterinarians, and the inspectors and laborers of the weights and measures service. For years M. Quentin has asked in vain for an ap- propriation of the $4,000,000 necessary to complete the Central Halls, which have stood unfinished for a generation. Three and a half per cent interest on the $30,000,000 invested in the various plants would alone come near canceling the alleged prof- it of our New York pamphleteers. The Paris mar- ket reports giving only receipts, it would require an accountant going from bureau to bureau looking up the financial history of the market system to arrive at the probabilities as to whether any part of it has ever "paid." The system has enormous purely fiscal receipts, not included in the $2,100,000 noted as the market bureau collections ; La Villette in 1911 took in $2,100,000 octroi duties and $500,- ooo slaughter-house head tax. But for the purpose of this review it is enough to note the capital errors as to the Paris markets of the New York pam- phlets in question, which destroy the arguments of their authors. As to city market systems in the United States "paying," pamphlet No. i says : "Reports show that MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE 263 Boston, for instance, nets a profit of $60,000 a year; Baltimore, $50,000 a year, and New Orleans $79,- ooo a year on their markets." No. 2 gives : "Bos- ton has a profit on its markets of $60,000, Balti- more, $50,000; New Orleans, $79,000; Buffalo, $44,000; Cleveland (Ohio), $27,507; Washington, (D. C), $7,000; Nashville (Tenn.), $8,200; In- dianapolis, $17,220; Rochester (N. Y.), $4,721; and St. Paul (Minn.), $4,085." The Boston market department had on operation a net revenue in 1912 of more than $111,000, the total receipts being $131,447; department expendi- tures, $20,181. In fixing rentals for new leases of ten years, the Board of Assessors rated Quincy Market, land and buildings, at $1,800,000; the mar- ket in the ground floor and basement of Faneuil Hall, not included in this rating, brought in $25,200 of the total receipts. If the total investment in the markets is $2,000,000 and a four per cent interest, $80,000, be deducted from the operating revenue, the result is apparently a net income of $31,000. What differences might be arrived at by an auditor calculating according to standard municipal ac- counting methods, which require recognition of ex- penditures not commonly comprised in bureau re- ports, is a question. In establishing wholesale mar- 264 MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE kets in New York, certainly the interest on invest- ment must be included in any estimate, and to ig- nore it in quoting Boston's alleged "profits" as an example would be grossly misleading. For Baltimore, its Deputy Comptroller writes: "I cannot understand where any one could get au- thority for saying the city of Baltimore derived an- nually profits of $50,000 from its municipal mar- kets. " In 1912, his report shows, expenditures ex- ceeded receipts by $24,899. He adds : "The city derives no profits in maintaining its eleven markets." In 1911, for the first time, a tabular statement con- taining historical and financial data of the Baltimore market system for the period 1857-1911, was issued by the City Comptroller. For 1912, a similar state- ment gives: Total debits, $2,513,628; credits, $3,- 281,959. But in a foot-note it is explained that the accounting does not include the expenses of ad- ministration or of cleaning and lighting the mar- kets! In 1912 cleaning cost $37,543; lighting, $7,495. These expenses alone would at this rate in twenty years wipe out the $768,331 to the credit of the markets in the fifty-four years. Nor does the statement recognize either depreciation or in- terest on the investment of $1,048,590, as appraised in 1911. A writer in the New York "Municipal MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE 265 Journal." December 5, 1912, in the course of a de- tailed review of the Baltimore system, reaches the conclusion that, deducting interest on the total cost of plant, $1,313,941, the net revenue for 1910 and 1911 was slightly over one per cent. But he says he omits cost of administration. And in 1912 this little net revenue, with self -obliterating qualifica- tions, became a considerable positive deficit. All the facts flatly contradict the claimants of $50,000 prof- its for Baltimore's markets. From New Orleans the Deputy Commissioner of Public Finance writes of the alleged $79,000 profits : "The figures you mention as the annual profits are unofficial, as the markets are not run for the basis of any profit." For Buffalo, the Markets Superintendent says "the revenues" from its four markets for 1912 were $62,000 and expenditures $18,000, which would give some recognition to No. 2's profit of $44,000. But he also writes, April 8, 1913, that rebuilding is now going on at an expense of $150,000, to which another $50,000 may be added to complete the work. He gives this opinion : "If the city of Buf- falo were at this time to enter upon an enterprise for the establishment of markets for revenue I would not be in favor of same as a revenue pro- 266 MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE ducer, for I think an even break would be the best the city could expect." To buy land and build the markets, he believes would cost $700,000 to $800,- ooo. Cleveland's reports, so far as made public, are for the year's operations, without accounting for inter- est or the other requirements of a systematic audit- ing system. Washington: Instead of $7,000 profit, the Dis- trict system has yielded during the last ten years a net annual revenue on operation of $3,600, being about one and one-half per cent interest on the in- ventory value of the three market-houses, $228,000. At four per cent on capital the system is losing $6,000 a year. Nashville: Receipts for 1912, $13,657; expendi- tures, $3,700; balance, $9,957. Cost of market- house, $73,000. Light supplied by city electric works free. Interest and lighting would bring the balance down to $6,000 or less. But net revenue cannot be calculated without better data. Indianapolis : One would hardly expect the mar- kets of this city among the models for revenue or for any other reason until they have had time to outlive their peculiar fame, gained in years of mis- management. MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE 267 Rochester: Instead of the alleged $4,721 profits, the Secretary of the Public Market Commission re- ports: "Until last year the receipts of the market have not been sufficient to pay the maintenance, in- terest and sinking fund, and it has been necessary to include in the tax levy the sum of $6,000 per year. to provide for the deficiency." St. Paul: From the Comptroller's office: "I cannot verify the figures of $4,085 profits of the city market for the preceding year." Receipts for 1912, $7,459; expenditures, $5,143; net > for y ear > $2,315. "The disbursements consist entirely of operating expenses and do not take into considera- tion the interest on the original investment, depre- ciation, or pro rata expense of city administration." The present estimated value of the market property is given as $150,000. That, alone, at four per cent, would bring the deficit on the market for 1912 to $3,685. From the foregoing analyses it is seen that in hardly one example have the pamphlets issued by the Chairman and a member of the New York Terminal Market Commission given correct statis- tics. In most cases the errors have been palpable, enormous inexcusable, considering that alleged profits are being employed to persuade New York- 268 MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE ers that to reduce the cost of provisions their first need is a system of wholesale markets "one to each borough." What that system might cost may be inferred from the estimate for the West Washing- ton-Gansevoort "terminal market," the model for which was recently shown at the Women's Exhi- bition in the Grand Central Palace. That cost, as given in a hand-out leaflet, was "from $10,000,000 to $12,000,000"! For the same market, a local committee's estimate, not including cost of a neces- sary railroad structure, is $8,610,832. It cannot be said that any adequate appreciation of the task of rehabilitating New York's market system has yet been shown, in their speeches or their writings, by those of its officials who for more than a year have given nothing better, in the way of information or proposition, than the matter con- tained in the above-mentioned pamphlets. Can they redeem their errors? XV. NEW YORK MARKET PROBLEMS- OFFICIAL PROMISE vs. PER- FORMANCE. PETER COOPER was President of the New York Citizens' Association which in 1867 investigated the city's public market system. Here is a passage in the association's report to Controller Connolly: "A careful and minute inquiry, made in 1863 into the comparative cost of articles bought in Wash- ington and Fulton markets and of the same articles bought uptown from grocers and butchers, showed an average of 30 per cent in favor of downtown, and the year's supply of these articles cost uptown people $25,000,000 more than they would have had to pay if the markets were so located as to bring consumer and producer together and dispense with middlemen and speculators. . . . This $25,- 000,000 was a direct tax on the consumer." Now, there was posed a great problem for the city, half a century ago : "To bring consumer and producer together." What have the city's re- sponsible representatives in the premises done since to solve that problem? The privately managed agencies of the foodstuffs trade have extended their 269 270 MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE commercial jurisdiction; they have adopted new methods with the increase of population and the general improvements of modern times. The rail- roads and the steamship lines have encouraged the carrying of country produce as fast freight. The refrigerator car lines have given life to vast new areas of production of fruit and vegetables, some of them thousands of miles from the Atlantic sea- board. The cold storage system has arisen granted with abuses as well as uses. The chain store and the private provision market are doing work that might have been in part done through municipal action. Yet, with this civic problem for- ever confronting them, our chief authorities when faithful servants overwhelmed with pressing re- forms in administration, when mere politicians ab- sorbed in personal and partisan gain have not only failed to establish means of bringing consumer and producer together, but have allowed the fairly ef- fective public market system of fifty years ago to die. Official investigations for the purpose of solving the market question as it exists for New York have of recent years been superficial, the recommenda- tions of commissions have been divergent, the find- ings as to the facts relative to other cities have in MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE 271 conspicuous cases been grossly in error, the schemes for new market systems have been startling in their probable cost, and, invariably, the "reforms" sug- gested have been destructive of the rights of the consumer to be served in the streets. Here is a resume of various official recommendations : 1. More than fifteen years ago, during Mayor Strong's administration, Street Commissioner George E. Waring energetically advocated munici- pal markets as a substitute for pushcart peddling. Nothing done. 2. In 1903, Secretary Reynolds' report to Mayor Low (anti-Tammany) recommended "the creation of three or four pushcart markets by the city, and the requirement, upon the establishment of these markets, that all pushcarts be relegated to them." By this report, market sites were to be taken by condemnation, each occupying a block or a half -block, up town or down town. The appro- priations for this measure, involving obviously some millions, never came. Pushcart foodstuffs were found by the committee to be good and cheap. 3. In 1906 this proposal of the Low adminis- tration was strongly opposed by the Commission of Mayor McClellan (Tammany). The counter opin- ion was : "We see no reason why the City of New 272 MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE York should go into the business of providing shop space for dealers in any class of supplies, at a large annual loss, nor why taxpayers should be called upon to bear such a burden." Among its findings, this Commission reported : "That public markets will not solve the pushcart problem, cannot be self- supporting, and would be an unwarranted burden to the taxpayers/' "We are clearly of opinion that the pushcart problem cannot be solved by the crea- tion of municipal markets." This Commission rec- ommended a complicated plan of pushcart regula- tion, involving "restricted" and "unrestricted" dis- tricts of the city, a limited number of stationary peddlers' positions, minimum license fees of $10 for carts, abolition of personal badges, exclusion of horse and wagon peddling from certain districts a very elaborate scheme, not one feature of which is operative today. Again pushcart goods were de- clared wholesome and cheap. Moreover, "The ped- dler must be free to travel from place to place." 4. An Aldermanic Special Committee on Push- carts and Markets, appointed July 9, 1912, reported May 8, 1913, on pushcarts only. Its recommenda- tions were to convert the pushcart peddlers to permanent standholders in sheltered markets under the river bridges and in small parks and certain MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE 273 open public spaces. The Committee found : "That the quality of food and merchandise sold from these pushcarts is in the main of as good a quality as can be bought anywhere else in the city, and much cheaper." 5. A Mayor's Commission on Pushcarts, ap- pointed December 18, 1912, reported March 26, 1913, its report being transmitted to the Board of Aldermen April 18. Its recommendations were the same as the aldermanic committee's turned out to be, six weeks later, the establishment of "per- manent shelter markets." Among the findings of this Commission were : "The legal status of the pushcart operator is that of a commercial outcast." "It has been found that the foodstuffs sold by the peddlers is nearly uniformly wholesome." "Com- modities are by means of them distributed at lower prices than they could be purchased for elsewhere." "But it is necessary to take them off the streets!" 6. To another Commission, one on markets, ap- pointed by the present Mayor, of which the Presi- dent of The Bronx is chairman, a joint committee representing organizations interested in the West Washington-Gansevoort market reported May 20, 1912, in favor of a new wholesale market which should take up several blocks adjoining the Ganse- 274 MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE voort site, the West Washington to be given over to dock purposes. A striking feature of this re- port is the estimate that the land and buildings of the new market would cost $8,610,832, not includ- ing the railroad structure essential to the service of its supplies. 7. A Member of the Advisory Board of the New York Terminal Market Commission, showing a model of the proposed Gansevoort market at the Woman's Industrial Exhibition at the Grand Cen- tral Palace, March, 1913, estimated its minimum cost at from ten to twelve million dollars. One of the necessary methods of making such a market "pay" is stated (page 32) in this member's "A Terminal Market System": "The municipality should select central positions for its markets, with rail and river access. It should have effective con- trol not only over the markets but the adjacent streets, wharves, and railroad sidings, so as to ob- viate evasion of the market tolls." That is, the pres- ent boat and railroad terminals receiving foodstuffs and the vast private storage warehouses now doing business in the vicinity of the Gansevoort market are to be "controlled" by the market authority somehow. Would they be subject to market tolls, or would they be wholly suppressed? Speaking of MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE 275 the peddlers' traffic in the streets adjacent to the Berlin wholesale market, the same writer says (page 19), that it "was prohibited and strictly lim- ited elsewhere. This measure, in fact, is deemed essential in every city where municipal markets are conducted successfully !" 8. The President of The Bronx ("Times," March 28, 1913), thus describes his course in ad- vancing his wholesale market theories: "After projecting the wholesale terminal markets I asked that a committee of the Board of Estimate and Ap- portionment be appointed to consider the plans and report to the board." Was it also after forming his vast project the cost of which is to be reckoned by the tens of millions that he ascertained, in its sup- port, in Europe and America, his alluring but il- lusory proofs that municipal markets "pay" ? "Be- ware," says a French proverb, "of looking for what you are seeking; you may find it!" We have seen this official's errors as a reporter of data due largely, perhaps, to haste in confusing what seems, in written or spoken report of a passing year, with what is, in permanent and foundation fact. What as a consequence may be the expectation of his projects? now involving, by his own announce- ments, a "wholesale distributing market for every 276 MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE borough, perhaps two for Manhattan" ("Munici- pal Market Policy," May i, 1912), or, later, "the building of wholesale markets at the railroad ter- minals/' with probably retail annexes ("Terminal Markets in the United States," January, 1913), the system to be equipped with storage facilities, motor trucks to carry surplus supplies from mar- ket to market, and a bureau for newspaper adver- tising or issuing a daily bulletin. An "industrial" railway is to be constructed in The Bronx and a dock railway on the West Side, and possibly Walla- bout Creek is to be dredged to accommodate large vessels ! All this in how many years ? This official has been more than a year in getting up his re- port often promised, not yet issued. 9. Directly opposed to the Manhattan Terminal project of The Bronx President stands a paragraph in the findings of the Committee on Markets, Prices and Costs of the New York State Food Investigat- ing Commission, which reads : "That the scattered locations of transportation terminals and the area and configuration of the city render a central whole- sale market impracticable, a needless expense, and a permanent and useless addition to the cost of food distribution." (Report, August i, 1912, page 33.) "The co-operation of the railroads which do not get MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE 277 a direct entrance to this location might be difficult to secure, and the plan is subject to the funda- mental objection that delivery in car lots should be made at the points nearest the consumer." This committee reported as one of its ascertained facts : "Increase to cost by the use of the pushcart system is lower than in any other type of food-distributing agency." But, instead of following up the line of cheap operation suggested by this fact, which would have led to liberty for the pushcart trade and the establishment of open-air markets, the committee's recommendation was : "We urge the reduction of cost by merging the wholesale and retail business, either through larger retail units, department stores or chain stores" (page 21). The committee believed "that not more than 200 such markets, perhaps less, would perform the function of food distribu- tion in Greater New York in the most economical and satisfactory manner." Its estimate called for a total investment of $40,000,000 for the 200 mar- kets! 10. A supplementary report by one of the three members of this committee, who believed "the situ- ation demanded more definite and radical treat- ment," after reciting a list of wastes and burdens in the present methods of food supply to New York 278 MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE consumers, contained his own project: "The remedy for this chaotic, uneconomic, extravagant and wasteful condition of distributing foodstuffs can be most effectively brought about by the estab- lishment throughout the city of a series of retail markets, in each of which all foodstuffs would be carried, and in which goods and prices would be uni- form/' . . . "The City of New York or the State should provide the sites and buildings for those markets by invoking, when necessary, their power of eminent domain." "The operating com- pany should be under the strict supervision of a State Commission of Markets and Marketing, with power to enforce all necessary regulations in re- lation to transportation, terminal facilities, sanita- tion, quality and grades and prices." Two radically different schemes, each requiring millions of dollars tens of millions? from one committee ! However, that committee's impractica- bilities have shrouded it in oblivion except that by whiles some one remembers the blunders of its statistics. It estimated that the fruit and vegetables other than potatoes consumed annually in Greater New York amounted in value to five million dol- lars, whereas evidently the value must be more than fifty millions, persisting in the error in different MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE 279 parts of the report. It also calculated on one page that the annual food supply of Greater New York costs in the consumers' kitchen five hundred mil- lions or over, while on another page it made only "the chief articles of consumption" nearly six hun- dred and fifty millions. A letter writer to the press, after saying that the committee acknowledges the first error, estimates that it should have found that, the cost of the annual food supply of Greater New York at the terminals being $350,000,000, in the kitchens of the consumers it is $700,000,000 a square block addition of 100 per cent. About the only point in practice on which all these ten committees and commissions and special investigators have agreed is the expenditure of more city money for plant and the creation of more city offices for operating or supervising bureaus. The framer of new public projects in which gov- ernment is to be trader, manufacturer, or operator ever assumes that city, State, or national admin- istration is on the eve of a sweeping and lasting re- form. The chastening thought and experience of a half century relative to the office-holder's ineffi- cient part in food selling, for example, gives him no pause. Yet here are some of the bits of com- ment and advice falling under my observation while 280 MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE looking up this subject : Approving Peter Cooper's recommendations for new markets, Samuel J. Til- den said : "I admit the general unfitness of the State to manage any kind of business." On the same point, Controller A. C. Flagg, writing in 1854, referred to "the bungling hand of government/' T. Scanlon, Secretary Tariff Reform Committee, writes : "The Lodge Report is discredited by the fact of the majority of the committee being com- posed of high-tariff partisans/' Frederic J. Has- kin, in his "Cost of Living", remarks, as a mat- ter of course : "It is only when investigators start out to prove a theory, rather than to ascertain the facts, that wide divergences of opinion become evi- dent." Henry R. Towne, President of the Mer- chants' Association, says: "New York lags be- hind every other great modern city of the world in cohesiveness, progressiveness, and municipal intelli- gence." Fritz Reichmann, State Superintendent of Weights and Measures, wrote three years ago: "Russia, which we consider a barbarous country, is so much better governed than New York State in respect to its weights and measures as to make us blush." In October, 1911, Dr. Alexis Ilyin, an of- ficial of St. Petersburg, denouncing the unsanitary conditions in New York bakeries, said : "I wonder MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE 281 how New Yorkers can stand eating bread made in these caverns of darkness and unwholesomeness." Bearing on the question of licensing peddlers and standkeepers, New Yorkers have read in the news- papers spicy accounts of fights between the "ins" and "outs" in "fish-stand politics," and of charges of grafting on pushcart men by political "organiza- tion representatives." Relative to the investment of millions in munici- pal markets "distributive" or wholesale, or com- pound wholesale and retail experience speaks in the views of representatives of two classes of New Yorkers, the one officeholders and the other trans- portation officials. Officeholders directed my attention to these points: A serious drawback in every one of New York's municipal branches is obtaining the annual appropriations essential to its development and its thorough and economical service. In the various departments, the loudest noise obtains the fullest purse. "Foolish waste and foolish frugality" was our late Commissioner of Accounts' verdict of the city's financial management. The officials at pres- ent engaged with the supervising, the licensing, the food inspecting, the policing of the markets and street vending all have one story either of insurfi- 282 MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE ciency or of superfluity of working force, or of in- adequacy of financial means, or of uncertainty of the law or jurisdiction, or of working at cross .pur- poses or of lack of co-ordination. Even the office accommodations of officials have long been anti- quated and inconvenient. In choosing market sites and creating new markets, some of these men ask, whose influence would predominate, that of real estate dealers or that of the localities standing most in need of the markets, which now are to have re- tail annexes, that of men best qualified to lay out a market adapted to metropolitan needs or that of politician contractors with elaborate and expensive plans of municipal monuments? In the shifting of New York's population due to new means of tran- sit, who can foresee whether or not in a few years a market at present located in a crowded district might not be partly abandoned ? And, given official recognition of the necessity of new wholesale bor- ough markets, how many years may elapse before sites are chosen and houses built? There has been urgent necessity for a new court building for more than a quarter of a century. The Hall of Records came after being needed a longer period. Once built, how to be cared for? The Assistant Com- missioner of Public Works stated last year he did MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE 283 not find it practical to have some of the present shabby market buildings repaired. The representa- tives of the dealers in one public market have testi- fied that the conditions under which they do busi- ness are deplorable. A walk around West Wash- ington Market today will be instructive, in its dilapidated state, as to the possibilities of upkeep for new markets ; only after a lapse of seven months after a bad fire was work at the necessary repairs begun in May. Fulton Market has a leaky roof; has no city refrigerating plant; for two years after it had a damaging fire in 1910 no permanent re- pairs were made. Last year Washington Market got the first coat of paint since 1882; removal of its outside stands, stallholders say, has made it in- sufferably cold in winter. The Eighth Ward Mar- ket, Brooklyn, has remained a costly unoccupied site only, not a market, for years. Transportation men ask what the promoters of municipal wholesale markets intend to do with re- gard to the terminal and wholesale methods de- veloped independently of municipal ownership or control. What is to be done with the scores of large receiving houses of the Western meat packing com- panies, the various costly miscellaneous storage plants, markets of themselves, the extensive whole- 284 MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE sale downtown quarter for butter, cheese and eggs, etc. ? In the course of time, the steamship and railroad terminals have established what are in part markets, in part freight depots on piers and in railroad yards the market features including wholesale auctioning, accommodations for commis- sion men, facilities for discharging and distributing produce. Dealers are in the habit of going to cer- tain of these points for specialties and the particular output of various parts of the country. Are offi- cial attempts to be made to supplant these enormous undertakings? The Long Island Railroad Com- pany has a site which it plans to have utilized as a market. How could the city prevent or control its operation? What would be the result of its com- petition with the proposed borough wholesale mar- kets? Grave questions, these, for promoters of ten-million-dollar municipal schemes. Today there is rivalry between the great railroad lines in bring- ing to their respective New York terminals the prod- uce of the different regions they serve. If con- strained to discharge their unsold perishable freight in municipal terminals only, or chiefly, what would be the effect on prices or in promoting combina- tions to control supply? The methods of the Paris wholesale market hav- MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE 285 ing been cited in support of the New York terminal plan, these pertinent facts are to be considered: With the one exception of meat, all classes of "per- ishable" foodstuffs to be marketed in Paris must be taken to the Central Halls. Private wholesale mar- kets are illicit. In 1909, the Municipal Council set out to investigate the "clandestine" markets of the railway freight stations, but the matter was soon dropped. The railway managers pleaded inability to give information on the subject; their business, they said, was transportation of goods; what was sold on arrival was not their concern. As the one exception to the compulsory sales in the wholesale market, the meat butchered under municipal super- vision is sold at the abattoirs. Being a branch of the municipal market system of Paris, lauded for its profits by the President of The Bronx, the abat- toirs of La Villette may be glanced at for a moment with the assistance of "Les Abattoirs Publics" (1906). De Loverdo, in the pages of this most thorough of reference books on the subject, de- scribes these features of La Villette : Defective in- stallation of butchers' slaughter sections, where the dirt is repugnant; stables badly aired, numerous cases of asphyxia consequent among the hogs, and the material in the structures permeable; the cut- 286 MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE ting-up sections for viscera untidy, ventilation bad, the emptying surface channels nests of pestilence; the paving permeable, the walls in bad condition; water generally insufficient, the workmen and women using soiled rags with dirty hands, while there is a complete lack of modern mechanical methods; absolute defects in the cooling rooms; sanitary section incomplete; laboratory and means of scientific investigation and apparatus for sterili- zation of slightly tainted meats absent; installation for the destruction of unwholesome meats un- known; collecting sewer in many of the establish- ments in the open air ! The new eight-million dol- lar La Villette has rested in the stage of "projec- tion" ten years. Paris, like New York, knows the procrastina- tions of bureaucracy. XVI. PRICES ; SUPPLIES ; DISTRIBUTION. COMPARING prices of foodstuffs in New York, Paris, Berlin and London brings confusing com- plications in the data. Some staples, such as meat, grain, butter and coffee, have offered what seemed an easy task to paste-and-scissors investigators of the cost of living in these cities. But other com- modities, such as fruit and vegetables, present spe- cial difficulties even to touch-and-go observers. Season alone brings to each city, for any particu- lar fruit for instance, a descending scale of prices until the full-season supply is reached, to be fol- lowed by an ascending scale with the passing of the crop. The seasons are not synchronous in the four cities. Qualities of fruit and vegetables differ in the course of the seasons as well as from year to year. The Paris marketmen strictly classify the several grades of vegetables, and each grade varies in freshness of stock. Prices vary in different quarters of one city, and even in different stores, being in each case adapted to the purse of the aver- age customer of a neighborhood or a clientele, and 287 288 MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE consequently his negligence or vigilance in saving his sous. The order by telephone gets the highest market charge; inspection by the buyer in a store brings an accommodation in price, and perhaps in quantity and quality. Dealers in specialties may know the current market rates for the six to ten grades of the commodities they buy and sell, but the family buyer must look sharp to distinguish differences, while the casual observer is not pe- cuniarily interested in fine distinctions. A judge on the bench has officially recognized seven degrees' of eggs; the market tables give six to eight classi- fications of chickens. Trade names in many cases signify not origin but merely quality. Beef in the British markets, especially among the retailers, takes grade by a nomenclature flattering to patriotism "Pure British grown/' "English killed," "Ameri- can," etc., are phrases which to the knowing mean quality, not country. The worst meats sold in England's butcher shops are "American," the best "English," with no real reference to geography. As to fruit, France specializes in pears and apples, the fancy "brands" bringing prices higher than any kind in America ; but the common run are retailed, in some years, much lower than similar qualities in New York stores. French cauliflower, it is a fact, MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE 289 is sold in Berlin markets; French tomatoes and flowers in Covent Garden; American fruit in most of the British and in several Continental cities, ef- fecting in all cases an influence on price of domestic products. Market reports and provision store cata- logues from the four cities may answer as finger posts for prices, but are not conclusive as to the class of the commodity. What grade the consumer buys, it is thus seen, is difficult to designate definitely and compare in tabular form. At the same time what value in money he pays is a fine mathematical question. The American traveler in France may count a sou a cent, five francs a dollar, a pound French weight a pound English weight, a litre a quart; it is his custom to calculate in convenient near equivalents. Facile but deceptive figuring. A dollar is worth not only five francs but nearly four cents more (5.1813). A pound English weight is short a pound French by nearly a tenth (453.6 grammes as against 500). Hence the New York housekeeper experimenting at living in Paris must remember that her American 100 cents is buying nearly 114 cents' worth, as calculated in French money and weight. That is, on all she buys she is gaining 14 per cent as compared with New York prices and 290 MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE scales. In England, a shilling is not equal to twenty-five cents, but only twenty-four; in Ger- many, a mark is not the same as a quarter, but only twenty-three and three-fourths cents. The ex- tremes of these differences, slight perhaps to the flush tourist, are sufficient in percentage to compass the entire rise in the average cost of foodstuffs in England from the level of 1900 to the maximum point of 1912. The much higher prices of certain comestibles in Paris than in New York lead the American to ask how they can co-exist with cheap facilities in mar- keting. Uniformly, there is but one correct reply taxes. France seeks self-subsistence. Her tillers, or owners, of the soil have imposed upon the coun- try a tariff protective of what they grow. In addi- tion, Paris has yet that medieval form of taxation, the octroi, or duty, assessed on certain commodities as they are brought within the fortifications that are coincident with the city boundary line. For ex- ample, the French national tariff on beef is pro- hibitive, twenty francs minimum on one hundred kilogrammes live weight in round numbers $3.90 on two hundred and twenty pounds. The octroi on a beef animal runs besides from $6 to $10, de- pending on weight, and the butchering head-tax MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE 291 may reach $2. Steak, then, at 40 cents! Butter and coffee are also high in price through taxation. A hundred kilogrammes of Holland butter pays twenty francs customs duty at the frontier and fourteen and a half francs octroi at the gates of Paris. There is no octroi on fruit and vegetables, but it strikes beef, pork, delicatessen, poultry and game, fish, oysters, butter, cheese, mustard, grapes, oils, alcohol, wood, coal, fodders and grain. How the national tariff affects price is seen in the in- stance of wheat, which, selling in March, 1911, at 18.38 francs per quintal in New York and advanc- ing to only 19.10 in London, sold in Paris at 26.69. In 1911, the index numbers for ten principal articles of household consumption subject to tariff duties in France and Germany stood: England, 100; France and Germany, 118. Coffee was not in this list. In France the minimum tariff on coffee is 148 francs on 100 kilogrammes, somewhat more than twelve cents a pound. The maximum duty is dou- ble. While the coffees displayed in the Paris gro- ceries take every fancy name known to the world trade, as a fact more than 90 per cent of all the importations are officially reported as from Brazil. It is, of course, the price of what any population principally eats that counts in its cost of living. In 292 MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE Paris, as in London, a direct effect of the people's markets is seen in the encouragement of market gardeners, local and distant, who raise the cheaper kinds of produce. While, especially during the crop seasons, the larger part of the supply comes to Paris by rail, the considerable deliveries from the local gardeners, by wagon to the market or direct to large buyers, indicate the consequences of a cer- tainty of sales of the food of the masses and con- fidence in the market prices. Large amounts of the cheaper sorts of fruit, berries, and vegetables are hence consumed; here quantity has an excep- tional weight in price comparisons. In view of such puzzling qualifications of ap- parent facts, quotation of sets of figures from for- eign sources to enforce the argument that pushcarts and street markets cut prices might fail to strength- en conclusions that stand to reason. A word here on the general trend in the prices of table necessaries. In the heaps of clippings before me on this subject is a magazine article, "Why Things Will Never Be Cheaper," and in the text the idea of the heading is repeated: "The worst of it all is that things will never be any cheaper than they are now. As gold increases prices are forced up." The positive and sweeping convictions of the MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE 293 author of the article, his swift penetration to the re- mote and all-comprehensive cause of high prices, and his command of the technical terms of finance and pure economics all these carry him to spheres of ratiocination beyond the purview of the com- monplace collector of everyday facts. Yet this I must venture to say : In my interviews with man- agers of markets, public and private, with numer- ous literary and statistical observers of the price problem, and with many men of affairs, in the four great cities, I have never met one who would say he had detected the slightest influence of the gold supply on current local market prices. Among the dealers in foodstuffs and the market officials the practical view was invariably taken that with large available supplies come low prices, and for proof they would point out the rise to double, or the fall to half, in the price of potatoes, or cabbage, or wine, as purely a crop consequence. In the Berlin mar- ket superintendent's reports for 1910 and 1911 and the Paris market director's reports for the same years, the unusual rise of prices of certain commodi- ties were accepted as plainly the results of the ex- traordinarily wet year and dry year. Some staple commodities bread, wine, fruit, fish were in 1911 no dearer in France than for years previous. 294 MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE Among the writers on general prices, Leroy-Beau- lieu ("ficonomiste," November, 1911), St. Leon ("La Vie Chere," 1911), and J. A. Hobson ("Gold Prices and Wages," 1913) regard the gold supply as of imperceptible influence. A rise in the price of meat in the United States was foreseen by J. Ogden Armour in 1906 ("The Packers, the Private Car Lines, and the People"), a chief cause being the decline in western range cattle raising. Cheap- ness through farm cattle might follow. By British writers the cheapening of meats in free trade Great Britain is today generally regarded as a certainty with increase in the Argentine supply, as may be the case in the United States. All in all, in various markets, cumulative special or coincidental causes for short supplies have in recent years been a strong factor in higher prices. An additional ground for hope of lower prices of foodstuffs for New York exists in the possible future utilization of large areas of land in the East at present not employed, or but partly employed, in production. Milton Whitney, Chief of the Na- tional Bureau of Soils, writes : "There are tens of thousands of acres of agricultural lands in a near-by radius of Greater New York, which are not at present under cultivation," but which "are MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE 295 adapted to the production of truck crops, for sum- mer, fall and winter use, fruit, live stock and dairy products." They "could be made to supply to a great extent the New York markets with perishable foodstuffs which, if properly handled, would in my opinion not only relieve the question of the food supply of Greater New York but would to a large extent reduce the prevailing high prices for vegetables, meats and poultry products." This, from one whose profession is to get at such facts, we may accept as better guidance for a correct fore- cast than the statement on the same point made by the President of The Bronx: "The suburbs of the large cities are taken up by fine estates so that they are out of the class of productive lands." The study given the local transportation methods of Philadelphia by Prof. C. L. King have caused him to expect benefits through better trolley freight service from farmlands of the vicinity to terminals in various sections of that city. In New York, the transit systems now being extended have their promise of improvements in local freight carrying. The possibilities in motor truck service on the prod- uce piers and in connection with the markets are also attracting some attention. So proceeds, point by point, the practical struggle against high costs. 296 MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE As to distribution of food through new whole- sale markets in Manhattan : A classification of the various foodstuffs which come to the city for sale enables one to discriminate as to where improve- ment is urgent and where none is soon probable. Present methods have been developed, in channels not easily changed, for the transportation of each class of food supplies to its particular rail or water terminals and thence in part to private storehouses. Inquiry brings out the fact that the sole class of foodstuffs in immediate pressing need of improved facilities for handling is country produce, and this only in the height of the season. Indications are that all kinds may, in time, through improved processes and organization, be carried more cheaply and directly than at present to market-places, com- mission men, wholesalers, retailers and consumers. But that the establishment of the system of whole- sale markets which has been proposed will be a certain improvement I found generally doubted by men in all branches of marketing except some in business near the proposed markets. Butter, cheese, and eggs have already, in the downtown West Side district long given over to dairy and kindred prod- ucts, an enormous private market generally regarded as impossible to dislodge. At the headquarters and MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE 297 main sales place of this trade, the Mercantile Ex- change, the proposition to affect it through the en- larged West Washington-Gansevoort market is treated with scorn and derision. Next, the meat supply, city and western, goes most of it in refriger- ator cars direct to scores of private storage houses scattered in the five boroughs; Swift & Co. alone have seventeen; none but a dreamer could today propose confining wholesale meat selling to public markets in New York ; the causes for concentration in Paris, London, and Berlin quarantining and taxation are lacking. Arrivals in New York of fish and live poultry are carried direct to their re- spective principal points of sale, which are inde- pendent of other markets. Country produce is the one commodity the handling of which has given a show of reason for the official proposal of a sys- tem of costly wholesale markets. Yet when the ob- server visits the principal fruit and produce piers on the North River, from No. 21 to No. 36, sees the wide streets and spacious landings and long row of goods shelters called "bonnets" in West street and talks with the men who day by day manage the enormous arrivals either as dealers or trans- portation agents, he can understand their contempt for proposals for a huge new costly pile of munici- 2 9 8 MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE pal warehouses, storage plants, and general markets, the whole plan propped up by incorrect testimony as to the revenue producing powers of municipal undertakings in foreign or smaller American cities. What might be done practically at little expense on the space and piers now occupied by the West Washington-Gansevoort market could doubtless be made a profitable study to the city by the four as- sociations interested in the neighborhood which unitedly have given countenance to the scheme for the new eight to twelve million dollar expansion of that market. That the latter project is now dead is quite a certainty; it has been more than a year before the community without action ; the marginal railway, which was to carry its supplies, is given up; the project is tied up with proposals for other borough markets to cost at least twenty million dollars. What, however, the associations have to work on as bases for improvement are the West Washington market with its adjoining pier space and the Gansevoort market square, the latter having an area of 125,000 square feet. Certain possible features for the proposed costly market, as given in the associations' pamphlet, might be embodied in a less ambitious plan. With the present market area brought up to its easy possibilities, and the MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE 299 other city markets operated to their fullest extent according to modern methods, the wholesaling link with incoming supplies might be well enough se- cured pending the immediate general transforma- tion of the metropolis. In the matter of handling produce alone, free pushcarts and open-air markets might effect radical changes in costs and methods. Viewed broadly, as clearly illustrated in the pres- ent state of the New York market system, the science of city market establishment and manage- ment is only in its infancy. Municipal market of- ficials everywhere are usually occupied merely in the details of administration. M. Georges Rouge, the chief of the Paris bureau, a master of his du- ties, expressed these sentiments on this point : "I regret that there have been no relations established between the market authorities of the four great cities of which you speak. No commissions have visited from one of these cities to another, so far as I know, in this generation. How the various market systems have risen out of the past has not been traced, to the benefit of us all." De Massy, who went to England in 1862, representing the De- partment of Agriculture of France, was the last Frenchman to investigate London methods and give a complete comparative study of the market estab- 300 MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE lishments of London and Paris. There is not one book in the British museum on London or other markets. The American "Special Libraries" num- ber, March, 1913, giving a list of publications on markets, the result of diligent research, revealed the paucity of comprehensive inquiry into the sub- ject. XVII. A METROPOLITAN MARKET SYS- TEM, CUT-PRICE AND COSTLESS. IN brief, here is what I advocate: 1. Ambulant street vending, free to all comers, limited in range only by ne- cessary health laws and any higher social exigencies of other traffic. 2. Open-air markets, to be held for a few hours semi-weekly or tri-weekly, in street or park or other public space, in any quarter of Greater New York where bodies of consumers may de- mand them ; free to all vendors either of foodstuffs or manufactured articles of household or personal use. 3. Existing public markets to be used to the fullest extent through modern methods auctioning, licensing the market commission men, selling by sample, ordering from producers for direct delivery, encouraging the at- tendance of local producers. Not a complete system, granted; only a fair be- ginning, at the wide base. But the principle is cor- rect; results would tell at once. No other project yet made public affords the immediately possible foundation for a fully rounded-out, naturally de- 301 302 MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE veloped system, permitting free play to every form of both wholesaling and retailing foodstuffs in New York. Consumers' rights are the main guide to these reforms. Consumers have a community right to the benefits of free ambulant pushcart selling. A certain pri- mary benefit would be general education as to the positive right of the masses to service on and through the highway. Consumers are afforded by pushcart selling a choice between outdoor and in- door merchants; are informed through the cart displays as to prices, qualities and supplies of food ; are protected through the elastic numbers of ven- dors from combinations to uphold prices. The push- cart brings the articles sold to the test of daylight; gives the buyer a varied choice ; offers comparisons with storekeepers' stocks and prices; encourages an increase of supplies; frees buyers from "the attack," subtle or aggressive, when in the hands of indoor salesmen; brings to consumers what is wanted, when and where it is wanted, at home or workshop. Consumers have a right, if they have any rights in the agencies of social progress, to the service of pushcart vendors who are free. The free vendor is MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE 303 a different being from the harried "commercial out- cast" who has long been known to the streets of New York. Yet what this victim of the policemen under orders and of the predatory acts of padrone, politician and storekeeper has been able to accom- plish as middleman nearest the people of small means indicates the possibilities that lie in him if not persecuted through unjust law. He ought to utilize the streets legitimately for the public good. His occupation puts to social use much otherwise unemployable labor and unserviceable capital, to the smallest units; gives small home producers oppor- tunity to find sales ; employs the infirm and elderly ; relieves the city from a part of its charitable charge ; above all, regulates the prices of other sell- ers to the masses. Berlin, in closing most of its streets to pushcart vendors, it is now seen by its market officials, created and for years maintained special advantages for the rapidly growing depart- ment-store provision sections. The forcible with- drawal of New York's pushcart vendors from many streets during the last year, and their concentration by the police mostly in small downtown districts, have lessened seriously the sales of the craft, ac- cording to common complaint of its members. It is evident that West Side and central factory and 304 MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE other employes cannot walk blocks at their lunch hour to reach the fixed pushcart street markets as now temporarily established, nor can housewives of distant districts make use of them in their buy- ing. Consequently, among these classes of buyers thousands of persons forced to economize closely are today paying store prices for their fruit or going without it in hunger. In other words, this clearing of the pushcart men from many streets has given rise to a storekeeper's tax on the poor, not calculable but undoubtedly onerous. Conjec- ture might reasonably place the tax in money at tens of thousands of dollars a week, while the tax on human force through insufficient feeding is be- yond estimate. The New York "Medical Times" quotes Professor Giddings, of Columbia Univer- sity: "It is a conservative estimate that one-third of the people in the large cities of the country do not get enough to eat." Pushcart vendors if made free in New York might be expected to rise in worth and efficiency of service to the level at which their similars stand in London and Paris. Men having the pride of free citizens would in increasing numbers enter the oc- cupation; they would learn to co-operate in buy- ing, in maintaining- trade discipline, in bettering MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE 305 their stock and increasing its varieties. To sell in New York's streets is now criminal ; it ought in jus- tice to be respectable. "Another raid of peddlers in Harlem; forty locked up!" ought to be impossi- ble as a newspaper heading. "Is it true that the peddlers will not clean up their litter?" I asked a police officer while looking at a line of vendors' carts in a tolerated quarter. "Not on my post/' he replied. "Look along the street there ; it is as clean as a grocery floor." Several patrolmen told me the pushcart men were in general anxious to obey the law on every point except going where they were forbidden, which at present is almost the entire street area of the city. "Is the pushcart trade a benefit to the masses, and are the vendors a sufficiently responsible class to perform this work to their own credit and the good of society?" This question I put to the Chief of the Markets Bureau of Paris, to the Chief In- spector of Berlin's Central Markets, and to the Chief Officer of the London County Council Public Con- trol Department. In each case the reply was em- phatically in the affirmative. "What is the special service performed by the coster?" I asked at the London County Council's offices. "The speedy dis- posal of a glut," was the prompt reply. "Apples or 306 MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE other fruit, strawberries or other berries, potatoes and vegetables, every sort of produce in its high season, might be a drug in the market and much of it left on the producers' hands, were it not for the street vendors. These, some of whom may be for the moment among the unemployed or the casual workers, catch wind of a glut and they seem to spring from the earth to spread the welcome cheap food all over London. This is a great boon to the underfed poor, for without the coster the overplus of the day's market would never reach them." "Then," was the next inquiry, "the farmer or mar- ket gardener, realizing something on his shipment, is encouraged to get to work again, producing; if he suffered a total loss he would be discouraged?" "True, and so he is kept at his work with confidence in some gain. The street vendor thus on the one hand helps to employ the producer and on the other to feed the people." In New York, a girl stenographer, writing to the press, used this Lon- doner's word "boon": "The fruit peddlers are a boon to a majority of employes down town, whose luncheon consists chiefly in just the fruit they buy from these peddlers." An East Side factory hand said to me: "The mothers of many young girls where I work give them five cents for their lunch. MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE 307 They can buy double the apples and oranges with it from the peddler that they can from the fruit store." At half the present prices of fruit-stand stock a million self-denying New York poor might when hungry eat twice the quantity they do now. The consumer has the right to rid himself of the padrone, the politician, and the storekeeper who rents street-space to peddlers. It is the consumer who when buying in the street now pays the cumu- lative blackmail or private taxes of these birds of prey on what is a beneficial and should be a wholly legitimate trade. He should be able to buy any- where in New York from a peddler uninterfered with while within his rights. "I was once selling to a customer in front of the Mansion House in London," said a New York East Side ex-coster- monger, "when a bobby ordered me to move on, and as I kept at my sale started to arrest me. 'Oh, no;' said the customer; 'we are both within the law, and I'll see the coster safe through at the po- lice station/ There was no arrest." The consumer has a right to the cheap and con- venient service of the semi-weekly or tri-weekly open-air market. Survivor, in Paris, London, and the Berlin suburban municipalities, of the two forms of public retail markets the housed and the 3o8 MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE open this type is one of the successful commer- cial adaptations to city needs. The turn for or against any method in trade may result on the sav- ing of one cent in ten or the avoidance of a mo- ment's inconvenience in purchasing. But open-air markets have numerous and considerable advan- tages. "Why," asks the family buyer, "should mar- ket dealers sit all week in stalls to sell to the people of a neighborhood the food that may be bought in a few hours on two or three days?" The query suggests, for the permanent indoor stallholders, un- avoidable "overhead charges," stale stock replen- ished by small purchases, and tacit agreements as to prices. In the housed market, moreover, the sell- er's maneuvres are for the best price from each straggling buyer, for he can hold his stock in stor- age ; but in the open-air market, the seller's incentive first of all is sales to the market-day's concourse, and he is loth to load up again and carry stock away. The purchaser going through a housed daily market often passes alone rows of stalls; he is eyed, "sized up," and probably solicited by vendors, while he is reluctant to betray in petty expenditures his enforced economies ; on the contrary, moving along in an open-air market the small purchaser is one of a busy crowd, is undisturbed in forming his MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE 309 judgment, and in buying can order, unobserved, quantities to suit his purse. The free open-air mar- ket is a democratic meeting place, where the small- est transient seller may meet the smallest casual buyer, to the benefit of both. In an occasional mar- ket, circumstances favor bargains, especially just before closing time; in a permanent market, cir- cumstances favor holding stock back. The open- air market selling goes off freely with a rush. A housed market has troublesome regulations, such as the three hours' suspension for cleaning during the afternoons in the Berlin system. The pro- ducer who sells in an open-air market is gaining meantime through the growth of his crops and ani- mals at home ; the stall-holding non-producing deal- er must make all his profit from handling his little stock. At an open-air market are producers desir- ous of selling their fresh stock, consisting of all varieties and qualities of the day, at prices an- nounced on cards to catch the attention of the passer-by; in a housed market are dealers, who combinedly guard against redundancy of supplies, and who often do not label prices for the best ar- ticles, the customer being usually obliged to stop and ask before he can settle in his mind whether he can afford to buy. "Confidence in the price and 310 MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE its advantages involve a mental operation before deciding to buy," the Chief of Statistics for France said to me in explanation of the trick of the trade when sellers do not show their prices; "and that operation is facilitated when goods are displayed in a clear light and marked by price cards. When merely told the price, the questioning and confused customer may make a regrettable hurried decision." A Londoner, one of the promoters of the proposed borough housed markets of a decade ago, gave me this point from his experience: "The preference for open-air markets is a phenomenon of psychol- ogy. Our people in London will not go into an arcade market" (one with rows of stalls). "They stay in the open, for one thing, for the paradoxical reason that they want to keep their business to themselves. The shy individual is lost in the bus- tling mass. Buyers want to know price, quality and probable origin of stock, all at a glance, and don't want to be singled out and bothered by the impor- tunities of sellers as they walk along, looking at the displays." Open-air markets are economical to the city, be- ing located or removed without cost, to suit neigh- borhood changes; market halls are immovable, costly to establish, and sources of loss while fail- MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE 311 ing. A commission of Berlin officials which in 1906 visited the larger cities of Germany and Aus- tria-Hungary to investigate markets, say in their report ("Bericht liber eine Informationsreise," page 63) : "As in Berlin, the public of Vienna and Budapest show a preference for free open-air mar- kets to closed-in market halls." The reasons there- for take up several pages of the report, the con- clusion being : "The district halls seem to be losing their warrant for existence and to be inevitably approaching their end." Fifty-eight Italian cities, including a number in the inclement Alpine regions, have open-air markets ("Annuario Statistico delle Citta Italiane," 1910). In the United Kingdom, the more than three hundred and fifty towns and districts having market systems quite invariably have open market-places ("Municipal Year Book," 1912). An article in the February, 1913, issue of "The American City," describing the markets in 71 cities and towns of the United States and Can- ada, mentioned 47 as being in the open, having open annexes, or being attended by farmers, presumably in the open. In the light of these facts, it may safely be ex- pected that New York's present administration's "permanent sheltered markets/' having every com- 312 MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE mercial drawback of "market halls" or "housed markets," will fail to meet public needs. If the pushcart vendors obtain their just freedom in the streets, such markets will be abandoned by most of them; if the stallholder must pay for the hauling of his stock from the wholesalers and also a rental for his market stall, he will be obliged to meet the competition of dealers appearing in private store- rooms better placed. The consumer has a social and a legal right to the uses, individually or through his purveyors, of pub- lic space for wholesale marketing purposes. What space or spaces should be so used is a question of convenience to the community. The public whole- sale market is a time-saving device ; it is in cases a method of obviating waste in hauling, a common ground for sellers and buyers, a means of collecting goods for inspection by consumers or officials. From various angles it is seen as a fair for the exhibition and comparison of commodities; a cen- tre for ready transfer or delivery; an exchange for dealers; a testing place for samples; a source of direct supply for retailers. All countries of our civilization recognize the use of common areas for the sale of foodstuffs in bulk, as they do highways for the transportation of foodstuffs. Recent de- MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE 313 velopments, however, in the larger cities have left unsettled certain questions of policy and expediency relative to the jurisdiction of the public administra- tion and to the expenditures advisable in establish- ing wholesale markets. The tendency in Paris is clearly to a falling off in the importance of the Central Halls and to an increase in the marketing business at railway terminals; in Berlin the whole- sale market is in no wise the main wholesale agency for the city's supplies; in London, the sales of Covent Garden and of the commodities other than meat and fish in the city's system have steadily fallen away in proportion to population. In New York, the idea of easily transferring, through imagined economies, the enormous sales at piers and rail- road yards and private warehouses to public whole- sale markets is quixotic. Consumers have the first right of consideration as between themselves and the provision store deal- ers in the matter of highway market service. It is not a certainty that substantial storekeepers would be seriously injured by free street selling. As it is, no sooner does one of them build up a fair custom than, in a basement or a "hole in the wall," a small competitor who might follow street peddling if permitted appears, to split up his trade. As 314 MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE already noted, wherever a collection of pushcart dealers or an open-air market is established, "a commercial atmosphere" is created, soon to be shared in by merchants in stores about the mar- kets. These learn the value to themselves of the street vendors. Consumers, of course, have valid and important rights to be defended in the remoter economic spheres of transportation, produce exchanges, the "packing" industry, and commission men's asso- ciations. But the operations of these agencies are far from the usual direct influence of individual consumers. The wrongs in this respect are being reached by legislation at the pace at which law- making marches. To advise consumers to devote time and force in that line of effort and patiently await results is to mock at them. The consumer has rights, small and great, as against both the sellers and the authorities, which he might effectively insist on through organization. In his program for reform he might announce these as among his minor rights : To require public ven- dors to designate by a card the price of each com- modity on sale; to have stock so arranged as to permit choice at the prices advertised; to examine purchases before payment; to have means of re- MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE 315 porting at once sales of unlawful goods ; to oppose advances in pf ice by undue units, such as five cents where one might be warranted. In a larger way, associated consumers might include as rightful de- mands : To have accurate information, day by day, of the current prices in all markets under public authority; to have ready access to publicly regu- lated weighing stations; to be protected from re- sales in public markets; to have purchases sold by weight on the asking; to get at the movements and prices of the market through auctioning; to have speculation in market stands or stalls pre- vented through weekly tenancies; to have the field of marketing kept clear of licenses, tolls, combina- tions or unjustifiable restrictions; to have every modern public and private agency operating in the markets in its appropriate sphere, to the common profit. The consumer's rights ! If a right is worth hav- ing it is worth fighting for. To know his rights and fight for them in their good order is, princi- pally, "The Consumer's Part." Also, if the consumer is to act intelligently, his part includes carefully weighing the various proj- ects before the public for reducing the prices not only of his table necessaries but many other arti- 3i6 MARKETS FOR THE PEOPLE cles of household and personal consumption. Which project is plainly practical? Which brings economies within sight? Which can come without expense? Which requires little organized effort? Which is the outcome of a try-out in other great cities? Which will give every one opportunity to sell? Which will at once help one's neighbor? Which asks nothing from the public funds? Which" is the result of an international study? Which com- pares projects of all forms and kinds, giving due consideration to each? Which is disinterested? Which carries its own clear evidence of a general benefit? On the challenge implied in this interrogatory, it is for time to render the verdict. The following pages contain advertisements of a few of the Macmillan books on kindred subjects THE PURCHASING POWER OF MONEY A STUDY OF THE CAUSES DETERMINING THE GENERAL LEVEL OF PRICES AN EXPLANATION OF THE RISE IN THE COST OF LIVING BETWEEN 1896 AND 1913 New Edition BY IRVING FISHER YALE UNIVERSITY Author of "The Rate of Interest," "The Nature of Capital and Income," "A Brief Introduction to the Infinitesimal Calculus," etc. Cloth, 8vo, 505 pp., $3.00 net; by mail, $3.18 What the Leading Reviewers say of "The Purchasing Power of Money" Professor S. J. Chapman, Manchester University, says: "The kernel of this book contains the results of a brilliant piece of research, in which, after discussion of the theory of the value of money, an attempt is made to establish the truth of the quantity theory induc- tively." "In the opinion of the reviewer, this book is a magnificent achieve- ment. . . . The research of which a brief account has been given in this notice will add greatly to the renown which its author has already fully earned by his two volumes on 'Capital' and 'In- terest ' respectively, and by his report to the American Senate on the 'Conservation of Vital Forces.'" Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Vol. LXXIV, Part VII. "It is timely to recall the views expressed by the professor in his new book, 'The Purchasing Power of Money,' which has two marked characteristics. Firstly, it gives a precision never before attained or attempted regarding the effect of the quantity of money in circu- lation upon prices, either in raising or lowering them. "Secondly, it proposes a remedy which is both in accord with the principles of classical economists, and which is yet progressive enough to satisfy the most advanced thought of this progressive age." Times, New York City. PUBLISHED BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 64-66 Fifth Avenue New York BUSINESS ORGANIZATION AND COMBINATION An Analysis of the Evolution and Nature of Business Organiza- tion in the United States and a Tentative Solution of the Corporation and Trust Problems BY LEWIS H. HANEY, PH.D. Professor of Economics in the University of Texas. Author of "A Congressional History of Railways" and "History of Economic Thought." Cloth, 8vo, $2.00 net Dr. Haney in his treatment of business organization recognizes two kinds: business that is productive from the social point of view, and business that is productive only from the individual point of view. According to the social point of view, business is productive when it adds to the net sum of goods and services which men want; that is, when the amount of food, clothes, books, automobiles, teach- ing, medical service, etc., is increased. But individuals may grow rich in ways which do not increase the net sum of goods and services and still be actively engaged in business, or in production from the individual standpoint. A large part of advertising is merely acquisi- tive, not adding anything, but taking for one business man what another business man loses. So it is with some "speculation" and some middlemen's activities. But all this, when recognized as lawful and when the price is freely paid, Dr. Haney calls "business"; and in the long run, he holds, the test of a good business man is simply the amount of income or private gain which he acquires legally. In his treatment Dr. Haney has recognized "business" to include some activities which add nothing to the sum total of society's wealth. PUBLISHED BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 64-66 Fifth Avenue .New York THE CREDIT SYSTEM BY W. G. LANGWORTHY TAYLOR Emeritus Professor of Political Economy in the University of Nebraska Cloth, 8vo, 322 pp. This book treats the subject of money from an entirely original point of view. It endeavors to explain financial phenomena rather than merely to describe them. It closely connects speculation and promotion with general prices, and also explains the relation of credit to money. The theory advanced by the author is the dynamic one that price fluctuation is itself a normal phenomenon, depending upon the inter- acting interests of various orderly groups of producers and financiers, and traceable through successive stages, whether nominal purchasing power be regarded in the light of normal or abnormal credit. The book will prove one of practical interest to the thoughtful business man and a source of stimulation to college students. THE ECONOMICS OF ENTERPRISE BY HERBERT J. DAVENPORT Professor of Economics in the University of Missouri. In this volume Professor Davenport presents the affirmative and constructive aspects of the positions established in his critical study, Value and Distribution. In simple terms and in compact orderly treatment he makes accessible to the wide economic public the issues, the controversies and the conclusions which together sum up into the modern economics. As the work is primarily an objective study of the facts of modern trade and business, its point of view is that of the enterpriser. A consistent acceptance of this competitive point of view compels a general restatement of economic principles and a reclassification of the facts of economic life. PUBLISHED BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 64-66 Fifth Avenue New York ECONOMICS OF BUSINESS BY NORMS A. BRISCO, PH.D. Instructor in Political Science in the College of the City of New York Cloth, xiv + 390 pp., index, i2mo, $1.50 net Business principles and methods are discussed in this volume in clear, untechnical language, and in such a manner as to make the work one which may be read intelligently by the novice and with profit by the business man, and which may be used to advantage as a text in college courses. The author's knowledge of business conditions and methods is based upon his personal experience, his work in the classroom, and his study of the publicly and privately expressed views of the leading experts in the various lines of business activity. Among the topics treated are Organization, Management, Cost Accounting, Efficiency of Methods, Labor, Buying, Selling, Advertising, Money and Credit, Copyrights and Patents. PUBLISHED BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 64-66 Fifth Avenue New York CO-OPERATION IN AGRICULTURE BY G. HAROLD POWELL (Rural Science Series) Cloth, i2mo., $1.50 net; postpaid, $1.62 This book deals with the general principles of co-operation. How to organize co-operative societies, how to finance them, simple organ- izations and constitutional documents, by-laws and general advice as to the administration of the associations or societies are all con- sidered. The author describes at some length the most famous organiza- tions, such as those which are handling citrus fruits in California, the farmers' grain elevators systems and the present co-operation in the creamery and butter business. This book is one that should be in the hands of every farmer or agricultural student, for a more practical guide to organized farm- ing and its co-operative societies has not been written. "The book distinguishes between associations for profit and for mutual benefit; it is valuable in its warnings as to the application and changing of existing laws, as to the methods of operation, and as to the spirit of membership, so vital to success." New York Post. "It is a mass of detailed instruction in every kind of work on the farm, in the garden and fruit raising industries." Philadelphia Telegraph. "The book should be read by all persons contemplating the forma- tion of a co-operative association." Tribune Farmer. PUBLISHED BY THE,MACMILLAN COMPANY 64-66 Fifth Avenue New York THIS BOOK IS DUE ON THE LAST DATE STAMPED BELOW AN INITIAL FINE OF 25 CENTS WILL BE ASSESSED FOR FAILURE TO RETURN THIS BOOK ON THE DATE DUE. THE PENALTY WILL INCREASE TO 5O CENTS ON THE FOURTH DAY AND TO $1.OO ON THE SEVENTH DAY OVERDUE. 4^V o~ *" 1939 nrr ] 9. 1589 Uo\ BWDKCOCT1 81889 LD 21-95i-7,'37 rB I8 " 7 U.C. BERKELEY LIBRARIES C020VWSUM UNIVERSITY OF CAUFORNIA LIBRARY