Page:Emile Vandervelde - Three Aspects of the Russian Revolution - tr. Jean Elmslie Henderson Findlay (1918).djvu/109

 to the detriment of the peasant-merchants. The evil has acquired a sort of right of naturalization impossible to deal with. There has even grown out of it a special type of commercial traveller, whose patrons think highly of him, and who is very well paid by them. These specialists manipulate so cleverly that the peasants can only raise their arms in astonishment when they learn that in a waggon of twenty pouds of wheat there are only eighteen or nineteen, and that when the price of wheat is fixed at one rouble per poud there is a difference of five to ten kopeks for each poud."

The remedy consists in assuring to the grower a credit gauged on his corn harvest. But that only solves one part of the difficulty. At the actual sale the peasant runs the further risk of falling into the hands of the middleman, unless the association comes again to his aid. Loan societies are therefore coming quite naturally to take up the question of the wholesale purchase of produce, and it is there undoubtedly that their activities can have the most important social consequences.

Let us note still further that these loan