Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 17.djvu/768

748 neighbor, must inevitably be distributed, as the struggle for the means of existence grows sharper, with the greatest economy possible. The pleasures of shopping may lose some of their attraction when the cost of keeping up shops depending upon chance custom becomes understood, and when the managers of stores undergo such evolution as to enable them to display their goods with taste and effect. Some of the great English stores look as if all inducing to purchase by tasteful appeals to the eye were among the things to be left behind.

The stores have drawn attention to a principle which may yet find wide development—the organization of supply and demand, so that the uncertainties and difficulties of modern business may be made less oppressive than they are now felt to be. When a particular retail store has its permanent body of purchasers whose money conducts the concern, stocks of goods can be laid in with little of the doubt and uncertainty which must vex the ordinary shopkeeper and subject him to inevitable loss; the same principle leads to yet further economy when, as at Manchester, a wholesale society supplies a stated and large number of stores for their fairly predictable wants. A steadying of the fluctuations of production would occur were wholesale societies federated to manufacturing and importing societies; the whole series conferring mutual benefits among the members, and depriving the speculator, the corner-maker, and the fraudulent bankrupt of their spoils. Such is the ideal of coöperation, to which at a distance, toilsome indeed, its leaders are endeavoring to come in practice. Could the coöperative principle by the integrity and stability of a people spread throughout its trade, the perplexities and losses of business would be enormously reduced. The area over which a merchant's customers are now scattered usually prevents him from knowing much of their personal characters or circumstances. Competition, with its too cheap credit, has made it rarely possible for a wholesale merchant or manufacturer to ask his customer upon what grounds he should be trusted. The knowledge which in olden times used to be directly sought between man and man is now usually obtained through irresponsible commercial agencies, which, however honestly and ably managed, can not and should not take the place of direct inquiry of a trader seeking credit by the merchant or manufacturer who trusts him. The intermediation, too, of the commercial traveler, who does so much of the business of to-day, weakens the sense of responsibility felt at its height when merchant and customer meet face to face; and the extent of bankruptcy within recent years has undoubtedly been widened by the constant and undue solicitation to buy on the part of these commercial travelers, who are interested more in effecting large sales than in ascertaining the soundness of their customers.

The extension of railroads and other means of travel and transportation, by increasing the mutual invasion by merchants of each other's territory, has had the effect of making constant and expensive