Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 31.djvu/612

594 high wages, conjoined with the skillful management of machinery, is a low cost of production.

Attention is next asked to the economic—industrial, commercial, and financial—disturbances that have also resulted in recent years from changes, in the sense of improvements, in the details of the distribution of products. And as the best method of showing this, the recent course of trade in respect to the practical distribution and supply of one of the great articles of commerce, namely, tin-plate, is selected.

Before the days of the swift steamship and the telegraph, the business of distributing tin-plate for consumption in the United States was largely in the hands of one of the great mercantile firms of New York, who brought to it large enterprise and experience. At every place in the world where tin was produced and tin-plate manufactured, they had their confidential correspondent or agent, and every foreign mail brought to them exclusive and prompt returns of the state of the market. Those who dealt with such a firm dealt with them under conditions which, while not discriminating unfavorably to any buyer, were certainly extraordinarily favorable to the seller; and great fortunes were amassed. But to-day how stands that business? There is no man, however obscure he may be, who wants to know any morning the state of the tin-plate market in any part of the world, but can find it in the mercantile journals. If he wants to know more in detail, he joins a little syndicate for news, and then he can be put in possession of every transaction of importance that took place the day previous in Cornwall, Liverpool, in the Strait of Sunda, in Australia, or South America. What has been the result? There are no longer great warehouses where tin in large quantities and of all sizes, waiting for customers, is stored. The business has passed into the hands of men who do not own or manage stores. They have simply desks in offices. They go round and find who is going to use tin in the next six months. They hear of a railroad-bridge which is to be constructed; of a certain number of cars which are to be covered; that the salmon-canneries on the Columbia River or Puget's Sound are likely to require seventy thousand boxes of tin to pack the catch of this year, as compared with a requirement of sixty thousand last year (or in 1886)—a business, by-the-way, which a few years ago was not in existence—and they will go to the builders, contractors, or business managers, and say to them: "You will want at such a time so much tin. I will buy it for you at the lowest market price, not of New York, but of the world; and I will put it in your possession, in any part of the continent on a given day, and you shall cash the bill, and pay me a percentage commission"—possibly a fraction of one per cent; thus bringing a former great and complicated business of importing, warehousing, selling at wholesale and retail, and employing many middle-men, clerks, book-keepers, and large capital, to a mere