Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 31.djvu/613

Rh commission business, which dispenses to a great extent with the employment of intermediates, and does not necessarily require the possession or control of any capital.

Let us next go one step farther, and see what has happened at the same time to the man whose business it has been not to sell, but to manufacture tin-plate into articles for domestic use, or for other consumption. Thirty or forty years ago, the tinman, whose occupation was mainly one of handicraft, was recognized as one of the leading and most skillful mechanics in every village, town, and city. His occupation has, however, now well-nigh passed away. For example, a townsman and a farmer desires a supply of milk-cans. He never thinks of going to his corner tinman, because he knows that in New York, and Chicago, and Philadelphia, and other large towns and cities, there is a special establishment fitted up with special machinery, which will make his can better and fifty per cent cheaper than he can have it made by hand in his own town. And so in regard to almost all the other articles which the tinman formerly made. He simply keeps a stock of machine-made goods, as a small merchant, and his business has come down from that of a general, comprehensive mechanic to little other than a tinker and mender of pots and pans. Where great quantities of tin-plate are required for a particular use, as, for example, the canning of salmon or lobsters, of biscuit, or of fruit and vegetables, the plates come direct from the manufactory to the manufacturer of cans or boxes, in such previously agreed upon sizes and shapes as will obviate any waste of material, and reduce to a minimum the time and labor necessary to adapt them to their respective uses. And by this arrangement alone, in one cracker (biscuit) bakery in the United States, consuming forty thousand tin boxes per month, forty men are now enabled to produce as large a product of boxes in a given time as formerly required fifty men; and, taken in connection with machinery, the labor of twenty-five men in the entire business has become equivalent to that of the fifty who until recently worked by other methods. And what has been thus affirmed of tin-plate might be equally affirmed of a great variety of other leading commodities; the blacksmith, for example, no longer making, but buying his horseshoes, nails, nuts, and bolts; the carpenter his doors, sash, blinds, and moldings; the wheelwright his spokes, hubs, and fellies; the harness-maker his straps, girths, and collars; the painter his paints ground and mixed, and so on; the change in methods of distribution and preparation for final consumption having been equally radical in almost every case, though varying somewhat in respect to particulars.

The same influences have also to a great degree revolutionized the nature of retail trade, which has been aptly described as, "until lately, the recourse of men whose character, skill, thrift, and ambition, won credit, and enabled them to dispense with large capital." Experience