594 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



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 dis- 

 tribution 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 busi- 

 ness 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 manufact- 

 ured, 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 

 Xew 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 im- 

 porting, warehousing, selling at wholesale and retail, and employing 

 many middle-men, clerks, book-keepers, and large capital, to a mere 



