748 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



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 under- 

 stood, 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 cooperation, to which at a distance, toil- 

 some indeed, its leaders are endeavoring to come in practice. Could 

 the cooperative 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 cus- 

 tomers 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 irre- 

 sponsible 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 transpor- 

 tation, by increasing the mutual invasion by merchants of each other's 

 territory, has had the effect of making constant and expensive solicita- 



