40 THE ALUMNI JOURNAL 



consumers, this makes New York, to an extent that very few 

 people can understand, an all-important factor in fixing prices. 

 If we, here in New York, deem it expedient to buy and send in our 

 orders, those orders affect the market decisively. If we hold 

 back in New York, the demand is reduced in a greater degree 

 than from any other source. New York makes the market in a 

 much larger number of articles than one imagines. 



In former years New York was the most speculative drug mar- 

 ket. We had a large number of brokers here whose sole oa- 

 cupation was the selling of round lots of drugs from one specula- 

 tor to the other. This is to a great extent a thing of the past, 

 and only a few of these brokers are left. Speculation in drugs in 

 the sense of cornering the market, is a thing of the past. 



The prices of drugs in general have increased materially, and 

 even our indigenous drugs have become much more valuable, and 

 this is bound to continue. In former years most of our crude 

 drugs came from Germany ; women and children and all the 

 unemployed collected drugs. If they could make fifty cents a 

 day during the comparatively short time when drugs can be 

 cojlected, they were very well satisfied. The peasants, when not 

 actively employed in farming, also collected drugs. A consider- 

 able part of the population had no fixed employment, and they 

 made a few groschen or thaler by collecting drugs. But as the 

 country developed industrially, all these people found employ- 

 ment in factories, and the number of people who collected crude 

 drugs diminished, and those who continued were paid better for 

 their work. To-day, very much fewer drugs come from Germany 

 and the less prosperous countries (Austria, Russia, Roumania, 

 Bulgaria, etc.), furnish a large share. In our country a large 

 number of our colored population in the South formerly added 

 considerably to their income by the collection of crude drugs. 

 This is also a thing of the past ; they find better paying employ- 

 ment. This is not confined to the blacks alone, but to the "poor 

 whites" in the South who were also engaged in a large way in 

 the collection of crude drugs. Indigenous drugs have advanced 

 very much and will never again sell at the low prices which pre- 

 vailed heretofore. Aside from the curtailment of production 

 caused by industrial development, the ruthless manner in which 

 crude drugs have been collected usually involving the destruction 

 of the plant, is an important factor in the increase of values. 



