Middlemen in English Business 303 



purpose of exporting it themselves; as to the domestic trade they were 

 to act only as factors for clothiers.^ These efforts were ineffective. 



The factors at Blackwell Hall did an increasing business as repre- 

 sentatives of foreign mercantile houses. Not till the eighteenth cen- 

 tury had they established foreign connections to much extent. But 

 it became very noticeable about 1740 that the Dutch and Spanish 

 merchants had changed their methods of buying between 1698 and 

 that date; that they no longer bought directly from the clothier, as 

 they had become habituated before that time, at his house in the 

 country; but that they bought through the Blackwell Hall factors.- 

 It is possible that the economic control exercised by the factor over the 

 clothiers was a compelling force in working this transition in practice, 

 whereby the factor attained a more complete monopoly of sales; at 

 least the subserviency to the Hall in this matter of foreign sales was 

 a subject of complaint by the clothier.^ 



The economic significance of the factors at the Hall is difficult of 

 analysis. To the clothiers who were more impressed with the abuses 

 imposed than the services rendered, the factors were, as was said, "a 

 pubHc nuisance and prejudice to the clothing trade;"^ and nowhere in 

 the literature of the century studied are found any praises for the 

 benefactions of the factor to the wool and woolens industry, while 

 there is a comparative abundance of invective and complaint against 

 him. Unquestionably the volume of the literature is no test or cri- 

 terion by which to estimate the factor's worth to trade. The most 

 salient abuses of his office have been analyzed at length; the genera! 

 tenor of his way was so unobtrusive that his fundamental services 

 were unrecognized except in the fact that he was constantly employed 

 to buy and sell. It may be concluded that if the practices of these 

 thirty or more men had become so intolerably obnoxious as the epi- 

 thetic phraseology of the pamphleteer suggests, either this paltr>' 

 number of factors would have succumbed to the host of assailing 

 clothiers and corrections have been allowed or means would have been 

 devised whereby a set of interloper or competitive factors would have 

 arisen. The simple fact is that the factors were doing a real service 

 to the wool and woolens trade, a service that was quite indispensable 

 and that grew more so as the volume of cloth handled increased. 



1 Act of Common Council, 1678; Ihe text of the act is {^iven in ^Maitland, London, 

 I, 463. 



-Webber, Consequences of Trade, 14; Gent. Mag., 1740:501; Webber is ali-'O 

 quoted in Smith, Mem., II, 376. 



3 Gent. Mag., 1740:501. 



4 "Treatise of Wool," 29. 



