CHAPTER VII. 



The Tradesman and the Merchant — The Commercial 

 Population 



In the preceding chapters the technique of particular trades has 

 been presented. The middleman organization of the English busi- 

 ness world before 1760 has been outhned in four groups of trades, the 

 trades within each group having similar characteristics respectively. 

 The treatment has been specific with respect to the ware handled; 

 the business world was quite arbitrarily separated into these four 

 divisions; and in the last chapter the separation was further empha- 

 sized by a summary statement of "contrasts and comparisons." 

 Unless the reader of those chapters consciously guards himself against 

 it, he is likely to think of the business world as actually existing in 

 this disjointed state; whereas it is a unit of interdependent parts. 

 The empire of business is a unitary organism of men having economic, 

 social, political, and other connections. In this last chapter it is 

 proposed to consider more general aspects of the middlemen. 



The progress of the several wares has been traced in two directions: 

 in the direction of the wholesaler or exporting merchant and in the 

 direction of the consumer. The degree of specialization with respect 

 to wares was, in general, not so marked in the case of either the mer- 

 chant or the retailer as it was in the case of the intervening handlers : 

 that is, both the merchant (the wholesaler and the exporter) and the 

 retailer tended to handle a variety of goods rather than one particular 

 good. The retailer commonly functioned as general grocer, provision 

 dealer, mercer, dry-goods dealer, etc. ; and the merchant did not con- 

 fine himself to a single ware but exported mixed cargoes. This 

 mingling of wares in the stocks of the retailing tradesman and of the 

 exporting merchant tended to bind together the middlemen of the 

 four general groups discussed above. Each group had common 

 interests with the others through these distributors. For this reason, 

 even if it were possible, no particular advantage could be realized by 

 differentiating the cloth merchants, for example, from the merchants 

 dealing in general merchandise; nor the retailer of cloth from the more 

 general dry-goods tradesman. With minor exceptions, the business 



329 



