THE MARKET SYSTEMS OF THE COUNTRY. 249 
the price paid by middle-men during the past summer has seldom been more than 14 cents. 
Purchasers know that they cannot buy a roast or fry for less than 25 cents, and often it 
is 28 to 35, while the poor cuts are sold for 15 to 22. While our respectable butchers will 
sell nothing but good meat, others are constantly on the look-out for low-priced cattle, 
poor, miserable, lean, stringy, diseased, over-driven beasts, whose quarters are cut up 
in the cheap meat shops, the best roasts and steaks selected out for low-priced eating 
houses, and the remainder sold, at whatever price can be had, to that class of people 
who inhabit the dirtiest portions of the city. These slaughterers also buy up all of the 
bob calves and sickly sheep within their reach. 
Farmers who have slaughtered sheep say that such as bring the highest prices will 
dress 60 pounds per hundred-weight. Some time since 10,000 sheep sold at Communipaw 
at an average of $4each. One pelt is as good as another, and the price fixed was 80 cents 
each, bringing eacli sheep down to $3 20. Suppose each dressed 50 pounds per hundred- 
weight, and was sold to the middlemen for 12 cents, then there would be nearly $3 
per head or 100 per cent. profit to the butcher. Put the price at 10 cents, and we 
have 50 pounds for $5, or $1.80 advance for the butcher. In vain may it be said that 
thin sheep will not bring these prices; the thin sheep only cost 4 cents per pound, and 
when nicely dressed with inside adipose from fat sheep delicately twined around their 
clean legs, why, then, a leg of mutton is a leg of mutton and sells for 25 cents per 
pound. A mutton has two legs which will weigh, say, 5 pounds each; amount $2 50; 
sell 12 pounds of chops for 20 cents, $2 40, and the remaining 28 pounds at 12 vents, 
$3 36, and your sheep amounts to $8 26. Cut and carve as we will, meat costs money. 
Take it the other way. The Newark retail-market quotations fix mutton at 14 and 
18, or 16 cents average. If the middleman paid 10 cents, he made $6 on 100 pounds, or 
60 per cent.- If be paid 12 cents he made 33% per cent. 
There may be a slight variation from these figures, prime sheep selling at 6}, but 
they dress over 60 pounds per hundred-weight, and more than make up the difference. 
Grass calves sell at 4 and 6cents. These will yield at least 60 pounds of meat per 
hundred-weight. Allowing the butcher the skin for the trouble of taking it off, the car- 
cass costs him $5. Sold at 15 cents per pound, it brings $9, or 89 percent. above cost. If 
it cost more than grass calves, let the difference go against the poor little things bought © 
up by thousands from milkmen at $1 perhead. On calves for which butchers now pay an 
average price of 10 cents per pound, and which are sold for 18 by the carcass, the profit is 
not so heavy, but the few that cost 10 cents are mixed with inferior ones, which reduces 
the average; besides, calves bought at the highest price will dress heavier than poor 
ones. Calves carried along distance in the hot sun, with their legs tied together, 
become fevered and make unwholesome meat. We have seen them tossed into a cart, 
hauled five miles, and thrown on a station-platform to lie seven hours, with their legs 
doubled, the cords cutting to the bone. 
It is due to the butchers of our city to state that among them are to be found many 
honorable, fair-dealing men, who, though they follow the fashions and fix great prices, 
give us some of the most juicy, tender, and excellent beef and mutton to be found in 
-any market. They have their backsets and lose heavily by those who buy on credit. 
Newark is deficient in market accommodations. The rapid extension of the city seems 
to demand some change, as two-thirds of the population are now compelled to travel 
one to two miles, or depend upon exorbitant shopkeepers for their supplies. 
While the reports from San Francisco and Newark indicate abuses 
which are sufficient to arrest general attention, some cities, more con- 
veniently situated as centers of great producing districts, make little or 
no complaint. Cincinnati, for example, gives the following brief sum- 
mary, aud the accounts from St. Louis aré similar : 
Cincinnati markets are open each week-day from dawn till 10 in the morning in 
summer, and from 6 to1lin winter. Certain convenient stands the farmers are allowed 
to oceupy with their wagons, and expose what they have for sale. Hucksters are each 
required to pay to the city a license of twenty dollars a year. Farmers pay no license, 
and are subjected to no special restrictions, our usages encouraging the largest freedom 
of direct traflic with the producer. The markets are under the supervision of market- 
masters appointed by the city. There have been periodical complaints of the combina- 
tions of hucksters and middle-men by which prices were exacted from the consumer 
out of all due proportion to those received by the producer. We bear little of this 
matter of late, and such investigation as we have instituted has as yet failed to disclose 
any glaring discrepancy between prices in the city and in the country. Our market 
system appears to be working smoothly, and, for aught thatnow appears, it gives general 
satisfaction. 
In Buffalo, hucksters make about 25 per cent. profit on produce bought 
from farmers, and the correspondent thinks the middlemen a useful class, 
Pet age they enable the farmer to sell out early and get back to his farm 
work. 
