908 THE FKUIT INDUSTRY IN NEW YORK STATE 



classes of trade whose demands are selective. And, furthermore, 

 his products are seasonal, and the business of carrying such 

 of them as are capable of being carried to seasons of nonproduc- 

 tion cannot be economically done on the farms, if modern facilities 

 of preservation are employed. 



TRUE FUNCTION OF THE COMMISSION MERCHANT 



The business of primary city distribution, at least in the greater 

 cities, must therefore be done chiefly by wholesale receivers who 

 can handle the entire crop of a distant producer, either by pur- 

 chase upon some definite price or basis of valuation agreed upon, 

 or as an agent acting for the producer. This latter agency is 

 the true function of the commission merchant, who thus occupies 

 a logical and indispensable place in the natural development of 

 distribution. 



The natural, logical, and legitimate function of the commission 

 merchant has been covered up and obscured in the public mind 

 and in the minds of many producers of farm products by two 

 classes of agitators: first, by those who with no economic or 

 practical knowledge of distributive necessities have ignorantly 

 classed all middlemen, and commission merchants in particular, 

 as parasites and a useless excrescence upon the food industry; 

 secondly, by those who have seized upon occasional instances of 

 dishonesty in the business to characterize the whole as corrupt, 

 and who attribute to the wholesale receiving trade powers of con- 

 trol over the prices of farm products which in fact have no exist- 

 ence. 



Charges of uselessness of the produce commission trade are 

 utterly ineffective; the trade will persist as long as it is eco- 

 nomically needed and no longer. As to charges of dishonesty, 

 there is doubtless dishonest dealing among produce commission 

 merchants just as there is among men in all other pursuits 

 there is no good reason to believe it to be more. Reputable mer- 

 chants are favorable to any reasonable system of state protection 

 of shippers' interests which will effectively weed out dishonest 

 dealers whose competition is always a thorn in the flesh of the 

 more scrupulous. Certainly the economic necessity of shippers' 

 agents cannot, as a principle, be condemned because some are 



