2i6 THE DIRECTION OF INDUSTRY 



and August, when the price of grain mounted to 

 i6 seers a rupee.' * 



As will be seen later on, prices have become com- 

 paratively steady since the development of railway 

 communications. The whole of Northern India is 

 practically one market for food-grains, and the price of 

 wheat in a district in which the crops have failed is 

 the same, with a very small addition for the cost of 

 carriage, as the price in a district which has had a 

 bumper harvest. The existence of this large market 

 has conferred upon the cultivator the practical cer- 

 tainty of being able to sell his produce at fairly good 

 prices. If his direction of the processes of production 

 has been judicious, he finds a steady market in which 

 to dispose of his goods. 



But not only has the normal value of his produce 

 risen in the general market, as will be seen by studying 

 the tables of prices at the end of Chapter XII., but it 

 is, I think, incontestable that the cultivator himself 

 disposes of his grain upon more advantageous terms 

 than in former days. It has always been the practice 

 that immediately after the harvest the cultivator sells 

 his grain to the grain-dealer wholesale, and the grain- 

 dealer retails it in the bazaar during the year at 

 fluctuating retail prices. There will, therefore, always 

 be a difference between the harvest price — that is, the 

 price ruling when all the cultivators are crowding into 

 the market — and the bazaar price, which represents 

 the average retail price realized by the dealers in grain 

 throughout the year. But the difference between 

 harvest and bazaar prices used, in the days before 

 railways and cheap freights, to represent something 

 more than the dealer's legitimate profit. It was a 

 measure of the advantage he took of the temporary 

 glut in the market, when all the cultivators of the 

 countryside pushed a season's supplies together on 



* P. J. White, 'General Report on the Settlement of Parganna 

 Kunch, Zillah Jalaun,' 1874. 



