MANAGEMENT 



28 7 



one another's whereabouts and enables them to transact busi- 

 ness Suppose, for example, that A has a specially trained sad- 

 dle horse for sale and feels that he ought to get a special price. 

 B may be looking for just such a horse, but may not know 

 where it is to be had. A notice in the advertising columns of a 

 reputable paper gives him the information he needs, and both 

 buyer and seller are benefited. There is nothing in this argu- 

 men:, however, to justify the extravagant advertising which 

 sometimes disgraces the pages even of some of our reputable 

 papers, where impossible horses of prodigious size and action 

 are represented in connection with the tallest kind of mendac- 

 ity is to the telescopic merits and microscopic prices of the 

 animals which the advertiser has to sell. 



Markets and fairs. Whenever possible, the ideal method of 

 selling agricultural specialties is that of exhibiting them. Reg- 

 ular periodic markets, where such things can always be found, 

 and where buyers are always present, have been proved in all 

 old and highly developed countries to be the most effective 

 way of bringing buyers and sellers together. This method has 

 not had a high development in this country for the reason mainly 

 that our farmers have generally been more interested in staple 

 crops than in specialties, and also because the organization of 

 our national economy has tended to produce a wide geograph- 

 ical separation of the producers and consumers. The western, 

 sparsely settled areas have produced for the eastern, densely 

 settled areas. This wide geographical separation has tended to 

 place producers and consumers in a position of dependence upon 

 commission merchants and other middlemen. When our popu- 

 lation is more uniformly distributed, and each center thereof 

 becomes more closely dependent upon its immediate surround- 

 ings for its agricultural products, there will doubtless be a revival 

 of interest in periodic open markets where buyers and sellers, 

 producers and consumers, can meet together. 



