Land Problems and National Welfare 



sale reorganisation of the system of exchange 

 — with which most of them have every reason 

 to be satisfied. 



The question is, how far would politicians 

 dare to interfere with the interests of the middle- 

 man, and how far would they be able to do so ? 



From the standpoint of political economy, 

 the middleman, the distributer, is not as useful 

 a citizen as the producer. Distributers there 

 must always be, but, as has been pointed out. 

 Free Trade has unduly fostered this class, till it 

 has become harmful to the nation at large and 

 too numerous for the welfare of the middlemen 

 themselves. Amongst all its other benefits 

 Tariff Reform will do much for the nation if it 

 tends to decrease the number of middlemen 

 and increase the number of producers, and the 

 transition will not be a hard one for the thousands 

 of small rural middlemen, who are already, in 

 part, producers. 



I will not go into more details about our 

 system of marketing, because with Mr. Wilkin's 

 kind permission, I append at the end of this 

 chapter certain extracts from his pamphlet. 

 He describes far better than I could do the 

 defects of our present system. I do not know 

 that I entirely agree with his policy of state 

 markets, but the choice lies between that and 

 a fully-developed system of co-operative buying 

 and selHng. With co-operation the producer 



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