388 History of Inland Transport 



direct from the manufacturer or the warehouseman in London, 

 Manchester, Sheffield, Glasgow or elsewhere, and those goods, 

 sent for one day and delivered the next, could be ordered by 

 him in exactly such quantities as would suit his immediate 

 requirements. In this way he was enabled to keep smaller 

 stocks of a greater variety of articles, trade with less, or with 

 better distributed, capital and anticipate a much larger turn- 

 over. The advantage of these facilities became greater still 

 in proportion as the post, the telegraph and the telephone 

 gave the retailer greater opportunities for communicating his 

 wants to the wholesale trader who supplied them. 



In these circumstances village stores are to be found to-day 

 in rural districts where shops had been non-existent down to 

 the Railway Age, while the conditions of retail trade in 

 probably every country town have no less changed, and have 

 altered to a proportionate extent the conditions, also, of 

 wholesale trade. 



On the other hand, the same transport facilities which gave 

 these opportunities to the small trader are now, to a certain 

 extent, operating to his disadvantage, since there is an in- 

 creasing tendency for retail trade to be done by the large 

 houses which are to-day more and more dealing direct with 

 the public, consigning to retail customers either by rail or by 

 parcel post. In this way many of the small traders are sharing 

 the fate of the small masters who had already been suppressed 

 by the factory system. 



The movement here in question is, of course, only a develop- 

 ment of the dual tendency now prevalent throughout the 

 commercial world for (i) the substitution of large or associated 

 undertakings for numerous small and independent ones ; and 

 (2) the abolition of middlemen ; yet such a movement could 

 hardly have been carried out to its present actual extent but 

 for the opportunities offered by the railway for the regular, 

 speedy and economical transport of commodities under just 

 such conditions as will alone allow of this further transition 

 in trade being brought about. 



So far as the railways themselves are concerned, these 

 various developments have not been an unmixed blessing, 

 since they have increased| r the] tendency? for the general 

 merchandise traffic to travel in small or comparatively small 

 consignments or parcels, involving a greater amount of 



