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ing on a large scale, and secondly through the elimination of useless middle- 

 men and the simplifying of unnecessarily slow and complicated marketing 

 processes, the lowest possible cost of distribution. It gets for the farmer a 

 larger number of the hundred pennies in the ultimate consumer's dollar, 

 not by increasing the size of that dollar, but by reducing the number 

 absorbed in the tolls and wastes of unintelligent, haphazard methods of 

 distribution. To illustrate by a rather extreme example, under the old sys- 

 tem of marketing still in vogue in many sections, the farmer ships twenty 

 barrels of sweet potatoes "on consignment" to a commission merchant in 

 New York, who, as the market in that city happens to be glutted, sells them 

 for a trifle more than freight charges to a speculative buyer, who combines 

 thtm into a car with a hundred and eighty other barrels similarly bought 

 and sells them at a profit to a Chicago dealer, who resells them at a further 

 profit to a wholesaler at Milwaukee. The farmer gets nothing; but 

 Mrs. Janssen, of Milwaukee, who buys a half peck of these potatoes, 

 must pay a proportionate part of the profits of these several dealers, of 

 the several separate assessments of freight, and of the shrinkage in the 

 car by reason of its several handlings and of the long delay. Under the 

 present system, the Exchange sells direct by wire to the wholesale dealer 

 at Milwaukee, who is on its regular quoting list and with whom it is in 

 direct and constant touch; the original twenty barrels of potatoes move 

 out with those of other members of the association, the same day they are 

 loaded, direct to Milwaukee under a car-lot rate of freight; the Milwau- 

 kee dealer and Mrs. Janssen pay probably about the same; the railroads 

 lose their freight charges for the roundabout, double haul; the commis- 

 sion man, the speculator and the Chicago dealer find, let us hope, more 

 useful employment; and the farmer gets a living price for his goods. 



The Exchange, be it remembered, has no quarrel with the economic- 

 ally legitimate middleman. And in particular, we believe that too much 

 importance has been attached to the dishonesty of commission merchants; 

 that for every dollar filched from the American farmer by the dishonesty 

 of a commission merchant, a hundred have been lost through his own 

 stupidity in blindly following unintelligent and outgrown methods of 

 marketing. In our industrial life, the processes of distribution are just 

 as important as those of production; the man who in any efficient way 

 facilitates the transfer of our farm products from those who grow to those 

 who eat them is just as truly and creditably helping to feed the country 

 as the man that guides the plow. But whenever the machinery of dis- 

 tribution is found unnecessarily cumbersome, when its processes are 

 needlessly complex and circuitous, when the movement of its products 

 departs from that commercial straight line which is the shortest practical 

 distance between the two points of producer and consumer, then the 

 superfluous middleman is an economic nuisance and his earnings an in- 

 tolerable tax. And it is in the discovery and elimination of these need- 

 less complexities, in the blazing out of new trails of commercial direct- 



