THE SMALL PRODUCERS. 159 



the result of having an open market. If you had open markets 

 for twenty years in the city of Baston, there would gradually 

 grow lip in the neighborhood of Boston, or would remain there, 

 a large body of small producers. 



It would be for the interest of the State and of the consumers, 

 to have a class of small producers establish themselves in the 

 neighborhood of these large cities. This class of men, I repeat, 

 is dying out in Massachusetts. In Philadelphia we used to see 

 the German women in the market. They would come in and 

 sell their ten, twenty, thirty or forty baskets of strawberries, a 

 week's butter, and so on. If we had a class of such persons, 

 working upon one, two, three, or four acres, within ten or fif- 

 teen miles of Boston, it would be to the advantage of the city, 

 and to the advantage of the consumers in the city. It seems to 

 me that under the present system, that class of people is crushed 

 out entirely. We have no producers who market their own 

 products on a small scale. 



Then I think the result is, that people become reckless 

 with regard to the price they pay ; they think they must submit 

 to whatever price is charged at the retail store. But such a 

 system of free markets would surely lead to the purchase of 

 articles in larger quantities, and tend to an easier sale of tlie 

 products of the larger farmer or market gardener. But so long- 

 as our people do not confine themselves to specialties in farm- 

 ing, such a market is more needed by the miscellaneous pro- 

 ducers than by the man who confines himself to special products, 

 because the latter is better known and better knows his market. 



Every means should be resorted to in order to destroy the 

 monopoly that exists with the larger agents. If tlicre was a 

 free market, where, if a man bought a dollar's worth, he would 

 save more than enough to pay a boy for carrying his basket 

 home, that would remedy the difficulty spoken of as existing in 

 Worcester. The consumer would buy so much cheaper, that 

 he could at least afford to pay ten cents to a boy to carry his 

 basket home. I think the influence of those free markets 

 would be to keep the price at such a point, that the Faneuil 

 Hall men could not set the price, or keep up monopoly. The 

 people would know where they could go, and what would be a 

 reasonable price for them to pay, and fur the producer to re- 

 ceive. 



