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Mr. A. H. Wheat. You spoke of goods being sold in 

 Holland at auction; what class of people buy them at auction? 



Mr. McCarthy. The wholesalers generally buy the material 

 to be sent out of the country, — to England or some place 

 like that; or the co-operative societies buy it. I saw an agent 

 for a big co-operative society buying a lot of goods in one of 

 these auctions in Holland; but generally it is the wholesaler. 

 The process there is very interesting. As I say, there will be a 

 grand stand, and all these buyers who come there have to sit 

 up on the grand stand; they cannot go around to you and 

 bargain with you individually; they must sit up on the grand 

 stand and pay for it. They have a little button in front of 

 them which is connected with a great big dial, and they press 

 the button when the price at which they want to buy shows 

 up on the dial; they take the lot before them on that. They 

 are up there to make a collective bargain with the collective 

 farmer. I have seen that all over Holland. I have seen it in 

 one place where there was a stream of water, — Holland being 

 nearly all water, — and a boat was drawn down the stream of 

 water and had on it the different little lots of potatoes and 

 vegetables and all kinds of produce, and they bid upon these 

 lots as the boat went by in front of them. All they did was to 

 look at the stuff, and any question in dispute was referred to a 

 court of arbitration composed of one representative of the 

 farmers, one of the buyers, and a third man appointed by the 

 municipality. The farmers, of course, had to bring their stuff 

 in according to the sample. It was the wholesalers or big 

 buyers in nearly every instance who bought it in that way from 

 the farmers. 



Mr. Wheat. Those are the buyers that sold to the retailers 

 after that, are they? 



Mr. McCarthy. Yes, you know over there in those 

 countries a co-operative organization is a wholesale organiza- 

 tion, after all; that is, if you were in Denmark you would see 

 the office of the English Co-operative Wholesale Society, which 

 does a business, I think, of $700,000,000 a year, and they buy for 

 all the different little member organizations in a wholesale way. 



Mr. Wheat. Does that auction come any nearer to the con- 

 sumer than our commission or fruit auction does here? 



