FOR PROFIT. 191 



this country. Mr. George Munro had given evidence 

 before a Parliamentary Committee that in one year 

 he had sold 700 tons of English-grown hot-house 

 Grapes, in addition to those from the Channel Islands, 

 and more than 1,000 tons of Tomatoes. 



Mr. J. ASHBEE (Manager, Covent Garden Market) 

 said it was perfectly true, as the last speaker had 

 said, that it was much better to keep inferior fruit 

 out of the market altogether, than to put it in with 

 the better class. He had repeatedly seen the sale of 

 good Apples entirely spoiled because certain growers 

 thought that they could get the better of the public 

 by putting inferior ones in with them. There were 

 two distinct classes of buyers ; the man who bought 

 the best and gave the best prices, and the man who 

 bought the worst and only paid the lowest price. If 

 you sent a mixed lot, the good man would not look 

 at it, and consequently the lower-class buyer must 

 have it, and he would only take it at his own price, 

 and thus the grower often did not realise the cost 

 of carriage, simply through carelessness and stupidity 

 in packing his goods. Foreign competition in fruit 

 was like foreign competition in everything else — 

 cereals, hay, straw, eggs, butter, cheese, or poultry. 

 Foreign fruit could not be kept out of the market, 

 and it answered a very useful purpose. No doubt, it 

 had stimulated the public taste ; the more fruit people 

 ate, the more they liked it. He had often wondered 

 what our forefathers did for fruit ; the people, generally, 

 could have had hardly any. He could remember the time 

 when the only thing you could get in winter was an 

 Orange. The Colonies were making great strides in 

 this direction. Cape Colony had recently come to the 



