28 



OFFICIAL REPORT OF THE PROCEEDINGS OF THE 



San Francisco, short of putting up the money to pay the cost of educating the people. 

 There they draw the line. Tt is evidently their opinion that a free market is a market 

 which does not cost them anything. Largely as a result of the first convention the law 

 now on our statute book was enacted and approved on March 29, 1897. The second 

 convention was called to devise some means for compelling the Governor and Harbor 

 Commissioners to comply with the law. It has never been found possible. They have 

 absolutely refused to execute a word of it. If the producers of the State had even as 

 much as the spirit of an Angora goat they would raise the money and attack the Com- 

 missioners by mandamus proceedings or for malfeasance in office. "But they haven't. 



The facts about the Free Market are these: Perishable products arriving in San 

 Francisco by water — comprising about two thirds of such products reaching that 

 market—are and have been for years sold upon the waterfront, either by producers or 

 commission men, without charge for space. Any One can see that Free Market going on 

 any day in the year. I am informed that from two thirds to three fourths of the perish- 

 ables arriving by water are now sold on this Free Market provided by the State. This 

 market is totally unregulated ; the business is carried on in great confusion and with 

 great inconvenience to all parties. The methods in vogue offer excellent opportunities 

 for fraudulent practices on the part of commission men, which are unquestionably 

 improved by some of them. 



On the other side of East Street and a short distance from the wharves where the 

 bulk of this produce is delivered and sold, are several fractional blocks of land which 

 are the property of the State. They are partly occupied by railroad tracks, but mainly 

 by the repair shops of the Pacific Coast Steamship Company, and by the coal yard of a 

 coal company in which the Steamship Company or its officers are interested, or at any 

 rate which is managed by the agents of the Steamship Company — Messrs. Goodall, 

 Perkins & Co. It is all one concern in some way ; I don't know how. 



The instructions of the two conventions to their committees were to induce the 

 Harbor Commission to remove the coal yard and repair shops of the Steamship Com- 

 pany from these blocks of State property and extend railroad tracks and sheds over the 

 whole, upon the condition that the railroads should make those blocks the regular 

 terminal for perishable products arriving in the city, which would then be mainly sold 

 in the sheds on the blocks, just as the perishables arriving by water are already sold in 

 the sheds over the wharves where they are delivered. It was then proposed that there 

 should be official supervision over the sales both on the blocks and on the wharves, 

 under such regulations as would reduce the possibility of fraud to a minimum; permit 

 convenient and effective inspection to be made; allow accurate records to be kept of 

 market conditions, available after six o'clock each day to shippers, and generally put 

 the marketing of perishable products in San Francisco on a sound, businesslike, 

 common-sense basis. Regulations intended to accomplish this end were drafted by the 

 producers' committee and were adopted verbatim by the Board of State Harbor 

 Commissioners and have been printed at the expense of the harbor fund. They can be 

 seen by the curious at anytime. They are all that exists of the Free Market. They 

 are not enforced even upon the wharves. 



The advantage from all this, common to all producers, was the "regulation" of the 

 market, surrounding transactions with all possible safeguards against fraud by pro- 

 ducers or salesmen, and furnishing immediate and daily information of the state of the 

 market for the guidance of intending shippers. 



Against this there would be to the shippers by river and bay the disadvantage that 

 whereas they now have in the San Francisco market a very great advantage over ship- 

 pers by rail, in that they have earlier delivery to the best place for selling in the city, 

 with no drayage charges or transportation of tender fruit over rough cobblestones, and 

 with such a concentration of products at one center as insures the largest concourse of 

 buyers, if the law now on the statute books were enforced they would be deprived of 

 tlii- advantage of position over the shippers by rail, but all would be on an equality. 

 The majority of a< mal shippers by water do not converse fluently in the American lan- 

 goage nor habitually subscribe to the "Melican" papers, and probably never heard of 

 the Free Market. The large land-owners understand the situation perfectly, and while 

 some of them profess to favor the Free Market, and none of them say anything against 

 it, they have never been known to sit up nights devising means for putting it through. 



