The Middleman in Agricidture. 
63 
Another fact which no doubt the bakers feel to press very 
hardly upon them is that wheat happens to be the only food 
stuff for which there are actual official records of prices. He 
who runs may read for himself every week the average price of 
wheat throughout the country, and with a very small amount of 
research he becomes qualified to write indignant and arithmetical 
communications to the daily papers with the assurance that one 
at least of his premisses is unchallengeable. The common and 
favourite resource of the middlemen as a class, when more or 
less direct reference chances to be made to their margin of 
profit, is to impugn altogether the accuracy of the market reports, 
and, as very few people indeed possess the necessary hardihood 
to defend the figures published by the newspapers as showing the 
state of the markets, it is extremely difficult to deal with this 
kind of argument. But, in the case of the bakers, they are 
debarred from taking up this line of defence, inasmuch as the 
price of wheat is ascertained from official sources and published 
on Government authority. 
It must be admitted that on the face of it the bakers seem 
to stand in need of vindication. At the very least the prices at 
which bread is sold involve what appear to be anomalies. It seems 
curious that the 4 lb. loaf should be selling in different parts of 
London at the same time at prices ranging from 3 $d. to 7 d. ; nor 
is this anomaly confined to the Metropolis, for it appears that 
at the same time the 4 lb. loaf was being sold at Hampstead for 
7 d., at Kingston-on-Thames for 6^d., at Birmingham for 6cZ., at 
Shrewsbury for 4 jjd., and at Wolverhampton at a rate varying 
from 3 id. to 5 ^d. Again, the quotation given for certain Lanca- 
shire towns was 3^d., and that for some other English towns at 
from 4td. to 6^d. In Suffolk a correspondent of the East Anglian 
Daily Times recorded the price as 5 d., while in the far West at 
Plymouth it was quoted at 4 \d. In the old ante-steam days 
these divergences might have been easily explicable, but in 
these times, when wheat is practically of the same value in any 
part of the country, it would certainly seem that a range of 100 
per cent, in the price for the same article, made of the same 
wheat, at the same time, is a circumstance which the public 
may reasonably regard with a pardonable amount of natural 
curiosity. 
An interesting statement was given in September last in 
the Morning Post, showing the relation of the price of bread to 
the price of wheat during a period of about eighteen months, 
the retail price of household bread being that which obtained 
in a large Wiltshire village. The dates at which the retail 
