Bristol, Glasgow, Edinburgh, Dublin, and many other places,the injury inflicted upon the people is of fearful magnitude.

The exposure of the glaring defects of the present mode of distribution by means of the wholesale trade is in itself sufficient to condemn the entire system; and if the author can point out another arrangement that would economize the greatest amount of labour by exposing the goods to the least damage and injury; by reducing the labour now required in filling up the huge ledgers of the counting houses to such a minimum as would require not one hundredth part of the number of clerks now employed; then, every one will be anxious that such a change should be made without the briefest delay, and that the old counting-house, with its crowds of clerks and giant volumes of ledgers; the warehouse, with its narrow storerooms, so difficult of access; the chaotic bustle of the traffic, and all the confusion of the higgling market and annual fair, should be cleanly and speedily swept away, and that men's minds should in future be freed from those chronic evils called commercial speculation, risk, failure, bankruptcy, fraud, embezzlement, loss, panic, and the like; the final effects of which not only end in the ruin of isolated commercial houses and single individuals, but often check the prosperity of whole communities and endanger the safety of nations and states.

IF

CHAPTER XII.-WASTE OF LABOUR IN RETAIL TRADE.

F the above picture of the wholesale trade be a faithful representation of the irrational working of the present system of distributing produce, the description which the author will presently give of the wasteful operation of retail trade will appear in still darker colours. Indeed, the waste of labour incurred in this operation is of so gigantic a character that it is even to social critics, who have studied the subject, an almost insurmountable task to state even an approximate estimate of its immensity. The author will, therefore, only be able to point out the chief causes of this enormous waste, and will leave the minor instances of the absurdity and wasteful

ness of the system to the reader's own reflection and imagination.

The waste of labour and time in carrying out the operations of the retail trade begins with the shopkeeper himself, when he is sitting idle in his shop, anxiously waiting for the arrival of customers, who, when they have come, very often do not purchase; in which case the shopkeeper wastes his labour in an unnecessary display and replacement of goods, and the customer loses his time in an unsuccessful attempt to purchase. The time lost in idleness by waiting for customers is an indirect loss of labour, for the time thus lost could be profitably and usefully employed in other occupations; and although the future social state will even grant a greater extension of the temporary cessation of labour than the shopkeeper now frequently enjoys, yet it will not be objectionable, because it will be the same for all employments. By the equal distribution of work and cessation from it, the shopkeeper will retain his leisure and perhaps enjoy it to a greater degree; and the working man and factory operative, who are now bound to incessant work and strict hours of labour, will be relieved from the hardships of continuous daily, weekly, and yearly work, and have the same allowance of leisure as any other class of the community.

Social criticism goes, however, still further in its condemnation of the occupation of shopkeeping. From a comparison of the comfort, ease, and the almost total absence of any danger to limb and life, which those enjoy who are, either as masters or men, engaged in retail trade, with the occupation of those who have to perform heavy and often dirty work, coupled with great exposure to accidents and injury to health, one is induced to argue that even were the time of the retail dealer fully occupied, and did he not spend it in idleness by waiting for his customers, he would still be regarded by the hardworking multitude as one belonging to the privileged and favoured classes who are exempt from those hardships and dangers which others have to endure. This line of argument

* Mr. Goldwin Smith says:-"Retail shops can only be kept open on three conditions, all of them bad-first, the great waste of human labour, because each shopkeeper must be idling half his time; secondly, undue profits, for without undue profits no man can live on a very small trade; and thirdly, which is the worst of all, the credit system."

verifies the axiom, that it is easier to distribute goods than to produce them.

The minute distribution of goods in retail trade causes an enormous waste of another kind. Tea, coffee, sugar, bread, butter, cheese, and many other articles of consumption, are very often parcelled out into packets containing halves and quarters of pounds, and even single ounces and half-ounces. The waste of labour incurred in this mode of distribution, takes place in three ways: firstly, in the making up of the parcels and the sub-division of the goods, besides the time lost in measuring and weighing; secondly, in the waste of paper produced by the labour of the paper maker, and is often manufactured for the very purpose of being used for these diminutive parcels; and, thirdly, in the repeated small purchases the customers make, the frequent courses they run to and fro for the purpose of fetching their articles of consumption; in the shoes they wear out in these daily and even hourly repeated errands to the retail shopkeepers, and which, if added together for the whole people of 30,000,000 individuals, would in a single year present a measurement that in extension would probably suffice to circumscribe the earth many times.

But whilst the social reformer is greatly incensed by the stupidity of a system that is productive of such wanton waste of labour, the political economist, on the contrary, remains filled with admiration at the aspect of the busy turmoil of retail trade; for he considers it to be one of the principal sources of the wealth and employment of the people. This is his strain of arguments:-The more minute the sub-division of the retailed articles, the more parcels will have to be made, and the more shopmen and shopkeepers will find employment; the greater the quantity of paper used for these parcels, the greater will be the produce of the paper manufacture, and the more work will be created for the people employed in the paper mills; the more shoes are worn out in the errands of the customers, the better it will be for the shoemakers, the leather dresser, and leather merchant. Surely, these and similar modes of reasoning for finding a valid explanation of the irrational working of the present social order, reach, in the opinion of the author, the greatest height of absurdity.

Another prodigious waste of labour caused by wholesale and

retail trade, is the time lost in the printing, posting, and distribution of advertisements, and the manufacture of the paper used for advertising. The enormous quantity of paper wasted. by this mode of advancing trade, and the labour required for the manufacture of the same, can easily be imagined by any one who looks at the countless number and continually increasing size of the bills posted on every available wall, boarding, and corner of the streets, sometimes covering whole fronts and sides of houses, or being spread on long and high timber stands, erected by the carpenter; the lost labour of whom must also be taken into account. Of these bills posted, not one hundredth part accomplishes the object of the advertiser, many of them being torn off and splashed over with dirt by malicious boys. A heavy rain and wind sometimes play sad havock amongst the posters and broadsheets of the advertising board, in pulling them off more affectually than the whole rabble of malicious juveniles could accomplish. In this destruction, the beautifully and artistically designed advertisement shares the same fate as the common print; thus causing not only a loss of hand-labour in the paper mill, but also wasting the talent of the artist designer and illuminator. In order to render the mode of advertising more permanent, the shopkeeper frequently engages the house painter and signwriter, and has the front of his house covered with big and gaudy inscriptions, containing the names and prices of wares to be had within; letters in enamel and gold fill every pane of glass in the windows of his shop; and the sign-writer has provided him with beautifully-written tickets, which are stuck on or attached to the goods, exposed in the windows and on the premises. But finding that the big bills he has stuck on the advertising boards in all the quarters of the town, and the gaudy inscriptions on his house, have not yet drawn a sufficient number of customers, he resorts to the distribution of handbills in thousands; he loads some half-dozen men with huge advertising boards, who have to walk up and down in front of his shop and make peregrinations into the adjacent streets;

* The men who carry these advertising boards do so from sheer necessity, and generally belong to the poorest of the poor. But little commiseration is felt for their sad lot; on the contrary, the unsparing raillery of heartless snobs delights in calling them "Sandwiches," because the

he engages an agent, who obtains for him permission to placard his advertisements in all the railway stations of the kingdom, and in the compartments of every railway carriage; and thus his business is made known throughout the whole length and breadth of the land. To give to his advertisement the greatest possible durability, he has even had it engraved on stone and combined with the mementoes of the dead, for we read that there is to be seen in a cemetery near New York, the following epitaph :

"Here lies Jonathan Thompson,

A kind Husband and an affectionate Parent.
His disconsolate Widow continues to carry on
The Tripe and Trotter business

At the same place as before her Bereavement."

But in order to ensure the final success of his trade, he calls to his assistance the newspapers; he finally invades not only every available corner of the paper, where he continually and persistently puts his advertisement at the end of some startling news, or under some sensational heading, but, besides this, he likes to occupy whole columns and even whole pages with the description of the novelties to be sold in his shop. At other times his name only will appear in the midst of a large blank space in a column of the paper, thus monopolizing for himself the room which other advertisers might be anxious to fill up, but whom for obvious reasons he does not want to see in the advertising field. The paper and printing wasted in the advertising columns of newspapers entail, moreover, a waste of steam-power; and as steam is generated from water by the application of coal fire, the labour of the coal-miner, of the coal-heaver, and of the engineer, is even requisitioned by the advertiser, and it may safely be assumed that half the steam-power used in the working of the printing presses is monopolized by the advertising columns of the newspapers. Moreover, half the space of many printed books, and especially periodicals, is filled with advertisements, which the reader is obliged to turn over leaf by leaf in order to arrive at the real text of the book indicated by its title page. To force the

men sticking between two boards are like a slice of (bad) ham between two slices of (dry) bread.