CHAPTER V: DISTRIBUTION.
§ 745. Distribution is a necessary concomitant of division of labour. The condition under which alone men can devote themselves to different occupations, is that there shall be transference from one to another of their respective products.
This transference, which originally takes place directly between producer and consumer, assumes from the outset two forms. The consumer applies to the producer for some of his surplus; or the producer brings his surplus to the notice of the consumer, in the hope of parting with it and receiving some equivalent. These alternative courses are variously illustrated at home and abroad. Says O’Donovan, describing the people of Merv:—
“In a European mart one would expect the sellers to cry out their wares, but at Merv it is the contrary. A man goes along the row of booths [in the bazaar] shouting, ‘I want six eggs,’ or ‘I want two fowls.’ . . . No dealer ever takes the trouble to put his goods en évidence.”
Though to us this proceeding seems strange, yet as our own purchases in shops begin by asking for this or that article, the two usages differ only in the respect that the want is in the one case expressed out-of-doors and in the other in-doors.
The converse process daily goes on around. Street-traders, from the costermonger to the newsboy, exemplify that form of distribution in which the seller offers while the buyer responds; and in various parts of London on Saturday Edition: current; Page: [374] nights shopkeepers, standing outside their doors, show us the same inverted process.
I name this contrast because, as we shall see, it exists in the earliest stages, and gives origin to two strongly distinguished modes of distribution.
§ 746. Though, being unobtrusive, the kind of distribution exemplified among the Hottentots, when the maker of some defensive appliance gives it in return for cattle, is not often described by travellers; yet, beyond question, this is the primitive kind of distribution. Until an individual has become reputed for skill in making a particular thing, there cannot arise such demand upon him as prompts special devotion to the making of it; and there cannot result a commencement of distribution by passing it on in exchange for something else. But when once the individual or the tribe has, because of great skill or local advantages, become distinguished for some article or class of articles, offers are made by producers to consumers, and journeys taken for the purpose of making such offers. Here are some illustrative facts.
In Guiana “each tribe has some manufacture peculiar to itself; and its members constantly visit the other tribes, often hostile, for the purpose of exchanging the products of their own labour for such as are produced only by the other tribes. These trading Indians are allowed to pass unmolested through the enemy’s country.”
Of the Mosquitos, Bancroft writes:—“Aboriginal wars were continually waged in Honduras. . . . Neighbouring tribes, however, agreed to a truce at certain times, to allow the interchange of goods.” And a good instance is furnished by some of the Papuans of New Guinea—the people of Port Moresby. These make annual canoe-voyages to another district to exchange the pottery made by their women during the year for various articles which they need.
Whether the transaction be or be not of that earliest kind in which the consumer applies to the producer to make Edition: current; Page: [375] something for him, or of that derived kind in which the producer, now become more distinctly differentiated, carries his product to the consumer, we are alike shown distribution in its primitive form—a direct transfer from the one who makes to the one who uses.
§ 747. In the course of evolution the wholesale trader of any kind has to be evolved from the retail trader; and, as we see, the retail trader in his primitive form is one who sells a thing he himself produces, whether he be maker of goods or tiller of the soil. Of the Greeks we read:—
“The countryman who carried his produce to the city, the artisan who sold his work, and the woman who offered for sale her tæniæ and chaplets, all belonged to the class of αὐτοπώλαι.”
Our own early history variously illustrates this undeveloped form of distribution:—
“We may picture the medieval artisan to ourselves—in so far as a money economy had come in—as a man who had to spend much time in trying to dispose of his wares. Hereward visited William’s camp as a potter, and many craftsmen must have been, to some extent, pedlars or have visited fairs, in order that they might dispose of their goods.”
Moreover, besides distribution of articles by the artizan who sometimes sold them at home and sometimes went about selling them, there was a distribution of special skill by migratory workmen. In continuance of the above description, Cunningham and McArthur remark that “in other cases we may think of them as men who had to wander about in search of custom, as travelling tailors did in the early part of the present century,” or as do sempstresses, who are often employed in households at the present time. And referring to this system in early days, Rogers tells us that besides a superior class of migratory carpenters there were migratory tilers, slaters, and masons. Even now in Scotland travelling bands of masons are employed in the remoter parts. Hugh Miller belonged to one of them.
Indeed this simple kind of distribution, alike of articles Edition: current; Page: [376] and of skill, both under its stationary and its nomadic forms, is still common among us. Everywhere are to be found shoe makers who are at once producers and distributors; and in our streets we occasionally hear the knife-grinder and the chair-mender.
§ 748. This early phase of industrial organization during which producer and distributor were united, was, however, more especially distinguished by periodic assemblings—fairs.
Gatherings of this kind are found everywhere. Monteiro describes them as occurring among the Congo people. Mommsen says of Rome that “fairs (mercatus), which must be distinguished from the usual weekly markets (nundinæ), were of great antiquity in Latium.” And of our own country the like was true.
“In these times [of about 1300] there were few or no shops; private families therefore, as well as the religious [bodies], constantly attended the great annual fairs, where the necessaries of life not produced within their own domains were purchased.”
Though in our days fairs have greatly changed in character, part of the trade carried on in them is still by direct transfer from producer to consumer; as, for example, in cheese-fairs held in some places, where the farmer sells the whole or half of a cheese to a retail buyer, or as again in the Nottingham goose-fair, where commoners and others bring the birds they have reared to be bought not by poulterers but chiefly by those who will eat them.
With the growth of population fairs are presently supplemented by markets, which in course of time usurp their functions. Even in Africa this has happened. Livingstone tells us that the market “is a great institution in Manyuema.” Burton says that in Dahome there are “four large and many smaller markets;” and that in Egba, villages had, “as usual in Africa, a bazaar or market, where women squatted before baskets under a tree.” In Central Africa—
Edition: current; Page: [377]“Market places, called ‘Tokos,’ are numerous all along Lualaba . . . when the men of the districts are at war, the women take their goods to market as if at peace and are never molested.”
And a similar state of things existed in early Rome, according to Mommsen.
“Four times a month, and therefore on an average every eighth day (nonæ), the farmer went to town to buy and sell and transact his other business.”
Though among ourselves the weekly market in every provincial town has come to be largely a place for wholesale transactions, yet dealings in various perishable commodities, such as eggs, butter, poultry, fruit, usually maintain the primitive form.
But in these days of commercial activity the original direct relations between producer and consumer are mostly replaced by indirect relations.