CHAPTER VI: AUXILIARY DISTRIBUTION.

§ 749. The greater part of the process commonly called “distribution,” is that which we here distinguish as auxiliary distribution. In our developed industrial system, intermediate agencies bring producers and consumers into relation; and these agencies, at first very simple, become gradually complex.

As the producer, properly so called, came into existence when, instead of making a thing for himself only, a man was led to make it for himself and some others, and by and by to make it exclusively for others, in that way creating a special occupation; so the distributor insensibly arose when, instead of selling only things he himself produced, a man began to sell in addition some things which others had produced, and, eventually increasing the number and quantity of these, was occupied solely in selling them. The first stages in this process, naturally unrecorded, may be inferred from parallel stages frequently visible among ourselves. To obtain good and cheap butter, eggs, and poultry, residents in towns sometimes arrange with a farmer to send periodical supplies of them. The success of this plan is made known, and the farmer is written to by others for like supplies. Presently demands on him so increase that his own productions prove insufficient to meet them; and then, anxious to retain the business, he buys from neighbours the additional quantities required. If the quality of the commodities continues to be Edition: current; Page: [379] good (which it generally does not), he may extend this process so greatly that he becomes mainly a distributor of others’ produce. Whence the step to one wholly occupied in distribution is easy.

§ 750. A clue to the rise of shopkeeping in an analogous way, is furnished by some facts from Africa. Negro peoples are in high degrees mercantile, and in sundry cases their assemblings for buying and selling have passed from the periodic stage into the continuous stage. A daily market is held in Loango, which begins at 10 o’clock; and in Timbuctoo “there are no particular market days; the public market for provisions is an open place fifty feet square, and is surrounded by shops.” This last fact implies a ready transition from daily attending market to keeping a permanent store. For the basket which a Negress brings from a neighbouring village, or the stall which a larger dealer sets up for the day’s transactions, differs from the adjacent shop only in the fact that it is removed daily: the shop is a permanent stall, which in early stages is but half inclosed, as butchers’ shops are still. Moreover we may see how the shopkeeper becomes differentiated into one who, not selling exclusively his own products, sells the products of others. Among ourselves dealers in perishable articles are often obliged at the close of the day to sell at a sacrifice. Fishmongers, for example, offer remnants to their poorer customers in the evening at low rates. Obviously, then, women who have brought produce to market will at a late hour reduce their prices rather than carry it home and have it spoilt. What occasionally happens? Here around them are persons permanently stationed of whom some deal in the same articles; and there must arise the thought that it will be best to part with their surplus at a low rate to one of these stationary dealers. If the bargain is made the dealer becomes a distributor of another’s goods. Such an example is sure to be followed, and the process once commenced Edition: current; Page: [380] goes on until the shopkeeper, daily supplied by people from the country, becomes wholly a distributor of things he has not himself produced.

In a kindred manner arises at an early stage the itinerant dealer—one who seeks buyers instead of letting buyers come to him. Incidents frequently occurring suggest how this function originated. We hear one lady say to another—“You are going to London, I wish you would buy so and so for me.” Requests of like kind, as well as converse requests, must have often been made in the days of sparse population, when the relatively few fairs were held at relatively remote places, the journeys to which were dangerous, wearisome and costly. “My harvest work will prevent me from going to the fair;” “I cannot walk to the fair, and I have no horse;” “It is not worth while going to the fair to sell this small quantity.” Here, then, are some among various reasons for saying to a neighbour who is going—“If you will dispose of these for me I will give you such or such a share of the price.” Transactions of this kind, economical of effort and less risky, are certain to become common. Not only to sell certain things at the trade-gathering is a prevailing wish, but to buy certain other things; and the man who does the one is naturally employed to do the other. As the habit grows some one person in a village, and by and by in a cluster of villages, who by each transaction gets some benefit, either as a gift or a share of the returns, is led to make such agency a business. Thus in time result chapmen, hawkers, pedlars, packmen—classes of primitive traders still represented among us.

§ 751. Among both fixed and locomotive distributors some, more skilful in business than others, enlarge their transactions until from retail they pass into wholesale.

Incentives like those which originally led to the rise of the shop, led by and by to the rise of the warehouse to which the shopkeeper could go for supplies. The small retailer in Edition: current; Page: [381] his original form, dependent on scattered producers for keeping up his various stocks, was sure to be often deficient of one or other thing asked for. In places where population had become great enough, he naturally then had recourse to a larger retailer who was pretty certain to have a supply (as retailers even now buy of one another to satisfy customers); and in proportion as the larger retailer thus had his stocks continually drawn upon, he gradually became one who laid in stocks for the supply of other retailers; until, finding he made good profits on these transactions, he devoted himself wholly to the supplying of retailers: he became a wholesale trader. As fast as he assumed this character he benefited by taking journeys to buy economically the larger stocks he needed—he grew into a travelling merchant, or else a merchant who got his orders executed at a distance, either in his own country or abroad. At the present day the genesis of such is observable. To a cheesemonger who has a large business, it occurs that instead of waiting for farmers to bring their cheeses to market, he may gain by going round among them, inspecting their cheese-rooms, and offering them prices somewhat below those they might otherwise get—prices which they accept because, while saving the cost of carriage to market, they avoid the risk of a glut which might force them to take still lower prices. Hence results the cheese-factor, to whom retail sellers of cheese go for their supplies. Similarly with corn, men like the brothers Sturge in the last generation, ride about to the local markets, ten, twenty, thirty miles off, and buy from the farmers at somewhat reduced prices, in consideration of the large quantities taken and the certainty of payment. Then from their large granaries millers and others fulfil their needs.

Traders of the converse kind have similarly developed. Out of wandering pedlars with their small quantities, there grew up those who conveyed large quantities to the great centres of trade. Even in the doings of the uncivilized, Edition: current; Page: [382] where they come in contact with the civilized, we see this occasional growth of wholesale transactions. Says Turner concerning the Hudson’s Bay Esquimos:—

There is evidence that the East, from early times downwards, has had kindred systems of distribution. Movers tells us that “the great festivals . . . of Lower Egypt . . . were connected with the arrival of caravans from Phœnicia twice a year;” and doubtless the Assyrians had assemblages of travellers carrying their commodities on trains of camels through desert regions, partially protected by their numbers from robbers. As we may infer from Chaucer’s account of the Canterbury pilgrims, there similarly resulted among ourselves in early days, associations of merchants whose strings of pack-horses bore their goods. This form of distribution, while it generates merchants, also generates carriers. Lansdell, while at Maimatchin on the Mongolian frontier, was introduced to a lama. He says:—

To be mentioned under this head is the rise of commission-agents—men who, instead of being themselves wholesale dealers, undertake to buy for wholesale dealers in places with which they are in communication. A merchant who himself, or by proxy, goes to a remote part of the kingdom or abroad will, by request, make a large purchase or a large sale, for a merchant in his own locality; and, having done this once, may thereafter be commissioned, first by a few and then by many, to buy or sell for them at a distance. At the present time English publishers who have set up Edition: current; Page: [383] branches in New York, have become agents for other English publishers; and, according to circumstances, the agency part of their business may or may not outgrow the original part. In some cases it does this, and there then arises an establishment which buys and sells wholesale, not on its own account but on account of various large traders.

§ 752. While the entire distributing system thus becomes organized, each of its larger components also becomes organized. In addition to its staff of clerks, porters, messengers, &c., a great trading concern contains functionaries of classes peculiar to itself. While his business was small, the wholesale dealer was himself the buyer of the things he supplied to retail dealers, but when his business grew large it became needful to depute this function. From such developments there resulted a class of men known as buyers, who, visiting from time to time producers in various localities, make, on behalf of their respective houses, wholesale purchases of goods which they inspect and approve. With a converse process came another class of deputies—the travellers, who, on behalf of the establishments employing them, visit retailers, exhibit samples, and obtain orders. Yet one more class of proxies distinguishes large establishments for retail distribution. To different parts of the business different heads are appointed; and in some cases each of these has a certain capital placed at his disposal to trade with, and to make as good a profit upon as he can: the retention of his place being determined by his success.

Thus, even in their details, the distributing processes develop structures parallel to those which the producing processes develop.

§ 753. Development of the animate appliances for distribution has been accompanied by development of the inanimate appliances—the means for conveying people, goods, and intelligence. The two have all along acted and reacted: Edition: current; Page: [384] increased distribution having resulted from better channels, and better channels having caused further increase of distribution.

To people living on its banks a river serves as a ready-made highway, and even in early stages much traffic has sometimes been developed by it. With the Sea-Dyaks in Borneo this has happened, and it has happened among Africans. On the Niger, “the intercourse and trade between the towns on the banks is very great.” Between Jenni and Timbuctoo “little flotillas of sixty or eighty boats are frequently seen all richly laden with various kinds of produce.” But where Nature has not provided them, channels of communication are at first nothing but paths formed by continual passing. Speaking of Eastern Africa, Burton says:—

Of such paths on the Gold Coast, Bosman writes:—“A road which need not be above two miles in length, frequently becomes three by its crookedness and unevenness.” So, too, is it in many parts of the Sandwich Islands. “The paths from one village to another were not more than a foot wide, and very crooked.” In these cases, as in the case of our own footpaths, we see how traffic makes the road, and the road, in proportion as it is more used, facilitates traffic.

Among some slightly civilized peoples, as the Dyaks, definite paths are made by laying single trees end to end, and sometimes two trees side by side. In New Guinea, similar artificial paths are required to prevent sinking into the mud. By various peoples who have reached this stage—Negroes, Dyaks, New Zealanders—streams are crossed on trunks of trees (probably at first trees that had accidentally fallen), having even in some cases hand-rails. When we read in Raffles that on account of the difficulty of transport, the price of rice in Java varies greatly in the different districts; Edition: current; Page: [385] and when Brooke tells us that while rice would be selling among the Dyaks at one place at 4½ cents a pasu, half a day further down the river it would be eagerly bought at 25 cents a pasu; we are shown how defective distribution is accompanied by abundance in one place and scarcity in another, and how such differences stimulate distribution. We are reminded, too, that these changes are furthered by increase of population, which at once augments the aggregate of desires for needful commodities, and makes the process of distribution a more profitable business. Once more, when transference of goods from place to place becomes active, improvement in the channels of communication is suggested to the more speculative by the prospect of profit. Even in the more advanced African communities this cause has operated. Burton writes of Dahome:—

Like causes worked here. The investment of money in making good roads with a view to payments from travellers, long ago transformed our channels for transit. Of course the reader’s thought running in advance will recognize such causes and consequences as strikingly operative in our days. The need for easier distribution where quantities were great, as of cotton between Liverpool and Manchester, prompted the system of transmission by railway; and the system having been initiated there and elsewhere, went on to increase the quantities of things to be transmitted. Nor let us omit to note that along with the formation of good roads, of good vehicles, and then of good railways, another change has taken place. Originally the distributor was his own carrier; but with the growth of traffic carrying became a separate business.

Of course distribution has been increasingly aided by easy transmission of intelligence. In the days when only kings and nobles could employ messengers, merchants had to do Edition: current; Page: [386] business by journeys. But the growth of an efficient postal service made distribution both more rapid and cheaper, while bringing supplies and demands everywhere towards a balance; and now that telegraphs and telephones subserve this purpose still better, the function of distribution is performed with something like perfection.