Middleman

“ Do not expect to get rich quick by "cutting out the middleman's enormous profits," for the middleman's profits are not enormous, and if you see that your co-operation is not paying, give it up and confess to yourselves that you do not know as much about the business as your private competitors. ”

“ They say that the one strategic man in every industry who can represent everybody if he wants to, who can be a great man and who can make a great industry serve everybody, must be eliminated because nobody believes America can produce a middleman. We say instead of weakly and helplessly giving up a great spiritual and morally-engineering institution like the middleman because the average middleman does not know his job, we say: Exalt the middleman raise him to the nth power, make him—well—do you remember, Gentle Reader, the walking beams on the old sidewheel steamers? ”

“ If a poor man be driven, by distress of rent, from his potato garden, he has no other resource—all is lost: he will do the impossible (as the French say) to retain it; subscribe any bond, and promise any rent. The middleman has no character to lose ”

“ Such alleged explanations were shrewdly caricatured by the cartoon showing many persons standing in a circle, each accusing his neighbor: the consumer blaming the retailer; the retailer, the wholesaler; the wholesaler, the middleman; the middleman, the manufacturer; the manufacturer, the workman; the workman, the trust; while (to complete the circle) the trust blames the extravagant consumer. ”

“ The advertising man whose description and pictorial representation of the shoe causes the consumer to buy it of the retailer is also a middleman.
78. NOT ALL MIDDLEMEN ARE SOCIALLY NECESSARY.—By co÷rdinating the work of these various individuals, many of whom are themselves middlemen, the middlemen whom we have been describing allow the community to secure the full benefit of the division of labor and of exchange. Where there exist just enough middlemen to co÷rdinate with maximum efficiency the various industrial agents of a community, the community gains. ”

“ All the objections that can be offered in favor of property I am as well acquainted with as any of my critics, whom I ask as a favor to show their hearts when logic fails them. How can wealth that is not measured by labor be VALUABLE? And if it is labor that creates wealth and legitimates property, how explain the consumption of the idler? Where is the honesty in a system of distribution in which a product is worth, according to the person, now more, now less, than it costs. ”

“ For why should a man be saving, whose success depends, not on frugality, but on a ‘successful hit’? and who, in a single speculation, may lose the savings of years?”
“That is a fact,” observed my friend. “How many of the gentlemen that dined with us to-day do you think are possessed of real property? Not one-third of them. And yet they are all ‘young, respectable merchants,’ as a certain New York paper calls them, doing ‘a handsome business’ on a borrowed capital. ”

“ For you, O broker, there is no other principle but arithmetic. For me, commerce is of trivial import; love, faith, truth of character, the aspiration of man, these are sacred; nor can I detach one duty, like you, from all other duties, and concentrate my forces mechanically on the payment of moneys. Let me live onward; you shall find that, though slower, the progress of my character will liquidate all these debts without injustice to higher claims. If a man should dedicate himself to the payment of notes, would not this be injustice? Does he owe no debt but money? ”

“ On one side of you stand the contributors to the vast treasure of knowledge that mankind has accumulated, and is accumulating—men who have, in general, labored without fee or reward; on the other side of you stand the owners of this vast treasure, desirous to have it fashioned in a manner to suit their various tastes and powers, that all may be enabled to profit by its possession. Between them stand yourselves, middlemen between the producers and the consumers. ”

“ I allow farther, that there are middle men, who make a profit, and even get estates, by [339] purchasing the labour of the poor, and selling it at advanced prices to the rich; but then they cannot enjoy that profit, or the income of estates, but by spending them in employing and paying our labouring poor, in some shape or other, for the products of industry. Even beggars, pensioners, hospitals, and all that are supported by charity, spend their incomes in the same manner. ”

“ If industry, frugality, and disinterested integrity were alike the virtues of all, there would, apparently, be more of the social spirit, in making all property a common stock, and giving to each individual a proportional title to the wealth of the whole. ”

“ Recognise in Capital that portion of wealth which is devoted to reproductive purposes, and that, as one of its chief purposes is the payment of wages, it should be treated as a friend, to be cultivated and encouraged, not as an enemy, to be plundered or destroyed. ”

“ And finally, would it not be highly presumptive and insolent on our part to demand of others that they deliver into our keeping, without price, property which they have purchased with their own money, and of which we have had the use and benefit for a third of a century? ”

“ Now, the money makers, the business men, those people who deal in stocks and bonds, the speculators and employers, all that class of men known as the money making class, have no conception of this labor questions ”

“ Only too well. You said, but at great length, and with much embroidery of language more than questionable, that capital had no bowels for the worker, nor owners of capital either; and that since no one else would be kind to them, the workers must be kind to themselves and take the matter into their own hands.
J. N. (making notes) . Owners of the capital; workman must take the matter—take the matter—into their own hands.
J. F. Well, I have no more questions to ask your Grace. ”

“ Capital, Mastership, Privilege, Monopoly, Loaning, Credit, Property, etc.,—such are, in economic language, the various names of I know not what, but which is otherwise called Power, Authority, Sovereignty, Written Law, Revelation, Religion, God in short, cause and principle of all our miseries and all our crimes, and who, the more we try to define him, the more eludes us. ”

“ His money and finished goods, however, are not wholly capital, for he does not wholly devote them to these purposes: he employs a part of the one, and of the proceeds of the other, in supplying his personal consumption and that of his family, or in hiring grooms and valets, or maintaining hunters and hounds, or in educating his children, or in paying taxes, or in charity. ”

“ The numerous and complex arrangements which, under the stimulus of individual self-interest, have arisen in this and other civilized countries for the distribution of wealth, and the growth from small beginnings of our vast system of credit and banking, serve as an illustration of the same principle. "When it is questioned," he remarks, "whether the spontaneous cooperation of men in pursuit of personal benefits will adequately work out the general good, we may get guidance for judgment by comparing the results;" ”

“ In the more fortunate class, whose incomes bear a progressive ratio to prices and whose cost changes are, therefore, inversely proportional to price movements, we may expect to find: (1) proprietors of mortgaged and bond-issuing commercial and industrial enterprises; (2) proprietors of highly capitalized and centralized industries not subject to public control; (3) employers of unorganized labor and salaried persons ”

“ The solid middle-class men of business have, as has been said, something else to employ them, and cannot spare their services. They cannot accept of mere notoriety, with mayhap a modicum of patronate influence attached, as an adequate price for the time and labour which their own 384 affairs demand. ”

“ The lender might himself use the money to gratify his own desires. It is his money; he may use it, as he pleases, for his own gratification. Or he may himself employ it productively, and, at the end of the period, receive back his principal with the customary rate of profit. ”

“ Property, and the pursuit of property, may be found to be a remedy for much that we regret to see in them, and it may be proved to be possible by moral and intellectual training—their wages being already in very many cases sufficient for this purpose—to qualify a fair proportion of them for attaining to the possession of some little capital in money for investments of one kind or another. ”

“ What do we say, in fact?
To determine value,—in other words, to organize within itself the production and distribution of wealth,—society proceeds exactly as the mind does in the generation of concepts. ”

“ And do you think that he, a merchant, who probably places a very high value on money, because experience has taught him its value, will say, like you, 'Palace or hovel, poverty or wealth, it makes no difference'? ”

“ By The Poor, then, I understand such Persons as have no Estate of their own to support them, without Industry; nor any Profession or Trade, by which, with Industry, they may be capable of gaining a comfortable Subsistence. ”

“ Traders and manufacturers took their places somewhat noisily beside their fellow politicians of older standing, filling the whole land till it seems for a moment as if nothing counted any more in English life save its middle class—a busy, hard, prosperous, pugnacious middle-class. ”

“ In this as in other branches of business, there is a class of middlemen or brokers, who bring buyers and sellers together, or stand between them, buying bills from those who have money to receive, and selling bills to those who have money to pay. ”

“ Some gentlemen have their stock in their hands, while others, who have more money than they know what to do with, want it; and this, and this alone, is the question, to settle which we are called on to squander thousands of the people's money. What interest, let me ask, have the people in the settlement of this question? ”

“ The pecuniary activities of men, efforts directed to acquisition and operations incident to the acquisition or tenure of wealth, are treated as incidental to the distribution to each of his particular proportion in the production of goods. Pecuniary activities, in short, are handled as incidental features of the process of social production and consumption, as details incident to the method whereby the social interests are served, instead of being dealt with as the controlling factor about which the modern economic process turns. ”

“ The source of supply from which he draws money, fitful and uncertain as it may be in what it yields to him, he considers unlimited; and as the amount which he can draw from it does not depend at all upon his frugality, his foresight, or upon any incipient financial skill that he may exercise, but solely upon his adroitness in coaxing, or his persistence in importunity, it is the group of bad qualities, and not the good, which such management tends to foster. ”

“ They [his pastoral charge] are, in the language of Scripture, ‘your money.’ They are the source, the means of your wealth; by their labour do you obtain the necessaries, the conveniences, and comforts of life. The increase of them is the general standard of your worldly prosperity: without them you would be comparatively poor. They are consequently sought after and desired as property, and when possessed, must be so taken care of and managed as to be made profitable. ”

“ He tempted the laborer by a larger stock of more attractive goods, made a direct contract with him, and took a mortgage on the growing crop. Thus he soon became the middle man to whom the profit of the transaction largely flowed, and he began to get rich. ”

“ I desire to fit myself for my position as owner and dispenser of a large income. I regard the money intrusted to me as a talent for which I shall be called to account, and I want to learn to manage my affairs properly, and with prudence and discretion. ”

“ Government ought to set an example of rating all things at their true value, and riches, therefore, at the worth, for comfort or pleasure, of the things which they will buy: and ought not to sanction the vulgarity of prizing them for the pitiful vanity of being known to possess them, or the paltry shame of being suspected to be without them, the presiding motives of three-fourths of the expenditure of the middle classes. ”

“ All young People, as I have before recommended, should be taught Method, and nothing more likely to initiate them in it than a masterly Knowledge of Figures. Besides, Debtor and Creditor, Loss and Gain, are by no means confined to the Merchant; every Man, however low his Trade, or however narrow his Dealings, while he does trade or deal, should understand what he is about: and he has no other Way than this of attaining that necessary Knowledge. ”

“ All persons in business are occasionally, and most of them constantly, borrowers: while all persons not in business, who possess monied property, are lenders. Between these two great bodies there is a numerous, keen, and intelligent class of middlemen, composed of bankers, stockbrokers, discount brokers, and others, alive to the slightest breath of probable gain. ”

“ Of the net profits of persons in business, a part, as before observed, may be considered as interest on capital, and of a perpetual character, and the remaining part as remuneration for the skill and labour of superintendence. ”

“ He had managed the property so successfully during the long minority that even he himself was surprised at the amount of money, both capital and income, which the earl was now master of, without restriction or reservation, and free from the control of any human being. ”