THE INIQUITOUS MIDDLEMAN.

North Otago Times, 15 February 1913, Page 4 (Supplement)

THE INIQUITOUS MIDDLEMAN.

EXTRACT FROM A SPEECH ABOUT "MIDDLEMEN."

Addressing the State Agricultural Society's meeting at Albany, recently, Mayor Gaynor said in part: I have told those people down there that I know no way to abolish this terrible middleman. They tell me that he is rich, that his profits are enormous, and I told them that if the profits were so enormous in that business I was astonished that they didn't all go into it and get rich also. • As I have a notion from the very time I first read Adam Smith up to this hour that supply and demand would bring about just that resultwhere a business gets so profitable that everybody gets rich in it, others can rush into it and make a distribution of it. It spreads out rather thin like a piece of butter on a piece of bread, Nobody gets rich so fast any more. On inquiry I also found that 3 per cent, on tte average was probably all they made out of such things. I also told them that somebody had to distribute this produce in the City of New York when it got there. If the farmer does not want to send it- to the middleman down there ha

has got to go down himself or send his son down, and I guess he has got to send a team and waggon to carry it to our doors also, because we have to get it to our basement door some way. And I imagine that if he has got some left over he baa got to have a place to keep it, hasn't he?

He has got to hire a store, hasn't he ? He has got to hire clerks and pay rent, hasn't he ? And if he wants to keep it a little while—and I am really told, maybe a yearthen he has got to erect a cold storage down there to put it in, And I am afraid he could not do all that. That has got to lie done by somebody. When the produce of the State comes into the cities it has got to be received, it has got to be stored, and we must get our distributive share of it at our basement doors the next morning, No, I have no objection to you farmers coming down and doing that in New York, city if you want to. Come along and I will shake hands with ovcry one of you. I dare say that a movement could grow .and become effective, by which the farmers of this State could establish their own agencies or their own middlemen in the City of New York and in other cities of the State. Whether yon would do any better than the ordinary middleman who is competing with his neighbour and doing the best he can for you I do not 'know. I only know that that work has to be done there by somebody. So now you get your heads together and just decldo who it will he,

I do not care' a cent which way you decide. Whoever docs it will make his living that way, and I suppose will live from hand to mouth, just like the farmer. We are not all so rich down in New York as some of you think. I tell you, you look a good deal richer than soma of the people that come in and out the. City Hall every day-a good deal richer, and you look as though you were better fed too.