Our system of industrial exchange has one very weak place, called _credit_. This credit is a hole in the net through which industrial gains are dropped into the bottomless sea; and the system is so fixed upon us that there is no hope of reform in our day. To pay when we buy more and more offends something in our make-up. A wise man proposed that one, two and five dollar bills be abolished, in order that we might circulate, as the French do, a large amount of silver. A member of Congress immediately amended the suggestion thus: “No. Put this silver in the United States Treasury, and let us use ‘silver notes.’” We insist upon having even a credit money, and object to “the trouble” of handling coin. This refined and transcendental sentiment, or taste, or æstheticism about coin runs through us. The man who always pays, as well as the sneak who never pays if he can avoid it, says, “Charge it,” when he buys goods. Goods are sold by the manufacturer to the jobber on credit; the jobber sells to the wholesale houses on credit; the wholesale dealers sell to retailers on credit; the retailers sell to consumers on credit. It is within the mark to say, that more is lost in these four credit traps than capital gets—much more. It is not, in fact, the capitalist, but the well-dressed and the shabbily-dressed thieves who cheat and rob labor.
At first sight, the reader will wonder how the losses of the four credits come home to labor. We reply: they are merely the aggregate of the risks incurred in making staple goods—all other risks being insignificant in such manufacturing. The order of things is like this: what the jobber loses the manufacturer loses by the failure of the jobber. The jobber loses what the dealers between him and the consumers lose. Not quite all, perhaps, for the capitals of the dealers must be of some worth; but the consumer has, in the end, to pay all these losses, and the result is an enhanced price. In other words, a bale of goods starts out with a burden of risk which grows as it travels, and adds to the cost of goods so much that the consumer can not buy as much as he needs. The from 250 to 300 or more failures each week tell a part of the workman’s trouble; another vast body of his losses does not go to record at all. It is the fifty-cents-on-a-dollar compromise system between wholesalers and retailers.
