The farmer protested. "My daughter in Vienna tells me that she has to pay thirty-six hellers a kilogram," he said.
"Not according to the maximum price set by the government, which is twenty-one hellers just now," was the bland remark of the agent.
"That is all very well, sir!" returned the farmer. "But you know as well as I do that when my daughter wants potatoes she must pay thirty-six hellers or whatever the retailer wants. She writes me that when she stands in the food-line she never gets anything. So she does business with a man who always has potatoes."
The food shark had no time to lose. Other farmers came.
The farmer thought it over for a while and then sold.
The reader uninitiated in war-food conditions may ask: Why didn't that farmer ship his daughter the potatoes she needed? He couldn't, of course. The economic-zone arrangement prevented him. That zone was the means which the government employed to regulate and restrict distribution and consumption without giving money an opportunity to tarnish in the hands of people who might not subscribe to war loans. The zone "mobilized" the pennies by concentrating them in the banks and making them available _en masse_ for the war.
Yet the fact was that the daughter of the farmer, buying potatoes clandestinely, may have bought the very product of her father's land. Who in that case got the eighteen hellers difference? The middlemen, of course. That the poor woman, in order to feed her children, might have been able to use to good advantage two kilograms at thirty-six hellers, instead of one, is very likely, but this consideration did not bother the food sharks known as the Vienna Bank Ring.
On one occasion the same group of food speculators permitted two million eggs to spoil in a railroad yard at Vienna because the price was not good enough. The Bank Ring was just then agitating for a better price for eggs and hoped that the maximum would be raised. But the government was a little slow on this occasion, and before the price went up, "according to regulation," the eggs were an unpleasant memory to the yard-hands. Naturally, nobody was prosecuted in this case. I understood at the time that the Bank Ring presented to the Austrian government a sort of ultimatum, which read: "No profits, no war loans." The government surrendered.