Читать книгу: «The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 07, No. 40, February, 1861», страница 10
The scene changes, as the clock strikes in the entry. We are lingering in the piazza of the Winged Lion, and the bronze giants in their turret overlooking the square raise their hammers and beat the solemn march of Time. As we float away through the watery streets, old Shylock shuffles across the bridge,—black barges glide by us in the silent canals,—groups of unfamiliar faces lean from the balconies,—and we hear the plashing waters lap the crumbling walls of Venice, with its dead Doges and decaying palaces.
Again we stir the fire, and feel it is home all about us. But we like to sit here and think of that rosy evening, last summer, when we came walking into Interlachen, and beheld the ghost-like figure of the Jungfrau issuing out of her cloudy palace to welcome the stars,—of a cool, bright, autumnal morning on the western battlements overlooking Genoa, the blue Mediterranean below mirroring the silent fleet that lay so motionless on its bosom,—of a midnight visit to the Colosseum with a band of German students, who bore torches in and out of the time-worn arches, and sang their echoing songs to the full moon,—of days, how many and how magical! when we awoke every morning to say, "We are in Rome!"
But it grows late, and it is time now to give over these reflections. So we wind up our watch, and put out the candle.
* * * * *
A DRY-GOODS JOBBER IN 1861
What is a dry-goods jobber? No wonder you ask. You have been hunting, perhaps, for our peripatetic postoffice, and have stumbled upon Milk Street and Devonshire Street and Franklin Street. You are almost ready to believe in the lamp of Aladdin, that could build palaces in a night. Looking up to the stately and costly structures which have usurped the place of once familiar dwellings, and learning that they are, for the most part, tenanted by dry-goods jobbers, you feel that for such huge results there must needs be an adequate cause, and so you ask, What is a dry-goods jobber?
It is more than a curious question. For parents desirous of finding their true sphere for promising and for unpromising sons, it is eminently a practical question. It is a question comprehensive of dollars and cents,—also of bones and sinews, of muscles, nerves, and brains, of headache, heartache, and the cyclopaedia of being, doing, and enduring. An adequate answer to such a question must needs ask your indulgence, for it cannot be condensed into a very few words.
A dry-goods jobber is a wholesale buyer and seller, for cash or for approved credit, of all manner of goods, wares, and materials, large and small, coarse and fine, foreign and domestic, which pertain to the clothing, convenience, and garnishing, by night and by day, of men, women, and children: from a button to a blanket; from a calico to a carpet; from stockings to a head-dress; from an inside handkerchief to a waterproof; from a piece of tape to a thousand bales of shirtings; not forgetting linen, silk, or woollen fabrics, for drapery or upholstery, for bed or table, including hundreds of items which time would fail me to recite. All these the dry-goods jobber provides for his customer, the retailer, who in his turn will dispense them to the consumer.
A really competent and successful dry-goods jobber, in the year of grace, one thousand, eight hundred and sixty-one, is a new creation. He is begotten of the times. Of him, as truly as of the poet, and with yet more emphasis, it must be said, He is born, not made. He is a poet, a philosopher, an artist, an engineer, a military commander, an advocate, an attorney, a financier, a steam-engine, a telegraph-operator, a servant-of-all-work, a Job, a Hercules, and a Bonaparte, rolled into one.
"Exaggeration!" do you say? Not at all.—You asked for information? You shall have it, to your heart's content.
To a youth, for a time interrupted in his preparation for college, I said,—
Never mind; this falls in exactly with my well-considered plan. You shall go into a dry-goods store till your eyes recover strength; it will be the best year's schooling of your life.
"How so?" was the dubious answer; "what can I learn there?"
Learn? Everything,—common sense included, which is generally excluded from the University curriculum: for example, time, place, quantity, and the worth of each. You shall learn length, breadth, and thickness; hard and soft; pieces and yards; dozens and the fractions thereof; order and confusion, cleanliness and dirt,—to love the one and hate the other; materials, colors, and shades of color; patience, manners, decency in general; system and method, and the relation these sustain to independence; in short, that there is a vast deal more out of books than in books; and, finally, that the man who knows only what is in books is generally a lump of conceit, and of about as much weight in the scales of actual life as the ashes of the Alexandrian library, or the worms in any parchments that may have survived that conflagration.
"Whew!" was his ejaculation; "I didn't know there was so much."
I dare say not. Most of your limited days have passed under the training of men who are in the like predicament,—whose notion of the chief end of man is, to convert lively boys into thick dictionaries,—and who honestly believe that the chief want of the age is your walking dictionary. Any other type of humanity, they tell us, "won't pay." Much they know of what will and what won't pay! This comes of partial education,—of one-sided, of warped, and biased education. It puts one out of patience, this arrogance of the University, this presuming upon the ignorance of the million, this assertion of an indispensable necessity to make the boy of the nineteenth century a mere expert in some subdivision of one of the sciences. The obstinacy of an hereditary absolutism, which the world has outgrown, still lingers in our schools of learning. Let us admit the divine right of Science, admit the fitness of a limited number of our youth to become high-priests in her temple, but no divine right of fossil interpreters of Science to compel the entire generation to disembowel their sons and make of these living temples mere receptacles of Roman, Grecian, or Egyptian relics. We don't believe that "mummy is medicinal," the Arabian doctor Haly to the contrary notwithstanding. If it ever was, its day has gone by. Therefore let all sensible people pray for a Cromwell,—not to pull down University Science, but to set up the Commonwealth of Common Sense, to subordinate the former to the latter, and to proclaim an education for our own age and for its exigencies. Your dry-goods jobber stands in violent contrast to your University man in the matter of practical adaptation. His knowledge is no affair of dried specimens, but every particle of it a living knowledge, ready, at a moment's warning, for all or any of the demands of life.
You are perhaps thinking,—"Yes, that is supposable, because the lessons learned by the jobber are limited to the common affairs of daily life, are not prospective; because, belonging only to the passing day, they are easily surveyed on all sides, and their full use realized at once; in short, a mere matter of buying and selling goods: a very inferior thing, as compared with the dignified and scholarly labors of the student."
How mistaken this estimate is will appear, as we advance to something like a comprehensive survey of the dry-goods jobber's sphere.
First, then, he is a buyer of all manner of goods, wares, and materials proper to his department in commerce. He is minutely informed in the history of raw materials. He knows the countries from which they come,—the adaptation of soils and climates to their raising,—the skill of the cultivators,—the shipping usages,—the effect of transportation by land and sea on raw materials, and on manufactured articles,—with all the mysteries of insurance allowances and usages, the debentures on exportation, and the duties on importation, in his own and in other lands. His forecast is taxed to the utmost, as to what may be the condition of his own market, six, twelve, or eighteen months from the time of ordering goods, both as to the quantity which may be in market, and as to the fashion, which is always changing,—and also as to the condition of his customers to pay for goods, which will often depend upon the fertility of the season. As respects home-purchases, he is compelled to learn, or to suffer for the want of knowing, that the difference between being a skilful, pleasant buyer and the opposite is a profit or loss of from five to seven and a half or ten per cent.,—or, in other words, the difference, oftentimes, between success and ruin, between comfort and discomfort, between being a welcome and a hated visitor, between being honored as an able merchant and contemned as a mean man or an unmitigated bore.
Is your curiosity piqued to know wherein buyers thus contrasted may differ? They differ endlessly, like the faces you meet on the street. Thus, one man is born to an open, frank, friendly, and courteous manner; another is cold, reserved, and suspicious. One is prompt, hilarious, and provocative of every good feeling, whenever you chance to meet; the other is slow, morose, and fit to waken every dormant antipathy in your soul. An able buyer is, or becomes, observing to the last degree. He knows the slightest differences in quality and in style, and possesses an almost unerring taste,—knows the condition of the market,—knows every holder of the article he wants, and the lowest price of each. He knows the peculiarities of the seller,—his strong points and his weak points, his wisdom and his foibles, his very temperament, and how it is acted upon by his dinner or the want of it. He knows the estimate put upon his own note by that seller. He knows what his note will sell for in the street. He knows to a feather's weight the influence of each of these items upon the mind of the seller of whom he wishes to make a purchase. Talk about diplomacy!—there's not a man in any court in Europe who knows his position, his fulcrum, and his lever, and the use he can make of them, as this man knows. He can unravel any combination, penetrate any disguise, surmount any obstacle. Beyond all other men, he knows when to talk, and when to refrain from talking,—how to throw the burden of negotiation on the seller,—how to get the goods he wants at his own price, not at his asking, but on the suggestion of the seller, prompted by his own politely obvious unwillingness to have the seller part with his merchandise at any price not entirely acceptable to himself.
The incompetent man, on the other hand, is presuming, exacting, and unfeeling. He not only desires, but asserts the desire, in the very teeth of the seller, to have something which that seller has predetermined that he shall not have. He fights a losing game from the start. He will probably begin by depreciating the goods which he knows, or should know, that the seller has reason to hold in high esteem. He will be likely enough to compare them to some other goods which he knows to be inferior. He will thus arouse a feeling of dislike, if not of anger, where his interest should teach him to conciliate and soothe; and if he sometimes carry his point, his very victory is in effect a defeat, since it procures him an increased antipathy. This the judicious buyer never does. He repudiates, as a mere half-truth, and a relic of barbarism, the maxim, "There is no friendship in trade."
"But," you are asking, "do only those succeed who are born to these extraordinary endowments? And those who do succeed, are they, in fact, each and all of them, such wonderfully capable men as you have described?"
If by success you mean mere money-making, it is not to be denied that some men do that by an instinct, little, if at all, superior to that of the dog who smells out a bone. There are exceptions to all rules; and there are chances in all games, even in games of skill. Lord Timothy Dexter, as he is facetiously called, shipped warming-pans to the West Indies, in defiance of all geographical objections to the venture, and made money by the shipment,—not because warming-pans were wanted there, but because the natives mistook and used them for molasses-ladles. It must be owned that a portion of the successful ones are lucky,—that a portion of them use the blunt weapon of an indomitable will, as an efficient substitute for the finer edge of that nice tact and good manners which they lack. Their very rudeness seems to commend them to the rude natures which confound refinement with trickery and assume that brutality must needs be honest.
But there are other things to be said of buying. The dry-goods jobber frequents the auction-room. If you have never seen a large sale of dry-goods at auction, you have missed one of the remarkable incidents of our day. You are not yet aware of how much an auctioneer and two or three hundred jobbers can do and endure in the short space of three hours. You must know that fifty or a hundred thousand dollars' worth of goods may easily change owners in that time. You are not to dream of the leisurely way of disposing of somebody's household-furniture or library, which characterizes the doings of one or two of our fellow-citizens who manage such matters within speaking distance of King's Chapel: but are rather to picture to yourself a congregation of three hundred of the promptest men in our Atlantic cities, with a sprinkling of Westerners quite as wide awake for bargains, each of them having marked his catalogue; an auctioneer who considers the sale of a hundred lots an hour his proper rôle, and who is able to see the lip, eye, or finger of the man whose note he covets, in spite of all sounds, signs, or opaque bodies. The man of unquiet nerves or of exacting lungs would do well to leave that arena to the hard-heads and cool-bloods who can pursue their aim and secure their interests: undisturbed either by the fractional rat-a-tat-tat of the auctioneer's "Twenty-seven af—naf—naf—naf,—who'll give me thirty?" or by the banter and comicalities which a humor-loving auctioneer will interject between these bird-notes, without changing his key, or arresting his sale a moment. If you would see the evidence of comprehensive and minute knowledge, of good taste, quick wit, sound judgment, and electrical decision, attend an auction-sale in New York some morning. There will be no lack of fun to season the solemnity of business, nor of the mixture of courtesy and selfishness usual in every gathering, whether for philanthropic, scientific, or commercial purposes. Many dry-goods jobbers will attend the sale with no intention of buying, but simply to note the prices obtained, and, having traced the goods to their owners, to get the same in better order and on better terms; the commission paid to the auctioneer being divided, or wholly conceded by the seller to the buyer, according to his estimate of the note.
A dry-goods buyer will sometimes spend a month in New York, the first third or half of which he will devote to ascertaining what goods are in the market, and what are to arrive; also to learning the mood of the English, French, and Germans who hold the largest stocks. Sometimes these gentlemen will make an early trial of their goods at auction. Unsatisfactory results will rouse their phlegm or fire, and they declare they will not send another piece of goods to auction, come what may. For local or temporary reasons, buyers sometimes persist in holding back till the season is so far advanced that the foreign gentlemen become alarmed. Their credits in London, Paris, and Amsterdam are running out; they are anxious to make remittances; and then ensues one of those dry-goods panics so characteristic of New York and its mixed multitude; an avalanche of goods descends upon the auction-rooms, and prices drop ten, twenty, forty per cent., it may be, and the unlucky or short-sighted men who made early purchases are in desperate haste to run off their stocks before the market is irreparably broken down. Whether, therefore, to buy early or late, in large or in small quantities, at home or abroad,—are questions beset with difficulty. He who imports largely may land his goods in a bare market and reap a golden harvest, or in a market so glutted with goods that the large sums he counts out to pay the duties may be but a fraction of the loss he knows to be inevitable.
In addition to the problems belonging to time and place of purchasing, to quantities and prices, there is a host of other problems begotten of styles, of colors, of assortments, of texture and finish, of adaptation to one market or another. The profit on a case of goods is often sacrificed by the introduction or omission of one color or figure, the presence or absence of which makes the merchandise desirable or undesirable. Little less than omniscience will suffice to guard against the sometimes sudden, and often most unaccountable, freaks of fashion, whose fiat may doom a thing, in every respect admirably adapted to its intended use, to irretrievable condemnation and loss of value. And when you remember that the purchases of dry-goods must be made in very large quantities, from a month to six or even twelve months before the buyer can sell them, and that his sales are many times larger than his capital, and most of them on long credit, you have before you a combination of exigencies hardly to be paralleled elsewhere.
The crisis of 1857 brought a general collapse. Scores and scores of jobbers failed; very few dared to buy goods. Mills were compelled to run on short time, or to cease altogether. The country became bare of the common necessaries of life. In process of time trade rallied. Manufacturing recommenced; orders for goods poured in; and for a twelve-month and more the manufacturer has had it all his own way. His goods are all sold ahead, months ahead of his ability to manufacture. He makes his own price, and chooses his customer. This operates not unkindly on the jobbers who are wealthy and independent; but for those who have but lately begun to mount the hill of difficulty, it offers one more impediment. For, to men who have a great many goods to sell, it is a matter of moment to secure the customers who can buy in large quantities, and whose notes will bring the money of banks or private capitalists as soon as offered. Against such buyers, men of limited means and of only average business-ability have but a poor chance. There will always be some articles of merchandise in the buying or selling of which they cannot compete.
When a financial crisis overtakes the community, we hear much and sharp censure of all speculation. Speculators, one and all, are forthwith consigned to an abyss of obloquy. The virtuous public outside of trade washes its hands of all participation in the iniquity. This same virtuous public knows very little of what it is talking about. What is speculation? Shall we say, in brief and in general, that it consists in running risks, in taking extra-hazardous risks, on the chance of making unusually large profits? Is it that men have abandoned the careful ways of the fathers, and do not confine themselves to small stores, small stocks, and cash transactions? And do you know who it is that has compelled this change? That same public who denounce speculation in one breath, and in the next clamor for goods at low prices, and force the jobber into large stores and large sales at small profits as the indispensable condition of his very existence.
Those who thus rail at speculation are generally quite unaware that their own inexorable demand for goods at low prices is one of the principal efficient causes of that of which they complain. They do not know that the capacious maw of the insatiable public is yearly filled with millions on millions of shirtings and sheetings, and other articles of prime necessity, without one farthing of profit to the jobber. The outside world reason from the assumption, that the jobber might, but will not, avoid taking considerable risks. They do not consider, for they do not know, how entirely all is changed from the days and circumstances in which a very small business would suffice to maintain the merchant. They do not consider, that, an immense amount of goods being of compulsion sold without profit, a yet other huge amount must be so sold as to compensate for this. Nor do they consider that the possibility of doing this is often contingent upon the buyer's carefully calculated probability of a rise in the article he is purchasing. Many a time is the jobber enabled and inclined to purchase largely only by the assurance that from the time of his purchase the price will be advanced.
The selling of dry-goods is another department in high art about which the ignorance of outsiders is ineffable. I was once asked, in the way of courtesy and good neighborhood, to call on a clergyman in our vicinity,—which I did. Desirous of doing his part in the matter of good fellowship and smooth conversation, he began thus:—
"Well, now, Mr. Smith, you know all about business: I suppose, if I were to go into a store to buy goods, nineteen men out of twenty would cheat me, if they could; wouldn't they?"
"No, Sir!" I answered, with a swelling of indignation at the injustice, a mingling of pity for the ignorance, and a foreboding of small benefit from the preaching of a minister of the gospel who knew so little of the world he lived in. "No, Sir; nineteen men in twenty would not cheat you, if they could; for the best of all reasons,—it would be dead against their own interest."
Not a day passes but the question is asked by our youths who are being initiated in the routine of selling goods,—"Is this honest? Is that honest? Is it honest to mark your goods as costing more than they do cost? Is it honest to ask one man more than you ask another? Ought not the same price to be named to every buyer? Isn't it cheating to get twenty-five per cent. profit? Can a man sell goods without lying? Are men compelled to lie and cheat a little in order to earn an honest living?" What is the reason that these questions will keep coming up? That they can no more be laid than Banquo's ghost? Here are some of the reasons. First, and foremost, multitudes of young men, whose parents followed the plough, the loom, or the anvil, have taken it into their heads, that they will neither dig, hammer, nor ply the shuttle. To soil their hands with manual labor they cannot abide. The sphere of commerce looks to their longing eyes a better thing than lying down in green pastures, or than a peaceful life beside still waters, procured by laborious farming, or by any mechanical pursuit. Clean linen and stylish apparel are inseparably associated in their minds with an easy and elegant life, and so they pour into our cities, and the ranks of the merchants are filled, and over-filled, many times. Once, the merchant had only to procure an inviting stock, and his goods sold themselves. He did not go after customers; they came to him; and it was a matter of favor to them to supply their wants. Now, all that is changed. There are many more merchants than are needed; buyers are in request; and buyers whose credit is the best, to a very great extent, dictate the prices at which they will buy. The question is no longer, How large a profit can I get? but, How small a profit shall I accept? The competition for customers is so fierce that the seller hardly dares ask any profit, for fear his more anxious neighbor will undersell him. In order to attract customers, one thing after another has been made "a leading article," a bait to be offered at cost or even less than cost,—that being oftentimes the condition on which alone the purchaser will make a beginning of buying.
"Jenkins," cried an anxious seller, "you don't buy anything of me, and I can sell you as cheap as any. Here's a bale of sheetings now, at eight cents, will do you good."
"How many have you got?"
"Oh, plenty."
"Well, how many?"
"Fifteen bales."
"Well, I'll take them."
"Come in and buy something more."
"No, nothing more to-day."
There was a loss of seventy-five dollars, and he did not dare buy more.
It will be obvious that the selling a part of one's goods at less than cost enhances the necessity of getting a profit on the rest. But how to do this, under the sharp scrutiny of a buyer who knows that his own success, not to say his very existence, depends upon his paying no profit possible to be avoided,—no profit, at all events, not certainly paid by some sharp neighbor who is competing with him for the same trade?
"But is there anything in all this," you are asking, "to preclude the jobber's telling the truth?" Nothing. "Anything to preclude strict honesty?" Nothing. "Why, then, do the questions you have quoted continually recur?"
I answer: In order to get his share of the best custom in his line, the dry-goods jobber has taken a store in the best position in town, at a rent of from three to fifty thousand dollars a year; has hired men and boys at all prices, from fifty dollars to five thousand,—and enough of these to result in an aggregate of from five to fifty thousand dollars a year for help, without which his business cannot be done. Add to this the usual average for store-expenses of every name, and for the family-expenses of two, five, or seven partners, and you find a dry-goods firm under the necessity of getting out of their year's sales somewhere from fifteen to a hundred and fifty thousand dollars profit, before they shall have saved one cent to meet the losses of an unfavorable season.
Now, though there is nothing even in all these urgencies to justify a single lie or fraud, there is much to sharpen a man's wits to secure the sale of his goods,—much to educate him in all manner of expedients to baffle the inquiries of customers who would be offended, if they could discover that he ever charged them the profit without which he could never meet his expenses. And the jobber's problem is complicated by the folly, universally prevalent among buyers, of expecting some partiality or peculiarity of favor over their neighbors who are just as good as themselves. Every dry-goods jobber knows that his customer's foolish hope and expectation often demand three absurdities of him: first, the assurance that he has the advantage over all other jobbers in a better stock of goods, better bought; secondly, that he has a peculiar friendship for himself; and thirdly, that, though of other men he must needs get a profit, in his special instance he shall ask little or none; and that, such is his regard for him, it is a matter of no moment whether he live in Lowell or Louisiana, in New Bedford or Nebraska, or whether he pay New England bank-notes within thirty days, or wild-cat money and wild lands, which may be converted into cash, with more or less expense and loss, somewhere between nine months and nine-and-twenty years.
And yet the uninitiated "can't understand how an honest merchant can have two prices for the same goods." An honest man has but one price for the same goods, and that is the cash price. All outside of that is barter,—goods for notes. His first inquiry is, What is the market-value of the note offered? True, he knows that many of the notes he takes cannot be sold at all; but he also knows that the notes he is willing to take will in the aggregate be guarantied by a reservation of one, two, or three per cent., and that the note of the particular applicant for credit will tend to swell or to diminish the rate; and he cannot afford to exchange his goods for any note, except at a profit which will guaranty its payment when due,—which, in other words, will make the note equal in value to cash.
Now it is just because all business-contingencies cannot be worked into an unvarying form, as regular as the multiplication-table, and as plain to the apprehension of all men, that a vast amount of lying and of dishonesty is imputed, where it does not exist. Merchants are much like other men,—wise and unwise, far-sighted and short-sighted, selfish and unselfish, honest and dishonest. But that they are as a class more dishonest than other men is so far from being true, that I much doubt if we should overstrain the matter, if we should affirm that they are the most honest class of men in the community. There is much in their training which contributes directly, and most efficiently, to this result. Their very first lessons are in feet and inches, in pounds and ounces, in exact calculations, in accounts and balances. Carelessness, mistakes, inaccuracies, they are made to understand, are unpardonable sins. The boy who goes into a store learns, for the first time, that half a cent, a quarter of a cent, an eighth of a cent, may be a matter of the gravest import. He finds a thorough book-keeper absolutely refusing himself rest till he has detected an error of ten cents in a business of six months. And every day's experience enforces the lesson. It is giving what is due, and claiming what is due, from year's end to year's end. Among merchants it is matter of common notoriety, that the prompt and exact adherence to orders insisted on by merchants, and prompt advice of receipt of business and of progress, cannot be expected from our worthy brethren at the bar. (The few honorable exceptions are respectfully informed that they are not referred to.) We do not expect them to weigh or measure the needless annoyance to which they often subject us, because they have never been, like ourselves, trained to the use of weights and measures; and therefore we are not willing to stigmatize them as dishonest, though they do, in fact, often steal our time and strength and patience, by withholding an answer to a business-letter.
None but those who are in the business know the assiduous attention with which the dry-goods jobber follows up his customers. None but they know the urgent necessity of doing this. The jobber may have travelled a thousand miles to make his customer's acquaintance, and to prevail upon him to come to Boston to make his purchases; and some neighbor, who boards at the hotel he happens to make his resting-place, lights upon him, shows him attention, tempts him with bargains not to be refused, prevails upon him to make the bulk of his purchases of him, before his first acquaintance even hears of his arrival. To guard against disappointments such as this, the jobber sends his salesmen to live at hotels, haunts the hotels himself, studies the hotel-register far more assiduously than he can study his own comfort, or the comfort of his wife and children. Of one such jobber it was said, facetiously,—"He goes the round of all the hotels every morning with a lantern, to wake up his customers." I had an errand one day at noon to such a devotee. Inquiring for him in the counting-room, I was told by his book-keeper to follow the stairs to the top of the store, and I should find him. I mounted flight after flight to the attic, and there I found, not only the man, but also one or two of his customers, surrounding a huge packing-case, upon which they had extemporized a dinner, cold turkey and tongue, and other edibles, taken standing, with plenty of fun for a dessert. The next time we happened to meet, I said,—"So you take not only time, but also customers, by the forelock!"
