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Writing: Answer to the Question on Rural Trade

Answer to the Question on Rural Trade, § 5

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§ 5

Let us now, to extend the argument, take the example of another rural commodity, namely beef cattle, which are driven in to the towns in the autumn to be sold. Let the same 100 farmers have 50 larger and smaller animals for sale, some one and others two, or at most three. According to the regulations, each individual owner should drive his own cattle to market. Then he who has one small animal as well as the one who has three has to drive it the same 6 mil. That will then require two hands from each farm that has any beef cattle to sell. Let there be 40 such tenants, then 80 persons will be engaged in driving those cattle to town and selling them, including the return journey, and each of them then takes four days, amounting for the entire drove of 50 cattle to 320 days’ work, which, reckoned at 2 daler kmt a day, amounts to an expenditure of 640 daler. Let 36 daler be the average price at which all of them are sold, which amounts to 1,800 daler. Driving them to town will then have consumed more than a third of the total value. Nor can anyone entrust his animal to a neighbour, considering the differences in quality and price, and the fact that they are not all driven there on the same day but as and when each individual has the time and opportunity.

Now let us again, in our mind, rescind the law prohibiting rural trade and allow a buying agent, whether farmer or townsman, to travel out there in the autumn and buy up all these 50 beef cattle, which would take him five days for the journey there and back. In order to bring the drove back, he hires three hands, who in four days get all 50 of them to the town, performing 12 days’ work, which, added to the five of the agent, amounts to 17 days’ work in all, producing, at 2 daler each, a sum of 34 daler spent purchasing the drove and getting it to the town, which produces a pure profit of 606 daler on this single commodity, by means of the rural trade, whether it is made by the buyer or the seller.

In the same way, one could demonstrate with regard to other products of the country what a remarkable profit accrues to individual people when they are sold through the rural trade. One could also make rough estimates from that as to the effect which that might have throughout the kingdom in a single year, but truth does not need to dazzle with impressive calculations; it presents itself best simple and naked; and I venture to assert that this proof is not much inferior to the mathematical ones in essence, even if the figures may be increased or diminished by various circumstances.

 

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