Market Extortions

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Market Extortions—Causes—The Speculators—Could not the Western Fashion be introduced here?—Free Trade—“Market Car Company.”

Among the astonishing results, the working of causes and effect, in America, we don’t know any thing, here in Brooklyn and in New York, that is really more astonishing than the prices of every-day provisions. Think of beef twenty-five cents a pound, in such a land as this! Think of butter, sugar, &c., the same proportion. Even bread and potatoes are frightfully dear diet, now.

What causes it all? Is there any great scarcity in the yield of those articles? Not at all. This is the very season of the year when the best of butter ought to be bought from 15 to 20 cents a pound; and potatoes might well be afforded at from 50 to 60 cents a bushel. Instead of there being any scarcity, or any prospect of scarcity, the appearance of the land shows every yield of the coming crops greater than those of any previous season in the United States.

It is an axiom in the great laws of supply and demand, in any connected department of the markets, that when one particular article is run up in its price to an enormous rate, that will cause the price of all other articles to be more or less run up also. May it not be that the extortion practiced in the single particular of beef, and other fresh meats, has had this curious effect, something like a contagion, upon the prices of all other food?

This, we find, is the deliberate opinion of the knowing ones. By a strong system of association and sympathy the cattle speculators have, for more than a year past, played their daring game upon the public—and played it successfully. And there is a general indication that it must soon be “played out.”

Why could not certain appropriate plots, squares, or parts of our streets, be specified by ordinance, in Brooklyn and New York, (not merely two or three filthy, crowded, ill-situated markets, as now,) where the country dealers could drive in with their covered wagons, back them up, and sell out what they have to sell, at first hand?

This is the Philadelphia and western fashion, and something of the sort might succeed here. Then there should be no favor or allowance at all thrown in the way of the speculators and forestallers. In other words, the whole license system should be abrogated, and the provision made in every respect free.

We are not sure indeed but Free Trade carried out in good faith, suggests that the only radical remedy for these extravagant prices of every day food. Then there are various minor arrangements. The inter-communication is now so quick and certain between New York and the great prolific fields of the West, South, and North, that we shouldn’t wonder if something good comes out of such a scheme, as the following:

A company called “The Market Car Company” has organized and incorporated itself, in New York, whose object is to do away with the blood-sucking of the succession of five or six different grades of speculators and brokers among whom animal food has to pass before it reaches these parts.

“The Company proposes to go back of all these traffickers and purchase its meats directly of the farmers in the West, and bring them here in its own cars, to be consumed by the shareholders and others. It has been ascertained from reliable data, that the cost of bringing meats from the West with the apparatus of the Company will be less than what is lost by shrinkage in the ordinary modes, and without any deterioration of the quality.

“The Company collects their cattle and sheep from the rich pastures adjoining their depots in Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois. From these pastures they are taken while in a perfectly healthy and thriving state, and when dressed they are hung up in large, dry, cooling rooms, kept perfectly pure, and where not a particle of dust can be found, and the temperature is so cold that a fly could not live in it.

“The meats are now ready for the refrigerating car, the chamber of which being filled with ice, is run up by the side of the cooling room. The door-casing of one is connected with the door-casing of the other by an air tight tunnel a few inches in length. The doors are then opened and the meat passed from the cooling-room to the car without coming in contact with the outer air. When filled, the door is shut and sealed, and from the time the meats are hung up in the car until the seal is broken in New York, they are in a temperature of 40 to 45 degrees. The ice-chamber is supplied every two or three days, and at the end of a week from the time the beef or mutton is dressed it arrives in New York. Meat kept two or three weeks in the cold, dry, pure air of the refrigerator is better and sweeter than that recently killed, as the strong, rank, animal taste is all gone.”

All this we transfer from the circular of “the Company,” because it contains very sensible suggestions of what could be done with the best results. Whether this association have the capital, the solidity, the perseverance, to carry it out, is another point.

One bit of advice, before we have done; that is to encourage our readers, and families not over-burdened with cash, to abstain from extravagant-priced articles of the table. A person would perhaps be all the better, if he or she were to go for months without eating butter at all, and beef but three or four times a week. O, but then the looks of the thing! Ah there’s the rub, after all.

Housekeepers will have their tables make a good spread, for “the looks.” If it were only once agreed upon to provide nothing, and partake of nothing, but what was suitable and needed, what a revolution for the better there would soon be!