16. Some middlemen must go.—Certainly it is not possible to defend all middlemen. There are many industries in whidi it is becoming more and more con venient to do without middlemen entirely. In other industries a smaller number of middlemen are being used. In the textile industries, for instance, a com plex and almost unending chain of middlemen is being simplified and shortened for the good of the business and the public as well; and in other businesses some thing similar is occurring. This does not, however, mean that the middleman is disappearing from com merce. To admit that a given type of middleman is unjustified and should be abolished is very far from admitting that all middlemen are bad and should go. It is entirely possible to defend the middleman with out defending all representatives of the class. Some must go and others must change their functions; but as a class middlemen will continue to exist and to hold their place as the characteristic feature of mod ern marketing for many years to come.
17. Middlemen and competition.—The only thing that threatens the middleman is a change from a com petitive to a monopolistic system of industry. Under a monopolistic system—either public or private—there would be only one concern or one group of closely allied concerns engaged in manufacturing any one commodity, and there would be only one distributing agency in each community. Naturally, manufacture would be on a very large scale and the distributing agency would do a very large business. While large scale production is one of the reasons for the rise of the middleman, after a certain point in size is reached the manufacturer, in many lines, at least, ceases to be wholly dependent on middlemen to distribute his prod ucts, and finds it more and more practicable to es tablish his own methods of reaching the market.
Similarly, a large distributing station, for reasons to appear in a later chapter, may be run jointly by a group of manufacturers, by the government, or by consumers operating cooperatively, without the in tervention of middlemen to supply it with the things it sells. It is the manufacturing establishment of medium size that ordinarily cannot exist without the middleman in some form, and it is the small and medium sized independent retail establishment that, in many lines, finds the middleman an absolute neces sity. These medium sized establishments which at the present time probably form the majority of manu facturing and retailing enterprises would not exist under a monopolistic system.
Under tile present competitive system, however, the field is free to anyone who wants to start in busi ness—who discovers a place where the creation of some kind of utility will mean comfort and COI1Vell knee for the public and for which the public will be willing to pay. As long as the field is free we shall have some very large establishments that may get along without tbe middleman, but we shall also have a majority of smaller business upits to whom the middleman is necessary. As long as We continue to operate on the basis of a fair field for all, and no favor, we shall continue to have the middleman, and no producer of time and place utility who performs a needed service, who does his work efficiently and who takes only an honest profit need apologize for his existence or fear that he is out of tune with the eco nomic trend of the times.