Even so, good reader. You have, perhaps, long imagined that the judges of Israel, and heroes of Greece, the consuls of Rome, and the dukes of Venice, the powers of Florence, and the kings of England, were all merely the dim foreshadowings and obscure prophecyings of the advent of the Jones and Robinson of the future: demi-gods revealed in your own day, whose demi-divine votes, if luckily coincident upon any subject, become totally divine, and establish the ordinances thereof, for ever.
You will find it entirely otherwise, gentlemen, whether of the suburb, or centre. Laws small and great, for ever unchangeable;—irresistible by all the force of Robinson, and unimprovable by finest jurisprudence of Jones, have long since been known, and, by wise nations, obeyed. [[26]]Out of the statute books of one of these I begin with an apparently unimportant order, but the sway of it cuts deep.
“No person whatsoever shall buy fish, to sell it again, either in the market of Florence, or in any markets in the state of Florence.”
It is one of many such laws, entirely abolishing the profession of middleman, or costermonger of perishable articles of food, in the city of the Lily.
“Entirely abolishing!—nonsense!” thinks your modern commercial worship. “Who was to prevent private contract?”
Nobody, my good sir;—there is, as you very justly feel, no power in law whatever to prevent private contract. No quantity of laws, penalties, or constitutions, can be of the slightest use to a public inherently licentious and deceitful. There is no legislation for liars and traitors. They cannot be prevented from the pit; the earth finally swallows them. They find their level against all embankment—soak their way down, irrestrainably, to the gutter grating;—happiest the nation that most rapidly so gets rid of their stench. There is no law, I repeat, for these, but gravitation. Organic laws can only be serviceable to, and in general will only be written by, a public of honourable citizens, loyal to their state, and faithful to each other.
The profession of middleman was then, by civic consent, and formal law, rendered impossible in Florence [[27]]with respect to fish. What advantage the modern blessed possibility of such mediatorial function brings to our hungry multitudes; and how the miraculous draught of fishes, which living St. Peter discerns, and often dextrously catches—“the shoals of them like shining continents,” (said Carlyle to me, only yesterday,)—are by such apostolic succession miraculously diminished, instead of multiplied; and, instead of baskets full of fragments taken up from the ground, baskets full of whole fish laid down on it, lest perchance any hungry person should cheaply eat of the same,—here is a pleasant little account for you, by my good and simple clergyman’s wife. It would have been better still, if I had not been forced to warn her that I wanted it for Fors, which of course took the sparkle out of her directly. Here is one little naughty bit of private preface, which really must go with the rest. “I have written my little letter about the fish trade, and L. says it is all right. I am afraid you won’t think there is anything in it worth putting in Fors, as I really know very little about it, and absolutely nothing that every one else does not know, except ladies, who generally never trouble about anything, but scold their cooks, and abuse the fishmongers—when they cannot pay the weekly bills easily.” (After this we are quite proper.)
“The poor fishermen who toil all through these bitter nights, and the retail dealer who carries heavy baskets, [[28]]or drags a truck so many weary miles along the roads, get but a poor living out of their labour; but what are called ‘fish salesmen,’ who by reason of their command of capital keep entire command of the London markets are making enormous fortunes.
“When you ask the fishermen why they do not manage better for themselves at the present demand for fish, they explain how helpless they are in the hands of what they call ‘the big men.’ Some fishermen at Aldborough, who have a boat of their own, told my brother that one season, when the sea seemed full of herrings, they saw in the newspapers how dear they were in London, and resolved to make a venture on their own account; so they spent all their available money in the purchase of a quantity of the right sort of baskets, and, going out to sea, filled them all,—putting the usual five hundred lovely fresh fish in each,—sent them straight up to London by train, to the charge of a salesman they knew of, begging him to send them into the market and do the best he could for them. But he was very angry with the fishermen; and wrote them word that the market was quite sufficiently stocked; that if more fish were sent in, the prices would go down; that he should not allow their fish to be sold at all; and, if they made a fuss about it, he would not send their baskets back, and would make them pay the carriage. As it was, he returned them, after a time; but the poor men never received one farthing for their thousands of nice fish, [[29]]and only got a scolding for having dared to try and do without the agents, who buy the fish from the boats at whatever price they choose to settle amongst themselves.
“When we were at Yarmouth this autumn, the enormous abundance of herrings on the fish quay was perfectly wonderful; it must be, (I should think,) two hundred yards long, and is capable of accommodating the unloading of a perfect fleet of boats. The ‘swills,’ as they call the baskets, each containing five hundred fish, were side by side, touching each other, all over this immense space, and men were shovelling salt about, with spades, over heaps of fish, previous to packing at once in boxes. I said, ‘How surprised our poor people would be to see such a sight, after constantly being obliged to pay three-halfpence for every herring they buy.’ An old fisherman answered me, saying, ‘No one need pay that, ma’am, if we could get the fish to them; we could have plenty more boats, and plenty more fish, if we could have them taken where the poor people could get them.’ We brought home a hundred dried herrings, for which we paid ten shillings; when we asked if we might buy some lovely mackerel on the Fish Quay, they said, (the fishermen,) that they were not allowed to sell them there, except all at once. Since then, I have read an account of a Royal Commission having been investigating the subject of the fishery for some time past, and the result of its inquiries seems to prove that it is [[30]]inexhaustible, and that in the North Sea it is always harvest-time.[1]