“When I told our fishmonger all about it, he said I was quite right about the ‘big men’ in London, and added, ‘They will not let us have the fish under their own prices; and if it is so plentiful that they cannot sell it all at that, they have it thrown away, or carted off for manure; sometimes sunk in the river. If we could only get it here, my trade would be twice what it is, for, except sprats, the poor can seldom buy fish now.’ [[31]]
“I asked him if the new Columbia Market was of no use in making things easier, but he said, ‘No;’ that these salesmen had got that into their hands also; and were so rich that they would keep any number of markets in their own hands. A few hundred pounds sacrificed any day to keep up the prices they think well worth their while.”
What do you think of that, by way of Free-trade?—my British-never-never-never-will-be-slaves,—hey? Free-trade; and the Divine Law of Supply and Demand; and the Sacred Necessity of Competition, and what not;—and here’s a meek little English housewife who can’t get leave, on her bended knees, from Sultan Costermonger, to eat a fresh herring at Yarmouth! and must pay three-halfpence apiece, for his leave to eat them anywhere;—and you, you simpletons—Fishermen, indeed!—Cod’s heads and shoulders, say rather,—meekly receiving back your empty baskets; your miracle of loaves and fishes executed for you by the Costermongering Father of the Faithful, in that thimblerig manner!
“But haven’t you yourself been hard against competition, till now? and haven’t you always wanted to regulate prices?”
Yes, my good SS. Peter and Andrew!—very certainly I want to regulate prices; and very certainly I will, as to such things as I sell, or have the selling of. I should like to hear of anybody’s getting this letter for less than [[32]]tenpence!—and if you will send me some fish to sell for you, perhaps I may even resolve that they shall be sold at twopence each, or else made manure of,—like these very costermongers; but the twopence shall go into your pockets—not mine; which you will find a very pleasant and complete difference in principle between his Grace the Costermonger and me; and, secondly, if I raise the price of a herring to twopence, it will be because I know that people have been in some way misusing them, or wasting them; and need to get fewer for a time; or will eat twopenny herrings at fashionable tables, (when they wouldn’t touch halfpenny ones,) and so give the servants no reason to turn up their noses at them.[2] I may have twenty such good reasons for fixing the price of your fish; but not one of them will be his Grace the Costermonger’s. All that I want you to see is, not only the possibility of regulating prices, but the fact that they are now regulated, and regulated by rascals, while all the world is bleating out its folly about Supply and Demand.
“Still, even in your way, you would be breaking the laws of Florence, anyhow, and buying to sell again?” Pardon me: I should no more buy your fish than a butcher’s boy buys his master’s mutton. I should simply carry your fish for you where I knew it was wanted; [[33]]being as utterly your servant in the matter as if I were one of your own lads sent dripping up to the town with basket on back. And I should be paid, as your servant, so much wages; (not commission, observe,) making bargains far away for you, and many another Saunders Mucklebackit, just as your wife makes them, up the hill at Monkbarns; and no more buying the fish, to sell again, than she.
“Well, but where could we get anybody to do this?”
Have you no sons then?—or, among them, none whom you can take from the mercy of the sea, and teach to serve you mercifully on the land?
It is not that way, however, that the thing will be done. It must be done for you by gentlemen. They may stagger on perhaps a year or two more in their vain ways; but the day must come when your poor little honest puppy, whom his people have been wanting to dress up in a surplice, and call, “The to be Feared,” that he might have pay enough, by tithe or tax, to marry a pretty girl, and live in a parsonage,—some poor little honest wretch of a puppy, I say, will eventually get it into his glossy head that he would be incomparably more reverend to mortals, and acceptable to St. Peter and all Saints, as a true monger of sweet fish, than a false fisher for rotten souls; and that his wife would be incomparably more ‘lady-like’—not to say Madonna-like—marching beside him in purple stockings and sabots—or even frankly barefoot—with [[34]]her creel full of caller herring on her back, than in administering any quantity of Ecclesiastical scholarship to her Sunday-schools.
“How dreadful—how atrocious!”—thinks the tender clerical lover. “My wife walk with a fish-basket on her back!”