CHAPTER XVII
"THIS LITTLE PIG WENT TO MARKET"
1
The basket was growing heavier and heavier, and his stomach weaker and weaker. How to convert his burden into a meal was a problem, written as large upon his face as the delight in the bargains he was making shone in the face of the marketer beside him. He was a young chap just emerging from boyhood. He had been employed by this restaurant-keeper because he said he needed a meal. It was not to be a real job. He was to get his meal all right, but not till he earned it by going with the boss to market and carrying his basket for him.
The basket was soon full to overflowing, and the young man bearing it was nigh exhaustion. They were now going home. At the corner of the open square that had been assigned to garden-truck venders the old man stopped to buy a rose. He disputed the price with the flower-girl, got it at a reduction, and went on. "I always bring my wife a rose from market," he remarked in semi-soliloquy, and they disappeared, the young fellow with his burden, the old man with his rose.
Thus does the European little pig go to market, and he's the most civilized little pig in the world. For hundreds of years he has been learning to market, and that most essential of social functions is the progenitor of communal life. The way in which it is performed is a test of the civilization of a people.
The first democrats and artists of Europe, the Greeks, knew this, and made the agora a market-place, a focus of public art, and the scene of their political gatherings. Wretched, indeed, was the little pig that stayed home when the agora was convoked, for he it was whom the Greeks had determined to ostracize. Despite their efforts as democrats, there were only too many who had to stay home when the affairs of that world were being decided; but as a market, with all the architectural genius concentrated on making it attractive and beautiful, and Socrates leading his classes through it, it was a certain success.
In the ruder parts of Europe, owing to the absence of means of communication and the dangers of carrying one's possessions abroad, definite market-places became an imperative necessity, and charters for their existence were granted by decree. They became an important means of securing revenue.
Even the Church recognized the value of festivals as means of enriching itself in a combination of barter with merrymaking and adoration. Festivals and fairs alike enhanced the material and the artistic life of medieval Europe, and marked, as it were, the embryonic element out of which grew all the later laws and ethics of trade. The legitimacy of piracy at sea and robbery on land had to be counteracted in some way, and the dignity and decency of exchange established.
The evolutionary process by which civilization has achieved some sort of business morality may yet be traced in various countries, especially among the primitive peoples of the South Seas, the more advanced Filipinos, the recently awakened Japanese, the Mexicans, and the accomplished New Zealanders. Beneath the surface of the market-place, the wide world over, one finds the source of civilization, and at its level, the level of human commonalty. For as men hunt to cover up their love of wild life and nature, so women market as an excuse for mingling with people. There is in the behavior of the marketer all the cunning of the animal in search of prey, and the degree to which these instincts are developed gives in a sense the measure of a man's civilization.
Even outside the bonds of law and order the mere process of exchange tends to establish social ethics. This is nowhere better exemplified than at the thieves' market in Mexico or in the hidden reaches of the Orient. Thither all robbers bring their stolen wares for sale. Thither all the robbed hasten, to recover their lost property. The instinct within each and all of them is the gambling spirit. The despoiler is eager to sell as quickly and as successfully as possible lest the rightful owner arrive and claim the booty. The general public is anxious to buy, for the prices naturally are low, and many a bargain may be secured. The despoiled, chagrined though they may be at their loss, are in part compensated by the hope of a purchase made at somebody else's expense.