"How many have you got?"
"Oh, plenty."
"Well, how many?"
"Fifteen bales."
"Well, I'll take them."
"Come in and buy something more."
"No, nothing more to-day."
There was a loss of seventy-five dollars, and he did not dare buy more.
It will be obvious that the selling a part of one's goods at less than cost enhances the necessity of getting a profit on the rest. But how to do this, under the sharp scrutiny of a buyer who knows that his own success, not to say his very existence, depends upon his paying no profit possible to be avoided,—no profit, at all events, not certainly paid by some sharp neighbor who is competing with him for the same trade?
"But is there anything in all this," you are asking, "to preclude the jobber's telling the truth?" Nothing. "Anything to preclude strict honesty?" Nothing. "Why, then, do the questions you have quoted continually recur?"