ectacle most
impressed me, so suddenly become a stranger in my own city, I know
not. Wretched men, I was moved to cry, who, because they will not
learn to be helpers of one another, are doomed to be beggars of one
another from the least to the greatest! This horrible babel of
shameless self-assertion and mutual depreciation, this stunning clamor
of conflicting boasts, appeals, and adjurations, this stupendous
system of brazen beggary, what was it all but the necessity of a
society in which the opportunity to serve the world according to his
gifts, instead of being secured to every man as the first object of
social organization, had to be fought for!

I reached Washington Street at the busiest point, and there I stood
and laughed aloud, to the scandal of the passers-by. For my life I
could not have helped it, with such a mad humor was I moved at sight
of the interminable rows of stores on either side, up and down the
street so far as I could see,--scores of them, to make the spectacle
more utterly preposterous, within a stone's throw devoted to selling
the same sort of goods. Stores! stores! stores! miles of stores! ten
thousand stores to distribute the goods needed by this one city, which
in my dream had been supplied with all things from a single warehouse,
as they were ordered through one great store in every quarter, where
the buyer, without waste of time or labor, found under one roof the
world's assortment in whatever line he desired. There the labor of
distribution had been so slight as to add but a scarcely perceptible
fraction to the cost of commodities to the user. The cost of
production was virtually all he paid. But here the mere distribution
of the goods, their handling alone, added a fourth, a third, a half
and more, to the cost. All these ten thousand plants must be paid for,
their rent, their staffs of superintendence, their platoons of
salesmen, their ten thousand sets of accountants, jobbers, and
business dependents, with all they spent in advertising themselves and
fighting one another, and the consumers must do the paying. What a
famous process for beggaring a nation!

Were these serious men I saw about me, or children, who did their
business on such a plan? Could they be reasoning beings, who did not
see the folly which, when the product is made and ready for use,
wastes so much of it in getting it to the user? If people eat with a
spoon that leaks half its contents between bowl and lip, are they n