: The World in Chains: Some Aspects of War and Trade by Mavrogordato John - Profiteering; War Economic aspects World War I

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not a place which the habitual Parisian cares to venture into. Apart from its own peculiar and particularly pungent odours, the markets are peopled with a class of stallkeeper who do not exactly keep their tongue in their pocket, as the French say. They have, in fact, a flow of language, and it requires a brave man to make a stand against it--and all the brave men are at the front just now.

But the Central Markets not only have a language of their own; they have ways and methods of dealing that require long years of acquaintance to fathom, so only experts venture to make head or tail of them.

All this means that between the Central Markets, at the depository, and most of all that Paris wants to eat, and the actual consumer as represented by the ordinary housewife starting out on her daily round of shopping, there move and live a host of intermediaries. Large as their number is, they cannot compare with the middlemen who squeeze in between the Central Markets and the actual grower, breeder, or producer.

With so many hands for produce to pass through, each one eager to grab all that it can for itself before it passes the stuff along, it is small wonder that prices grow, not taking into account the burden of taxes and other charges the goods have to bear on their journey from the farm to the household.

ARMY OF INSPECTORS

The police have an army of inspectors for watching and superintending the work of the markets. The rules drawn up for their regulation would more than fill an old-fashioned three-volume novel, and each one provides for penalties severer and stricter than the other. Yet the profitable game of rigging the market and everything connected with it is in full swing, and no one is more fooled than the police, unless it be the public.

Since the war broke out, the State, the city, and the public alike, backed up by the small retail trader, have done their best to get even with the Central Markets. The more they try to put things right the worse they seem to get. Prices appear to ease for a brief space, but they soon become inflated once more. Or, if they do not, the particular commodity concerned simply disappears in some mysterious fashion until the "powers that be" submit to the inevitable, and shut their eyes to scheming they are helpless to prevent.

AS MUCH FOOD AS USUAL

The worst of it is that statistics can always be produced to show that the rise in prices is purely and simply the outcome of a falling off in supplies. Arrivals of fruits, vegetables, and fish in the last quarter of the past year were exactly half the average supply of an ordinary year; eggs were two-thirds below the proper figures, meat some 4,000 tons short, butter six tons, cheeses only a ton.

Of course, the population of the city has diminished also to a certain extent, but not so much as might be expected considering that there is practically no single family that has not one or more members at the front.

They have been replaced by refugees, sick and wounded soldiers, huge war administrations of one kind and another. Paris consequently wants almost as much feeding as in ordinary times, not taking any account of the fact that portions of both the British and French Armies still buy provisions on the Paris markets.

Notwithstanding the legitimate reasons that can be put forward to explain the upward trend of prices, the authorities know well enough that all is not so innocent and above board as it appears. One or two more glaring instances than usual of manipulation have put them on the right track at last. Other steps may also be expected, for public opinion has got to the point that either the "inside ring" must be broken up or popular resentment will take a form that no Government can afford to overlook or affect to ignore.

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