I remember how the old-time skyline of the metropolis faded away as the ship steamed down the Bay toward the Narrows. The spire of Trinity, if I recollect aright, was the highest of them all, except perhaps the dome of the World Building. I have forgotten as to that. At any rate, I stood and watched the picture recede, and knew full well that I was running away from my chance. I was taking the easy course, drifting along pleasantly with an agreeable current, but leaving behind me the really big purpose that had fired every nerve for many months.

For the present let me skip the things that happened in Europe - things of things of immense importance to me, nevertheless - and jump ahead a few months. On the first day of May I sailed into New York harbor again on the same City of Rome. Something had changed all my plans again and sent me back to my battlefield, ready to get a stronger grip on my big purpose.

I had come back a free agent, no longer connected with the house of Langenbeck Brothers. My first act of consequence after landing was to lease, for ten years, a store at Junction Square. My store had a frontage of only twenty feet and a depth of sixty.

silks

Moreover, it was a store that had neither umbrellas with ornamental handles, nor could you have found any where in the establishment a white ostrich plume and maribou with lace effects; nor a smart jabot such as we stocked down at Lost River; nor any rose and gold brocades in glass model cases. It was a store devoted exclusively to general merchandise of the cheap variety. The cost of my initial stock was twelve hundred dollars. My actual available cash, however, was seventeen hundred dollars, which represented my savings since the failure of Broadhurst & Higgins. The receiver for that erstwhile firm had closed his task and discharged all the debts except a balance of fifty-five hundred dollars due our special partners. For this indebtedness Higgins and I gave our personal notes, payable in instalments.

On the day I started, Higgins came up to see my grand opening, as he called it, with a laugh. There was a little emotion on my part as well as his. We both recalled vividly the day of our grand opening in Lost River, and the hopes we both cherished on that occasion.

"But I don't see any festoons of gilded leaves here," he observed, with a smile, as he glanced toward the ceiling of my tiny establishment; “and you've forgotten the potted plants and canary birds, Broadhurst."

"I needed the space for goods," I said. Then I showed him the special systems I had installed for transferring the people's money from their pockets to my coffers. "When a man or woman comes in here with cash," said I, "it is my intention to get it quickly. I have the machinery here for that purpose. I'll have nobody going away with a tale of woe about our poor service. Not long ago I went into a store down the street, intent on spending five dollars for a pair of shoes. The chief clerk received me most genially and invited me to be seated. Then he brought me the morning Sun and a joke paper, and told me to make myself quite at home - a clerk would be at liberty presently. But I had already perused the day's news, and reading joke papers was not part of my routine during business hours. I spent ten minutes at it, and then took it back to the affable gentleman at the door. 'Good day,' said I, 'thank you very much for the entertainment,' and out I walked with my five dollar bill in my pocket."

Higgins laughed. "The art of separating customers from their cash, for value received, is one that most merchants understand only feebly," he said. "The advertising men lie awake nights thinking up schemes to attract circulating medium, but when it comes it often circulates through the store and out the side door before anybody nabs it. The proprietor is busy thinking up fresh advertising schemes, and hasn't any time to discover the leakage from people who can't wait."

"Leakage of that sort," I returned, "seems to me largely inexcusable. There is something wrong with a store when a customer must fret and fume, and flourish

And then I showed him some calculations I had made concerning the efficiency of clerks. I had gathered a lot of statistics from retail stores showing that the average clerk sold less than twenty-five dollars' worth of goods a day, and that the average net profit to the store on every clerk's sales was less than a dollar and fifteen cents.

This, in fact, was a most extraordinary showing — a stupendous contribution to the literature of selling inefficiency. Many a clerk, even to-day, is receiving more in his pay envelope on Saturday night than he has earned for his employer during the week. And more likely than not his boss doesn't know it, but imagines the clerk to be a very good sort of fellow, doing the best he can. When the store goes to smash the advertising man gets roasted.

There is a way to find out what the clerks are doing a way to find out most of these things; but I can't take up here the detailed arithmetic of selling.

I escorted Higgins about my diminutive domain and showed him how I had planned to cut off the corners of retail salesmanship. True, we had done pretty much the same thing at Lost River, but down there, you know, other things had proved our undoing. In a way, merchandising is something like the practice of medicine. The head of a business is likely to run against a snag if he allows himself to become a

faddist, just as a doctor will kill off half his best-paying patients if he makes himself too much of a specialist.

A business man, I repeat, must not depend on a few narrow systems and imagine he has a model store. He must start with a broad philosophy that covers the store's whole anatomy, and then build every system as a subsidiary, and not as a detached scheme. I know of one largely unsuccessful store in particular that stands to-day as a striking example of this one-sided vision. It employs a magnificent gentleman to stand just inside its main portal and to give the glad-hand to all incoming customers. He is one of the most courtly men I ever saw, suave as a diplomat. He passes the customers along with kingly favor and then, back at the counter, the customer has to take a jimmy and get the cash-drawer open so he can drop in his contribution. Having done this, he waits ten or twenty minutes for his change. If he gets tired before he lets go of his cash, the magnificent gentleman never sees him as he walks out.

"I tell you, Higgins," said I— as he was leaving my store that first day-"politeness is a good specialty in business, but it ought to be combined with store engineering. It is better not to smile quite so much and to hustle more. It is more profitable to have swiftly moving systems for handling customers and sending them away with smiles on their own faces and less money in their pockets."

Yet with all my care and planning, I had overlooked something that soon got me into hot water.

(To be continued)

T

A TRADE EMBASSY

-was over; and so satisfactory have been the results that the association, after critically reviewing what had been accomplished, has made the Buenos Aires office a permanent department of its work for trade extension.

South America was chosen as a field, and Buenos Aires as the centre of operations, because the Chicago men, after a careful study of the whole world, found that of all the countries yet to be invaded by the American exporter none possesses so high a type of citizenship, so enlightened a consuming public, and so great a purchasing power as the countries of South America. These countries, rich in agricultural and natural wealth, depend almost entirely upon foreign commercial nations for products of manufacture, a condition which will probably continue permanently because of their lack of coal deposits and other sources of power. Hitherto England and Germany have had the lion's share of this rich trade. The citizens of Buenos Aires purchase annually goods valued at $16 gold from England, $10 from Germany, and $7 from this country per capita. American goods in general, and Chicago goods in particular, were little seen in South American markets. In spite of the efficient work of the organized Consular Service, no adequate move had been made to give American goods a proper chance in this territory until these business men stole a march on the commercial world and established their trade embassy.

In Chicago, in nearby towns, and in neighboring states of the Middle West, is growing up a manufacturing district so large that it must look to the world for adequate markets. That field lies open in South America. Machinery, tools, men's furnishings, and women's apparel are

needed by these countries and these things the Chicago district produces.

The trade ambassador at Buenos Aires was sent to "introduce Chicago." He was not permitted to take orders for anything; he was to place South American business men in connection with the Chicago firms with which they might do business. His field of operation is the whole southern continent. He visits every important city several times annually, and his gospel is "American goods in general, but Chicago goods first of all." The business that has come to Chicago from this experiment has fully justified the annual expense of $15,000 of maintaining the office, and has caused the association to open as an adjunct to the office a permanent exposition of Chicago goods. Chicago goods. These goods will not be offered for sale directly by the association's representative. They will be maintained there to demonstrate to the consuming public of Argentina, and of other countries of which Buenos Aires is the commercial Mecca, the character of Chicago-made goods.

Chicago is not only the first city to establish a trade embassy in a foreign country; it is the only city that is making an extensive, organized effort to win for America a larger share of the trade that lies south of the equator. When other manufacturing centres wake up to the opportunities in South America they will find Chicago already established in the field and doing business, thanks to its Association of Commerce.

T

HIS is the story of a group of discouraged farmers who applied factory and mercantile methods to their work

who made farming a business - and succeeded greatly. They have organized like the steel trust and have advertised like the kodak manufacturers; and they have found that it pays.

Twenty years ago the citrus fruit industry of California was unorganized and demoralized and unprofitable to the growers. The railroads made money from it, by charging high tariffs for slow and careless service. The commission men, in Chicago and New York, made money by exacting extortionate commissions and often by downright fraud and larceny.

The growers were in California and the markets were two and three thousand miles away; and, once the fruit left a grower's ranch, he had to take other folks' word for it that his perishable product had spoiled in transit." As often as not, instead of a check for his crop, he got bills for services from his commission agent and from the railroad.

Some of the growers, in desperation, formed a coöperative packing and selling company. They established their own packing houses, in which their fruit could be inspected and graded and packed by their friends instead of their enemies, as the commission merchants had proved to be. Then they formed their own selling organization. Men of their own choice, dependent on their loyalty to the growers for their jobs and drawing salaries for their undivided attention to the growers' interests, were sent to the big fruit markets of the country to sell the fruit. These men kept the central office in Los Angeles informed daily of the market conditions in their territory. Thus the officers were able to send fruit to those parts of the country in which the stock was low and the price high, and to stop shipments to markets that were already glutted. And the growers' agents constantly widened the then limited market for citrus fruits.

The results have been astonishing. The cost of packing has been reduced from 40 and 50 cents a box to 30 cents a box. The cost of selling has been reduced from 7 and 10 per cent. of the gross proceeds to 3 per cent. for an infinitely better service. The market has been widened from a "fancy" trade in a few big cities to a popular trade radiating through more than 1,500 jobbers in more than 600 cities. A year-round sale is now secured by extensive advertising at a cost of about $200,000 a year, paid for by a levy of about a cent a box on the growers, who believe heartily in advertising.

And these mere farmers, because they were organized, as the great manufacturers are organized, have got the tariff on citrus fruits raised from 20 cents a box to 65 cents a box on imported oranges and to $1 a box on imported lemons.

The California Fruit Growers' Exchange, which has done this thing, now represents

about 100 local coöperative exchanges, or about 6,000 growers, whose investment in land and improvements is about $175,000000 and who annually produce about 50,000 carloads of fruit that yield them about $30,000,000 a year.

The Exchange neither buys nor sells fruit. It picks most of the crop for its members, and it keeps its members supplied with the latest authentic market information. The members sell their own fruit, through the Exchange.

The California Fruit Growers' Exchange is the central organization of which the local associations are the units. The citrus districts of California are not all contiguous, and this and other peculiarities determine the natural boundaries of these associations. The growers pledge their fruit to their local association. The associations, in turn, combine into district exchanges which represent them in the central exchange and which coöperate with the central exchange in the distribution and sale of the fruit. The central exchange maintains the selling agents in the Eastern markets, supervises the shipping of fruit to those markets, and collects the money and transmits it to the district exchanges which pay the growers through its component associations.

The Exchange now handles 60 per cent. of the citrus crop of California, and other coöperative associations that are modeled after it handle about 25 per cent.

The success of the coöperative principle has led the growers to form a supply company, with a capital of $1,000,000, through which they buy orchard supplies, such as fertilizer, etc. The packing-houses, which are valued at about $2,000,000, are also owned in common and are run as cooperative enterprises.

The California Fruit Growers' Exchange is one answer to the problem of the farmer who is looking for a larger share of the proceeds of his industry. Its efficiency is about 90 per cent., compared with the average farm selling-efficiency of less than 50 per cent. This is the result of organization and business methods applied to farming. Any other group of farmers can achieve the same freedom and profit by like methods.