In England, Or In Any Other Great Mercantile Country, The Bulk Of The Things Bought And Sold Goes Through The Hands Of A Wholesale Dealer, And It Is He Who Higgles And Bargains With An Entire Nation Of Purchasers By Entering Into Treaty With Retail Sellers.

The labour of making a few large contracts is sufficient to give a clue for finding the fair market

Value of the goods sold throughout the country; but in Turkey, from the primitive habits of the people, and partly from the absence of great capital and great credit, the importing merchant, the warehouseman, the wholesale dealer, the retail dealer, and the shopman, are all one person. Old Moostapha, or Abdallah, or Hadgi Mohamed waddles up from the water's edge with a small packet of merchandise, which he has bought out of a Greek brigantine, and when at last he has reached his nook in the bazaar he puts his goods BEFORE the counter, and himself UPON it; then laying fire to his tchibouque he "sits in permanence," and patiently waits to obtain "the best price that can be got in an open market." This is his fair right as a seller, but he has no means of finding out what that best price is except by actual experiment. He cannot know the intensity of the demand, or the abundance of the supply, otherwise than by the offers which may be made for his little bundle of goods; so he begins by asking a perfectly hopeless price, and then descends the ladder until he meets a purchaser, for ever

"Striving to attain By shadowing out the unattainable."

This is the struggle which creates the continual occasion for debate.

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