THE HISTORY OF COMMERCE
1681, when a travelling physician of Bizen administered a drug of striking efficacy to Mayeda Masatoshi, feudal chief of Toyama. Mayeda ordered his vassals to learn the method of compounding this medicine, and thereafter they began to carry the "Toyama drug" from place to place, finding a ready sale for it. The method of dealing was peculiar. No one was required to pay for medicine that he had not used. The vendor deposited a certain quantity of medicine with a customer, and returning a year later, received the price of whatever portion had been used in the interval. It was a system of absolute trust, and it worked so successfully that the business grew to very large proportions. A guild was organised with subordinate confederations, and licence-fees were paid, varying from sixteen shillings in the beginning of the eighteenth century to two pounds in the middle of the nineteenth. The vendors received monetary advances and parcels of medicine on the security of their beats and of the sale made by them. In short, the method of credit received its highest development in these transactions, and it is therefore interesting to note that whereas seventeen hundred pedlars were employed in 1830, making sales that amounted to £80,000, the figures in 1848 were two thousand pedlars and £192,000, which further increased in later years.
The tea-trade of Tokugawa times also presented features of special interest. Uji, in the
203
