competing with another manufacturer or the jobber's and dealer's trade direct, he soon found that the immediate and essential issue of their competition was not the use of the article but the profit. The persons whom the manufacturers now had to consider immediately were not those who were themselves to eat, wear or use the product but who were to sell it again for profit.
As long then as the consumers were kept in ignorance, a manufacturer could go on cheapening and adulterating a food product or a piece of cloth indefinitely. And for a good many of the first years when the manufacturers found themselves loaded up with the tons of products which their new machinery methods gave them quickly and cheaply, the manufacturers very largely kept the people in ignorance of exactly what they were getting. The producers almost frantically competed for favor with the jobbers and for the dealers' trade—and took readily, perhaps necessarily, to competing in terms which would most immediately satisfy the jobbers and dealers, that is, in terms of direct profit to the dealers.
We—the eaters of the foods—were clearly not the ones immediately considered in the competition which had been going on. For most of those food suppliers were not supplying directly to us; but competing for the dealers.
Our chief interest lay in procuring the best
