In their case, however, the authorities left the supply uncontrolled. The farmer sold to the Food Central what milk, butter, lard, suet, tallow, vegetable-oil, and eggs he produced, and the Central passed them on to the retailers, who had to distribute them to a given number of consumers. The same was done in the case of sugar.
Such a scheme left many middlemen high and dry. Those who could not be of some service in the new system, or found it not worth while to be connected with it, took to other lines of industry.
The government had left a few such lines open. That, however, was not done in the interest of the middlemen. The better-paid working classes still had pennies that had to be garnered, and these pennies, now that food was surrounded by cast-iron regulations and laws, went into the many other channels of trade.
I made the acquaintance of a man who in the past had bought and sold on commission almost anything under the heading of food. Now it would be a car-load of flour, then several car-loads of potatoes, and when business in these lines was poor he would do a legal or illicit business in butter and eggs. Petroleum was a side line of his, and once he made a contract with the government for remounts. I don't think there was anything the man had not dealt in. But the same can be said of every one of the thousands that used to do business in the quiet corners of the Berlin and Vienna cafés.
I should mention here that the Central European commission-man does not generally hold forth in an office. The café is his place of business--not a bad idea, since those with whom he trades do the same. There are certain cafés in Vienna, Berlin, and Budapest, and the other cities, that exist almost for that purpose. In any three of them one can buy and sell anything from a paper of pins to a stack of hay.
My acquaintance found that the new order of things in the food department left him nothing but the pleasant memory of the "wad" he had made under the old régime. He took to matches.
Matches were uncontrolled and rather scarce. Soon he had a corner in matches. He made contracts with the factories at a price he could not have paid without a large increase in the selling price of the article. But he knew how to bring that condition about.