"THIS LITTLE PIG WENT TO MARKET"
1
The basket was growing heavier and heavier, and his stomach weaker and
weaker. How to convert his burden into a meal was a problem, written as
large upon his face as the delight in the bargains he was making shone
in the face of the marketer beside him. He was a young chap just
emerging from boyhood. He had been employed by this restaurant-keeper
because he said he needed a meal. It was not to be a real job. He was to
get his meal all right, but not till he earned it by going with the boss
to market and carrying his basket for him.
The basket was soon full to overflowing, and the young man bearing it
was nigh exhaustion. They were now going home. At the corner of the open
square that had been assigned to garden-truck venders the old man
stopped to buy a rose. He disputed the price with the flower-girl, got
it at a reduction, and went on. "I always bring my wife a rose from
market," he remarked in semi-soliloquy, and they disappeared, the young
fellow with his burden, the old man with his rose.
Thus does the European little pig go to market, and he's the most
civilized little pig in the world. For hundreds of years he has been
learning to market, and that most essential of social functions is the
progenitor of communal life. The way in which it is performed is a test
of the civilization of a people.
The first democrats and artists of Europe, the Greeks, knew this, and
made the agora a market-place, a focus of public art, and the scene of
their political gatherings. Wretched, indeed, was the little pig that
stayed home when the agora was convoked, for he it was whom the Greeks
had determined to ostracize. Despite their efforts as democrats, there
were only too many who had to stay home when the affairs of that world
were being decided; but as a market, with all the architectural genius
concentrated on making it attractive and beautiful, and Socrates leading
his classes through it, it was a certain success.
In the ruder parts of Europe, owing to the absence of means of
communication and the dangers of carrying one's possessions abroad,
definite market-places became an imperative necessity, and charters for
their existence were granted by decree. They became an important means
of securing revenue.
Even the Church recognized the value of festivals as means of enriching
itself in a combination of barter with merrymaking and adoration.
Festivals and fairs alike enhanced the material and the artistic life of
medieval Europe, and marked, as it were, the embryonic element out of
which grew all the later laws and ethics of trade. The legitimacy of
piracy at sea and robbery on land had to be counteracted in some way,
and the dignity and decency of exchange established.
The evolutionary process by which civilization has achieved some sort of
business morality may yet be traced in various countries, especially
among the primitive peoples of the South Seas, the more advanced
Filipinos, the recently awakened Japanese, the Mexicans, and the
accomplished New Zealanders. Beneath the surface of the market-place,
the wide world over, one finds the source of civilization, and at its
level, the level of human commonalty. For as men hunt to cover up their
love of wild life and nature, so women market as an excuse for mingling
with people. There is in the behavior of the marketer all the cunning
of the animal in search of prey, and the degree to which these instincts
are developed gives in a sense the measure of a man's civilization.
Even outside the bonds of law and order the mere process of exchange
tends to establish social ethics. This is nowhere better exemplified
than at the thieves' market in Mexico or in the hidden reaches of the
Orient. Thither all robbers bring their stolen wares for sale. Thither
all the robbed hasten, to recover their lost property. The instinct
within each and all of them is the gambling spirit. The despoiler is
eager to sell as quickly and as successfully as possible lest the
rightful owner arrive and claim the booty. The general public is anxious
to buy, for the prices naturally are low, and many a bargain may be
secured. The despoiled, chagrined though they may be at their loss, are
in part compensated by the hope of a purchase made at somebody else's
expense.
2
I had not known that buying and selling was ever part of the scheme of
things among people whose needs were as few as those of the South-Sea
islanders. Saints and philosophers are always teaching us that the most
desirable state is that in which wants are few, and their indulgence is
still more limited. But it seems to me that where that condition holds,
the few necessaries of life become so much more desirable and so much
more difficult to obtain that, instead of a release from slavery,
slavery is even more rigorous. Our pictured impressions of the tropics
are full of breadfruit-trees and fruits growing in abundance without
labor. But quite the contrary is the case. The fear of famine and the
insecurity of life have dampened the joys of many a wild man, and the
pressure of population has only too frequently resulted in infanticide
and cannibalism.
When, therefore, I heard that there was to be a native bazaar across
the Rewa River, in Vita Levu, the largest island of the Fiji group, I
defied the yellow sun that hung overhead, secured a complement of guides
in two Fijian boys who were more afraid of me than they were of their
chief, and set out for real primitive excitement. We were pulled across
the river on a punt secured to each shore by a cable, and made our way
up the banks in the direction of the sugar-mill.
It was noon when we arrived at the fair-grounds. Aside from long wooden
tables that stood beneath arbors of palms, there was nothing completed
by way of preparation. A few straggling natives wended their ways from
hut to hut of slab-board and thatch, their quiet manners reminding me of
the monks in monasteries, absorbed in their duties. Gradually, venders
arrived; the tables began to sprout with banana-leaves and flowers.
Strings of berry beads were displayed, like fish out of
water,--appealing eyes of the plant world asking why, with nature so
near at hand, they needed to be torn from life. Bottles of liquid fats,
like capsules of the castor-plant, stood ensconced in green-leaved
packages containing sweet messes that left the eager natives, old and
young, literally web-handed.
The goods displayed, the crowds from the surrounding huts arrived, drawn
by an irresistible charm. A Fijian never came with his mate; maiden
never approached on her lover's arm. Though they all appeared
indiscriminately, there was no obvious grouping of friends with friends.
They moved like shoals of fish that had got the scent or the sight of
food. It was a crowd with every evidence of cohesiveness except that of
companionship.
To me there was something pathetic in that crowd. An outsider by all the
laws of centuries of contrary development, I had no means of entering
their emotional lives, of guessing the promptings which made them leave
privacy for herding. I had only the most outward signs to go by, and I
thought what spiritless, barren lives they must lead who could be
brought together on such an occasion in so casual a mood. For aside from
the bottles of oil, the strings of beads, and the wrappings of stuff in
banana-leaves, there was nothing from my view to make a hundred or two
hundred thousand pounds of sluggish flesh rise from its mats and dare
the piercing sun.
Yet the women, who did most of the selling, with their unkempt hair and
their crude alien costumes, awoke to something universal under the game
of barter they were here called upon to play crudely. Rummage-sales and
carnivals, dog-shows and dances, likewise change the glitter of blue
eyes and pink cheeks; and I smiled at the thought of Lao-tsze and
Tolstoy, who between 650 B. C. and A. D. 1910 preached the ugliness of
trade.
When the play of barter and exchange had stirred these primitive folk to
a little more life, they quite naturally sought a way of giving it off
again; but so foreign did a real bazaar seem to them that they entered
the recreations with little zest. In these days of savage sedateness,
with trade becoming more and more a feature and a pastime of life, it is
not surprising that the natives attend with spirits in abeyance.
Following the great exchange of beads and oils and edible messes, the
crowds moved out to a more open space, under the clear sun. There, with
the aid of a native band, under the conductorship of a Catholic priest,
they made merry, with strange sounds and more familiar dances. But it
all seemed perfunctory and not without a touch of sadness. The Fijian
voice at its best is rich, deep, and stately. One cannot imagine it
attuned to singing jazz or rag-time. It seems exclusively made for
hymns. In consequence, the crowds could not rise to the occasion, and
stood behind the entertainers like so many solemn Japanese in the
presence of royalty.
3
But lest the little pig who stays at home may really starve to death,
the world sometimes indulges him a little by letting the market go to
him, and never have I seen a market more picturesque and more
self-possessed than one of this sort that visited our steamer as she lay
anchored in the harbor of Manila.
All about us during the night had crept Filipino lighters, their
gunwales capped with low-arched mats. They hugged the steamer like a
brood of younglings waiting for their food. They were to receive the
cargo of boxes and canned goods from New York and other markets of the
world.
It was still cool. A native Filipino woman squatted on the ridge of a
lighter top between two men. She was enjoying her morning cigarette. As
she caught my gaze her face beamed flirtatiously. Then and there I tried
my tongue for the first time in the real use of Spanish, and failed. As
the morning advanced, children crept from the darkness of the covered
lighters; charcoal pails were fanned into a glow like that of the dawn;
and roosters, tied to the boats by one leg with a string, crowed, their
contempt, protest, or indifference to a gluttonous and unjust world.
As the hour of breakfast's needs arrived, a thin, long canoe came up,
insinuating its way among the many more capacious crafts, quietly,
slowly, like a thing just stirring with the new day. On its narrow
bottom flopped dozens of little fish in agony, dying of too much air.
They looked like so many bars of silver when they lay dead. A basket of
bananas and a few simple vegetables comprised the rest of the stock of
these aquatic tradespeople, this man and his woman. She squatted
comfortably, looking from side to side for customers, while he pushed
the canoe along with easy strokes. They did not cry their wares, and
handed their stores out as though known to all for fair dealing and
fearless of competition. Thus with the freshness of morning air they
stimulated this little world to action.
By noon that day I was slipping through narrow streets, avoiding the
moldy shops of the main street, seeking out the men and women who make
life interesting. The coolness of the morning was gone, crowded out by
steaming noon. The casual, gift-like manners of those two aquatic
traders was now a thing not even to expect, for I was in the midst of
civilized trade. Unexpectedly, I came upon the public market.
What a different world! The hand of the law was in evidence. Here,
despite the general confused appearance, the concrete drains and stone
tables gave an assurance of at least periodical cleansing. Here the laws
of barter held men tied to fair dealing, as the roosters were tied to
those lighters. Venders make a mad dash for freedom through cheating,
but were jerked back to honesty by the bargain-hunter who watches the
scales and knows the laws. Values are measured by the size of the pupil
or the intensity of the gaze; if eagerness is manifest, up goes the
price.
A Buddhist, looking upon a market like this, if he were unaccustomed to
pagan ways, would shrink from the sight as we would at a cannibal feast.
Here the world was calmly cruel. All the things we eat lay in their
naked ghastliness,--the thin streams of blood, the bulging eyes of
little creatures, the stiff inflexibility of limbs once quick and
supple. And the men and women were unconsciously affected by the scene.
For nothing stimulates the snarling quarrelsomeness of human beings more
than the sight of food or the fear of imposition. The appeals of the
sellers were mingled with the bargainings and bickerings of the buyers,
a competition among both to best one another. Two women stood over a
fish-bin engaged in a matching of wits that might well have been envied
by filibustering senators. The debate was over a tray of tiny fish.
A white woman, firmly knit in body and in character, made her way
through the many aisles, purchasing with a precision as clearly
civilized as it was silent. A Spanish woman, dark and dashing, swung
through the same aisles like a little whirlwind. There was brilliance in
her eyes, and brilliancy in the gems on her fingers and in her ears. She
was exceedingly well dressed, buxom, and attractive, but every purchase
was made with a gust of austerity and command quite uncalled for. She
bullied the fisherwoman, she bullied her hackman, she bullied the
servant who had come to carry her purchases for her; and then she sat
down at one of the little restaurant tables and ate the strange
concoctions with a dexterity obviously native to her. She was a
half-caste, but the Spanish vein was strong in her blood, and Spanish
passion actuated her. She got into her ancient-looking hackney-coach
with flash and gusto; but not, however, before she had gained her point
in the matter of an extra piece of fat upon which she was insisting. She
was the little pig who had roast beef because she knew how to market
economically.
4
But the little pig that has none, and the one who cries, _wee! wee!
wee!_ all the way home, in the Far East, is like the Greek about to be
ostracized by the community in the agora. Indeed, he has been ostracized
in Japan for hundreds of years, and even modernization and imperial
edict have changed his status but little. He is known as the _eta_. To
him has been allotted the task of attending to dead animals, whether
edible or not, and though his touch profanes the lowest classes of
Japan, his labor keeps the country clean after a fashion. Much more. Not
only do these outcasts remove dead carcasses from a careless Oriental
world, but in one place at least they have been given the sweetest of
all professions,--that of selling flowers with which to decorate the
_tokonoma_, the most honorable place in the Japanese home. And all
through the day, if one is not too much engrossed in the marts of the
foreign settlement, one will hear the voice of these flower-girls
calling plaintively, "_Hana! hana-i! hana-iro!_" Flowers are the things
that stand between her and the degradation of her class, because for
years the shrine of a loyal servant of the neglected emperor who was
struggling against a greater and more powerful group of disloyal
Japanese had been kept fresh with flowers by these _eta_, or outcasts,
who did not know whose grave they cherished.
[Illustration: FIJIAN VILLAGE
One is content with its peaceful aspects]
[Illustration: LITTLE FISH WENT TO THIS MARKET
Before Japan woke up
© Harper Brothers]
[Illustration: A FIJIAN BAZAR IS A RED LETTER DAY]
[Illustration: GOOD LUCK MUST ATTEND THESE TRADERS AT THE DOORS OF THE
CATHEDRALS IN MANILA]
Otherwise the market in Japan is in the hands of Japanese now in good
social standing, men who before the opening of the country numbered
among those not much above the outcasts. To be in trade was worse in
Japan than in England, and when one watches the behavior of men at
markets, one is not surprised. One who takes the average trader at his
word in Japan--not the big concerns, to be sure--deserves to cry, _wee!
wee! wee!_ all the way home.
While all over the world woman goes to market, in Japan the market goes
to her. She has had to have most of her daily supplies brought to her
door by the cobbler, the bean-curd-maker, or the fisherman. In
consequence, except when she has servants, she has been deprived of the
educational advantages of market gossip, and has been kept in her sphere
more easily. She will be the last to come forward to freedom.
Not so the men. All the social advantages of barter and exchange are
theirs. They communicate their experiences to one another at four
o'clock in the morning over the fish-tub. They test their wits and their
eyes with the auctioneer who starts them running in competition with one
another over an attractive specimen from the sea. Or the more
imaginative resist confusion in the pit of the stock-market, where they
keep in touch with their entire country and with the world. They are
becoming, in consequence, more efficient and more practised in
world-wide ethics of business.
Yet within the last few years public markets have sprung into vogue in
Japan, and I look toward a revolution in the relations of the sexes, for
no woman who goes to market remains long an obedient and submissive
little soul. This is obvious to any one who wanders into the market of
Shanghai. There one can see the status of the various women who
replenish their household supplies and the most humble, it seemed to me,
was the woman of Japan. She moved about like _Priscilla_ suddenly
brought back to life and sent to compete with the modern American woman.
5
In ancient Greece, of course, no woman of refinement went marketing
herself. She sent her slaves. But in modern New Zealand not only are
there no slaves, but there is no one to do any personal service of that
nature. In the old days, in Europe, the market was the general
rendezvous where life played its pranks at all levels. The religious
festivals also afforded dramatic pageantry, and sometimes the two
interplayed with each other. But in our modern times, when the public
market is largely supplanted by the great department store, shielded,
protected, organized into a minimum of human interest and a maximum of
efficiency, the charm of the market is no more. So, too, our festivals
have surrendered much of their artistry. This was somewhat revived
during the war. New Zealand, because of the still evident atmosphere of
pioneer life, the lack of interlocking systems of communication, and its
distance from the most advanced places in the world, still affords some
of that simple charm of a life one reads about. The streets of the main
cities nightly resemble something one has dimly heard of and never
hoped to see. The people have laid aside all thought of business or
barter. There is in their attitude something of that suppressed
amazement that revealed the thoughts of the South-Sea islanders when
asked to thrill to an alien band conducted by the Catholic priest. Both
the whites and the primitives seemed to recall that once they knew how
to celebrate.
Queens Street of Auckland was decorated one day, and booths were erected
on which simple products were offered for sale. A parade of two
fire-department machines, a number of men in Chinese costumes, others
painted and foolscapped, boys with enormous masks, and girls in
dominoes, marched through the city, and in their wake was a rush of just
plain pedestrians. Other than that nothing happened. From five to ten
thousand people jammed the street. The crowd was essentially like every
other crowd in the world,--the same in gregariousness, the same in
hunting after pleasure that abideth but a moment.
One evening the events were more thrilling. Sulky races, men driven by
girls, and May-pole dances round the street lamps that stand between the
tram-lines gave a suggestion of antiquity to the city. The only
difference between these performances and those in the upper regions of
the tropics was in the absence of palms and green arbors. In place of
wide spaces were narrow streets, lined with brick buildings and studded
with iron poles whose only blossoms were glowing electric lights, and
whose only branches were pairs of stiff arms holding the trolley wires.
So, too, the market side of this carnival was a sharp contrast to the
fairs and markets in more modernized communities. Britons are
essentially traders, but they trade by rule. Even when they play
trading, as at this carnival, they are more constrained. What little was
done to allay the sober spirit was revived by the element of barter. The
gambling spirit, checked in normal times, was stimulated. Raffles,
wheels, and rings were employed to extract coins from the under-zealous.
The only abandon was in the confetti, which was scattered generously
about in the throngs.
In the booths conservation was the key-note. Everything, from motor-cars
to potatoes, was auctioned and raffled. A man from Coney Island,
accustomed to that hysterical release of emotion, would have felt that
he was attending not a carnival, but an open market in which only the
basic necessities of life were in demand.
Not so in Napier, New Zealand, or in Sydney, Australia. There they seem
as different from their British ancestry as Hottentots are from
Polynesians. There men and women know how to make merry in ways almost
unforgettable, and to ripple the smooth surface of sedate civilization
with lovely flirtations that would weaken the most stoic of mortals and
paragons of propriety.
Otherwise, in all New Zealand, life goes along in its leisurely,
businesslike way. Men attend horse-sales with great zest; salesmen rush
across the country in their little motor-cars, bringing the wares of the
world's elaborate markets to the doors of stations or ranches;
auctioneers dash hither and thither to confuse, if they can, farmers
into the exchange of sheep or cattle.
While tramping along the road to Wellington, I was overtaken by a
touring-car.
"Want a ride?" asked the driver. And when I mounted, he asked: "Seeing
our little country, are you? Nothing like it in the world. Ever been to
a sheep auction? Want to come along?" And the next thing I knew we were
rushing over the dirt road toward Onga Onga. We drew up at the
accommodation house with a sudden jolt.
The guest-room was filled with farmers. Sallow, hollow-cheeked, with
voices that seemed to plow through their brains for thoughts, their
conversation was labored. Dinner was devoured in semi-silence.
But when they got to the stockyards, they became more alert. The
auctioneer mounted the fence like an orator. He began cackling like a
bewitched hen. The farmers moved about, feeling sheep offered for sale,
the more expert glancing at them with pride in judgment. One sleek
farmer, whose elaborate motor-car stood by the roadside, scrutinized the
yards as one who might buy the entire lot as a whim.
The psychology of the auction-sale crowd is distinct from that of the
bargain-hunter. The latter believes himself to be the winner because of
the confessed misjudgment of the trader. But the auction-buyer moves
about quietly, makes his own judgments of values, exchanges opinions
only with his associates, and waits his chances. At a bargain-counter
every one rushes for the thing he wants; here the very thing most wanted
is ignored, as though to lead other hunters off the scent. As soon as
the sale was over, men fell apart, like boiling rice in a pot when
suddenly douched with cold water.
So far has civilized man made certain the processes by which he secures
the satisfaction of his wants that one begins to wonder why men like to
buy and sell at all. They are like the artisans and the mechanists who
have become specialized and divorced from contact with the living,
finished product. So much so is this true that much of New Zealand's
real marketing is done in London. Once the manager of a station wired
his London principals:
SNOWING DURING LAMBING
The principals, according to New Zealand's version, replied:
STOP LAMBING AT ONCE
6
Wander where one may this wide world over, one finds that the places to
which tourists are drawn mostly are the markets. There one finds the
richest reward for curiosity. The traveler in foreign lands, especially
if he is alone and somewhat homesick, knows no pleasanter thrill than
the sight upon the pier, amid cargoes from every known quarter of the
globe, of a box of canned goods stamped in black-stenciled letters with
the seven signs of bliss, "NEW YORK."
When lost in that good old town, it had never occurred to him that ships
trail the seven seas carrying canned soups and fruits and vegetables to
black-faced, sprawling-toed savages. But out there in the wide spaces of
the globe he realizes how strikingly alike are the alimentary failings
of mankind. Lost in reminiscences, when on Broadway again, he thinks
himself forever cut off from romance, until he happens to turn into a
side street, a public market, or even a small chain-store grocery. There
he finds that in a way romance is not dead. The sedate housewife permits
herself on occasion to flirt with the butcher or the baker; incidents
the on-looker has not thought possible prevail here as well as in the
markets of the Orient. And packages with the imprint of Japan, of China,
coffee from South America, awaken in him memories irresistible. He goes
away wishing he were again off there where New York seems like romance
to him. The day will never come when silks and spices and marts will not
conjure up in the minds of the most prosaic the very essence of
romance.
BOOK THREE
DISCUSSION OF THE POLITICAL PROBLEMS INVOLVING AUSTRALASIA, ASIA AND
AMERICA