The great state : essays in construction / by H.G. Wells [and others].

Date:
1912
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The great state : essays in construction / by H.G. Wells [and others]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    Beethoven symphony. The consumer does not dream that, in 1911, 348,000,000 pounds of tea were imported into the United Kingdom for the small sum of £13,000,000, or only od. per pound, and that when he buys tea he pays a tax of 5d. to the government and a tax of from 4d. to 8d. and upwards per pound to the host of wholesale and retail middlemen, rail- way shareholders, advertising agents, brokers, etc., who stand between tea at the port and tea on the breakfast-table. To furnish forth the newspaper ad- vertisements, the posters, the lead wrappers, the paper wrappers, the boxes, and the other parapher- nalia connected with the tea-selling means a good deal of ‘‘manufacturing,’’ but it is manufacturing which from the point of view of economic production is for the most part a good deal worse than useless. I hope no one will suppose from this that retail grocers make big net profits on tea, for they do not. Their gross profit is about 20 per cent. on the whole- sale price at which they buy, but much of that goes in rent, etc. The great waste of work brings small net gain out of large gross profit to ordinary shop- keepers. And if the manufacturing of competitive materials is bad, the manufacturing of rubbish in nearly every department of industry is worse. I repeat here what I have said before, that rubbish-making is our largest industry. It is one of the saddest things in our industrial system to see an ingenious machine, worked by an intelligent man, and driven by an