by the ordinary housewife starting out on her daily round of
shopping, there move and live a host of intermediaries. Large as their
number is, they cannot compare with the middlemen who squeeze in between
the Central Markets and the actual grower, breeder, or producer.

With so many hands for produce to pass through, each one eager to grab
all that it can for itself before it passes the stuff along, it is small
wonder that prices grow, not taking into account the burden of taxes and
other charges the goods have to bear on their journey from the farm to
the household.

ARMY OF INSPECTORS

The police have an army of inspectors for watching and superintending
the work of the markets. The rules drawn up for their regulation would
more than fill an old-fashioned three-volume novel, and each one
provides for penalties severer and stricter than the other. Yet the
profitable game of rigging the market and everything connected with it
is in full swing, and no one is more fooled than the police, unless it
be the public.

Since the war broke out, the State, the city, and the public alike,
backed up by the small retail trader, have done their best to get even
with the Central Markets. The more they try to put things right the
worse they seem to get. Prices appear to ease for a brief space, but
they soon become inflated once more. Or, if they do not, the particular
commodity concerned simply disappears in some mysterious fashion until
the "powers that be" submit to the inevitable, and shut their eyes to
scheming they are helpless to prevent.

AS MUCH FOOD AS USUAL

The worst of it is that statistics can always be produced to show that
the rise in prices is purely and simply the outcome of a falling off in
supplies. Arrivals of fruits, vegetables, and fish in the last quarter
of the past year were exactly half the average supply of an ordinary
year; eggs were two-thirds below the proper figures, meat some 4,000
tons short, butter six tons, cheeses only a ton.

Of course, the population of the city has diminished also to a certain
extent, but not so much as might be expected considering that there is
practically no single family that has not one or more members at the
front.

They have been replaced by refugees, sick and wounded soldiers, huge war
administrations of one kind and another. Paris consequently wants almost
as much feeding as in ordinary times, not taking any account of the fact
that portions of both the Brit