"Middleman" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... not expect to get rich quick by "cutting out the middleman's enormous profits," for the middleman's profits are not enormous, and if you see that your co-operation is not paying, give it up and confess to yourselves that you do not know as much about the business as your ...
— The Dollar Hen • Milo M. Hastings
... feeding of cattle, and even the fatting of cattle soon had to yield to the lowered prices occasioned by the importation of beef from western grazing lands. The making of butter and cheese, with the increased cost of labor on the farms, was abandoned, that the milk might be sold in bulk to the city middleman. The time had not come, however, in which farmers or their laborers imported condensed milk, or used none. Quaker Hill farmers lived too generously and substantially for that; but they ceased, during the Civil War, when ...
— Quaker Hill - A Sociological Study • Warren H. Wilson
... trade,' he said once to Harvey Rolfe; 'it's clean and sweet and useful. The Socialist would revile me as a middleman; but society can't do without me just yet, and I ask no more than I fairly earn. I like turning over a sample of grain; I like the touch of it, and the smell of it. It brings me near to the good old Mother Earth, and ...
— The Whirlpool • George Gissing
... Unions. Where Unions exist we should place ourselves in every case in communication with their officials. But the most helpless mass of misery is to be found among the unorganised labourers who have no Union, and who are, therefore, the natural prey of the middleman. Take, for instance, one of the most wretched classes of the community, the poor fellows who perambulate the streets as Sandwich Men. These are farmed out by certain firms. If you wish to send fifty or a hundred men through London carrying boards announcing the excellence of ...
— "In Darkest England and The Way Out" • General William Booth
... is not a producer, but is a mere middleman, taking a profit as goods pass from hand to hand, is handed down from the time when Jews were forbidden by law to become producers and, therefore, were compelled to become traders and middlemen, barred from the guilds and from engaging in the ...
— Face to Face with Kaiserism • James W. Gerard
... a middleman; one could get a little work without the necessity of going to him and pouring a flask of brandy down his thirsty gullet. But was it any more reasonable that the shoes Pelle made should go to the customer by way of the Court shoemaker and yield ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... world needed to have done in order that it should be a redeemed world. But for the distribution and application of that finished work God depends on men. You all know, in your own daily businesses, how there must be a middleman between the mill and the consumer. The question of organising a distributing agency is quite as important as any other part of the manufacturer's business. The great reservoir is full, but there has to be a system of irrigating-channels by which the water is carried into every ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: Romans Corinthians (To II Corinthians, Chap. V) • Alexander Maclaren
... knowledge is the material which can be fallen back upon as given, settled, established, assured in a doubtful situation. It is a kind of bridge for mind in its passage from doubt to discovery. It has the office of an intellectual middleman. It condenses and records in available form the net results of the prior experiences of mankind, as an agency of enhancing the meaning of new experiences. When one is told that Brutus assassinated Caesar, or that the length of the year is ...
— Democracy and Education • John Dewey
... explained earnestly. "In Russia it was the aristocracy who oppressed the people, shamefully and malevolently. In England it is the bourgeoisie who rule the country and stand in the light of Labour. It is the middleman, the profiteer, the new capitalist here who has become an ugly and a dominant power. Labour has the means by which to assert itself and to claim its rights, but has never possessed the leaders or the ...
— The Devil's Paw • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... method of application, according to their respective day-to-day views of policy. The British by the free-port system, instituted in their central geographical position, hoped to make the profits of the middleman. Rodney reported that the effect had been notably to discourage the direct Spanish intercourse, and to destroy carriage by British colonial vessels in favor of those of France, which now flocked to Jamaica, smuggled goods into the island, and apparently cut under their rivals by the greater ...
— Types of Naval Officers - Drawn from the History of the British Navy • A. T. Mahan
... economics the stranger makes his appearance everywhere as the trader, the trader his as the stranger. As long as production for one's own needs is the general rule, or products are exchanged within a relatively narrow circle, there is no need of any middleman within the group. A trader is only required with those products which are produced entirely outside of the group. Unless there are people who wander out into foreign lands to buy these necessities, in which case they are themselves "strange" merchants in this other region, ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... undoubted stability, and affording great advantages for receiving the interest without trouble and realizing the principal without difficulty when required, tempt all persons who have sums of importance lying idle, to invest them on their own account without the intervention of any middleman;) the deposits with bankers consist chiefly of small sums likely to be wanted in a very short period for current expenses, and the interest on which would seldom be worth the trouble of calculating it. Bankers, therefore, ...
— Essays on some unsettled Questions of Political Economy • John Stuart Mill
... by a being even inferior to the angels, by a middleman named Moses. Paul wants us to understand that Christ is the mediator of a better testament than mediator Moses of the Law. Moses led the people out of their tents to meet God. But they ran away. That is how good ...
— Commentary on the Epistle to the Galatians • Martin Luther
... even if I had to do milk delivery. Shortly afterwards he sent for a second-hand dealer and sold for a song all the bric-a-bric which had been handed down from ages ago in our family. Our house and lot were sold, through the efforts of a middleman to a wealthy person. This transaction seemed to have netted a goodly sum to him, but I know ...
— Botchan (Master Darling) • Mr. Kin-nosuke Natsume, trans. by Yasotaro Morri
... statemonger^; Minos, Draco; arbiter &c (judge) 967; boss [U.S.], political dictator. board &c (council) 696. secretary, secretary of state; Reis Effendi; vicar &c (deputy) 759; steward, factor; agent &c 758; bailiff, middleman; foreman, clerk of works; landreeve^; factotum, major-domo^, seneschal, housekeeper, shepherd, croupier; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... send no such bill to him. He was then asked whether it might not be possible that the money should be repaid by Messrs. Griffenbottom and Underwood through his hands, reaching Glump again by means of a further middleman. Mr. Trigger acknowledged that were such a claim made upon him by any known agent of his party, he would endeavour to pass the ten pounds through the accounts, as he thought that there should be a certain feeling ...
— Ralph the Heir • Anthony Trollope
... reduces a man to a middleman and a jobber, when it prevents him, in his preoccupation with material things, from making his spirit the measure of them. There are Nibelungen who toil underground over a gold they will never use, and in their obsession with production begrudge ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... is doing it. It is the accumulating man impelled by his instinct, or if you please his lust, for wealth and power who makes it possible for poor men to live in any great number. If he happens also to be a Captain of Industry, which usually he is not, it is merely one middleman cut out. His essential function is that of the money-grabber. It is by his exercise of that function ...
— The Inhumanity of Socialism • Edward F. Adams
... of shoes he paid ten cents to the tanner for leather, twenty cents for the labor of putting, the shoe together, and ten cents for all other labor in any way entering into the making of the shoe, so that the pair cost him in actual outlay forty cents. He sold the shoes to a middleman for, say, seventy-five cents. The middleman sold them to the retailer for a dollar, and the retailer sold them over his counter to the consumer for a dollar and a half. Take next the case of the farmer, who sold not merely his labor like the wage-earner, ...
— Equality • Edward Bellamy
... produced hardness of heart in the 'middleman,' extravagance in the land-owner, and extreme poverty in the peasant. The poor-law commission of 1839 reported that two million three hundred thousand of the agricultural laborers of Ireland were 'paupers;' that those immediately above the lowest rank were ' the worst-clad, worst-fed, and ...
— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud
... himself. "I do not happen to possess the requisite amount of inside information and I have no means of obtaining it until I ascertain where it is for sale! The purpose of this ridiculous rule is to keep the rabble out of the public domain until some middleman gets a profit out of his information. I'll just give up for the ...
— The Long Chance • Peter B. Kyne
... Protestant clergyman commonly has with the Catholic population of his parish—have made the introduction of tithe proctors very general, sometimes as the agent of the clergyman, sometimes as the lessee or middleman between the clergyman and the cultivator of the land, but, in either case, practised, dexterous estimators of tithe. The English clergymen in general are far from exacting the whole of what is due to them, but ...
— Peter Plymley's Letters and Selected Essays • Sydney Smith
... about camping out. I am talking now about farm life. Farmers eliminate the middleman pretty effectually, and that in itself is going a long way toward complete happiness. Take the making of soap, that I told you about; there you have it, cheap and good. When you've made it, you know what is in it, and I'll be hanged if you do when you pay a big price for it in New ...
— In the Midst of Alarms • Robert Barr
... them all is beautiful and all is good. Paid preachers they do not have; they do not believe in priests or certain men who are nearer to God than others. All have access to Eternal Truth, and thus is the ecclesiastic excluded. To eliminate the theological middleman is well, and as for the Church itself, surely Mrs. Eddy eliminated it also; for she never entered a church, or at least not more than once a year, and then it was only in deference to the architect. A Church! Is it necessary? For ...
— Little Journeys To The Homes Of Great Teachers • Elbert Hubbard
... convictions in terms that are intelligible and persuasive to persons who have felt the force of the various intellectual movements of recent years. They do not pretend to make any contribution to scholarship; they aim at the less difficult, but perhaps scarcely less necessary middleman's task of bringing the results of the study of scholars to men and women who (to borrow a phrase of Augustine's) "believe in thinking" and wish ...
— Some Christian Convictions - A Practical Restatement in Terms of Present-Day Thinking • Henry Sloane Coffin
... of the soil who rent small parcels of land from the government, through the medium of the zamin-dar, who is a servant of government and not the proprietor of the land, as some have erroneously supposed. The word means keeper of the land, and not the proprietor. In fact, he is like the Irish middleman, in ...
— Bagh O Bahar, Or Tales of the Four Darweshes • Mir Amman of Dihli
... greater pleasure," adds the King. And both did proceed upon it with all zeal; but only the King as real "mediator," or MIDDLEman; Kaunitz from the first planting himself immovably upon the Turk side of things, which is likewise the Austrian; and playing in secret (as Friedrich probably expected he would) the strangest ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XXI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... was a celebrated Cupid's middleman. In presenting the cause of Miles Standish to Priscilla, however, he did not attend strictly to business as a jobber. He was not able to resist the lady when she asked: "Why don't you speak for yourself, ...
— Cupid's Middleman • Edward B. Lent
... great quantities of food at a comparatively small profit on each item is put into practice in chain stores, which are operated by different companies throughout the United States. Such stores are a boon to the housewife who must practice economy, for they eliminate a middleman by acting both as wholesaler and as retailer. Because of this fact, foods that are purchased in large quantities from the producer or manufacturer can be offered to the consumer at a lower price than ...
— Woman's Institute Library of Cookery, Vol. 5 • Woman's Institute of Domestic Arts and Sciences
... contract made by the middleman, she is not asked to worship heaven and earth nor the tablets of her husband's ancestors, but two cups of wine are placed on the table, and she and her bridegroom must each take one and sip the wine, the cups being joined together by ...
— The Fulfilment of a Dream of Pastor Hsi's - The Story of the Work in Hwochow • A. Mildred Cable
... of the island: "Because of its early 'plantations,' the word 'planter' is still current in the insular vocabulary, and the 'supplying system' still prevails, the solitary links which connect with these bygone days. A 'planter' in Newfoundland parlance is a fish trader on a moderate scale, the middleman between the merchant, who ships the cod to market and the toiler who hauls it from the water. 'Plantations' are yet interwoven with local tradition, and show on ancient maps and charts. The tenure of ...
— The Story of Newfoundland • Frederick Edwin Smith, Earl of Birkenhead
... steer's hide or a wagon load of wheat to sell, and it's somebody else's ox that's gored. Consumers pay big prices for farm products, goodness knows, but they don't pay them to the farmer. Not on your tintype. The middleman gets his, you needn't question that. We beg pardon a thousand times. We mean the middlemen. There's no ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... got a little farm about seven miles from the city limits, and the tenant on it says that nearly every Sunday somebody motors out from town and wants a chicken-and-waffle supper. There ain't much in the nursery business anymore. These landscape fellows buy their stuff direct, and the middleman's out. I've got a good orchard, and there's a spring, so I could put running water in the house. I'd be good to you, Tillie,—I swear it. It'd be just the same as marriage. ...
— K • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... wheat areas in California could not feed them. Ah, if I could only hammer that into the brains of every rancher of the San Joaquin, yes, and of every owner of every bonanza farm in Dakota and Minnesota. Send your wheat to China; handle it yourselves; do away with the middleman; break up the Chicago wheat pits and elevator rings and mixing houses. When in feeding China you have decreased the European shipments, the effect is instantaneous. Prices go up in Europe without having the least effect upon the prices in China. We hold the key, we have ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris
... their demands more easily and are attracted to it, whereas a small lot of howsoever good a product must seek a buyer. Freight rates are reduced, damage in transit is reduced, and better transportation is secured in carload and trainload than in small shipments. The middleman's charges are less if he is assured a considerable volume of business. Thus specialization makes possible a more effective system of marketing than is possible ...
— The Farmer and His Community • Dwight Sanderson
... which these guns were procured shows the marvelous nature of the organization and its resources. Finding that the cost of the guns was greatly increased by the profits of the manufacturer and the middleman, and that it was, in fact, very doubtful whether the government would permit them to purchase them in any large quantities, they resolved to make them for themselves. In the depths of abandoned coal mines, in the wildest and most mountainous ...
— Caesar's Column • Ignatius Donnelly
... who by autosuggestion and imitation can bring themselves into ecstatic convulsions. They alone know from the gods the means to treat diseases and their personal influence overcomes the ailment. In early America, before the European discovery, the cure of disease belonged in the same way to the middleman between the gods and human beings. In the Antilles, for instance, the bohuti heals the diseases which are regarded as punishments of the gods for human neglect. The priest by inhaling a certain powder brings himself into an ecstatic condition, ...
— Psychotherapy • Hugo Muensterberg
... salt and tobacco of the State. The Italian tobacco is generally bad, and formerly one had to smoke it or go without; but now the best of imported cigars may be found in all the large cities, cheaper in some respects than those in America, and not a whit inferior, since there is no middleman's profit, buying, as one does, direct from the State. The hotels, however, sell the same brands at an outrageous advance; the proprietor must have his commission, the concierge, the head-waiter, the waiters, the porters, and the chef, for this slight favor to the guest. Commission! ...
— The Lure of the Mask • Harold MacGrath
... I bought four thoroughbred Holsteins, four years old, in fresh milk, and in October, six more, at an average price of $120 a head,—$1200 in all. These reenforcements made it possible for me to keep my contract with the middleman, and ...
— The Fat of the Land - The Story of an American Farm • John Williams Streeter
... marriages were arranged by parents with the aid of a middleman. Sometimes when things went wrong after marriage one of the couple, or both, would blame the middleman. When marriages are made after the Western pattern, there is no one to blame but oneself. Before ...
— Have We No Rights? - A frank discussion of the "rights" of missionaries • Mabel Williamson
... weight of fur might range in value from one hundred to five thousand dollars, so that a man with a pack of fine furs was a capitalist. The profits of the business were good for trapper, very large for the trader, who doubled his first gain by paying in trade; but they were huge for the Albany middleman, and colossal for the New Yorker who ...
— Rolf In The Woods • Ernest Thompson Seton
... father and his father's friends were busy dividing. They were dividing, to put it more fully, husbands from families as a means of requesting ransom, and money from banks as a means of getting the same cash without use of the middleman, or victim. This was the period of the Great Readjustment, and the frenzied search among gangland's higher echelons for ...
— Supermind • Gordon Randall Garrett
... of the Crown is the largest employer of labour in the country, and at least 200,000 men, not counting the army and navy, are directly in the service of the community, without the intervention of the profit of any middleman."[261] ...
— British Socialism - An Examination of Its Doctrines, Policy, Aims and Practical Proposals • J. Ellis Barker
... the facts were upon him, eye and brow and mouth. So I did not get his story, but I got a thrilling picture of the recent generation in American letters—I, being the public; the truth of his story representing the producer, and the miserable thing he fancied I was ready for, being the middleman's part. ...
— Child and Country - A Book of the Younger Generation • Will Levington Comfort
... everywhere to imitate the new organization. The arrangement of industry was planned in detail, a co-operative system was organized that would keep every man busy at useful labor without working him too hard, would take away the profits of the middleman by a well-planned system of distribution, and would allow liberty in social relations as far as consistent with the general good, but would subordinate the individual to the community. Certain of the Utopians thought ...
— Society - Its Origin and Development • Henry Kalloch Rowe
... see each other frequently before marriage. The business of selection, betrothal and marriage is attended to by the parents or friends of the pair, who carry on negotiations by means of a third factor, a middleman or go-between. Children are often betrothed at birth or when on their nurses' backs (there are no cradles in Japan). Of course the natural results, mutual dislike and severance of the engagement at mature age, or love and happy marriage, or marriage, mutual dislike ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 86, February, 1875 • Various
... blousard would think his fortune was made if he could get a sou for it. The retailer in the Rue Mouffetard sells it for a sou: the man who made it would be happy if he could sell it at the rate of eight sous the dozen, but, like most other workers, he must deal with a middleman. No retailer could take his stock off his hands in sufficient quantities: he must sell to a wholesale dealer in the first place, and the wholesale dealer sells to the little shopkeeper at eight sous the dozen. All this work for half a sou, then! And when it is added that the workman has ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 87, March, 1875 • Various
... products of their own country; but both they and English vessels must ship such cargoes in the country of origin, not at any intermediate port. The purpose of these provisos, especially of the second, was to deprive Holland of the profit of the middleman, or the entrepot, which she had enjoyed hitherto by importing to herself from various regions, warehousing the goods, and then re-exporting. The expense of these processes, pocketed by Dutch handlers, and the exaction of any dues levied by the Dutch Treasury, reappeared in increased ...
— Sea Power in its Relations to the War of 1812 - Volume 1 • Alfred Thayer Mahan
... to me that we're going on all right now," said Deering. "We're getting our goods cheap and we're cuttin' off the middleman." ...
— A Spoil of Office - A Story of the Modern West • Hamlin Garland
... utterly to destroy.'[46] Now a Virginia planter stands in much the same relation to his plantation as an absentee Irish landlord to his estate; the care of the land is in each case handed over to a middleman, who is anxious to screw out of it as large a return of produce or rent as possible; and pecuniary embarrassment is in both cases the result. But as long as every pound of cotton grown on the Mississippi and ...
— The trade, domestic and foreign • Henry Charles Carey
... am not quite able to deny it. "Sultriness" I am not conscious of. But it would appear to be an epithet for the Conservatives of wealth. So that England, being very wealthy, we are to call it a sultry country? You are much wanted, for where there is no "middleman Liberal" to hold the scales for them, these two have it all their own way, which is ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... that he could do about that as he saw fit, but he must not mention his name to a third party. A few days later Herr Carovius told a tale, of hair-splitting negotiations: there was a middleman who demanded immodest guarantees, including certified notes. He swore that he knew nothing about that kind of business, and that he had undertaken to supply the needed loan only because of his excessive affection ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann
... of Richard I., the House of Vipont, though recalled to England (leaving its Irish acquisitions in charge of a fierce cadet, who served as middleman), excused itself from the Crusade, and, by marriage with a rich goldsmith's daughter, was enabled to lend moneys to those who indulged in that exciting but costly pilgrimage. In the reign of John, the House of Vipont foreclosed its mortgages ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... have found the girl you want, you have to go and get her yourself, while we can send a middleman to do ...
— Court Life in China • Isaac Taylor Headland
... State Brandy, Warranted Entire (a very flagrant distillation) filled a great part of his thoughts, and was kept before the public in an eloquent but misleading treatise, "Why Drink French Brandy? A Word to the Wise." He kept an office for advertisers, counselling, designing, acting as middleman with printers and bill-stickers, for the inexperienced or the uninspired: the dull haberdasher came to him for ideas, the smart theatrical agent for his local knowledge, and one and all departed with a copy of his pamphlet, "How, When, and Where; or, The Advertiser's Vade-Mecum." ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 13 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the weavers. Moreover, since weaving is a much quicker process than spinning, the weaver often wasted much time and found it hard to collect enough yarn to keep his loom busy; and, as the market for cloth grew wider and was no longer confined to the town of the weaver, the need was felt for some middleman to specialize in the selling of the finished cloth. So by degrees there grew up a class of men who bought wool in large quantities and sold it to the weavers, and then by a natural transition began, not to sell the wool outright, but to deliver it to the weavers to weave, to the fullers to ...
— Medieval People • Eileen Edna Power
... middlemen, continues, as is shown in a Statute of Edward VI, providing that no one shall buy butter or cheese unless to sell the same only by retail in open shop. That is to say, there must be no middleman between the producer and the retailer, and a definition of the word "retail" is given. In 1552, the 7th of Edward VI is a celebrated statute called the Assize of Fuel, applied to the city of London, notable because ...
— Popular Law-making • Frederic Jesup Stimson
... girl, ten years of age, and my brother Richard about two years older, when my father brought home his second wife. She was the daughter of a farmer up at Lackabawn, and was reared with care and dacency; but her father held his ground at a rack-rent, and the middleman that was between him and the head landlord did not pay his own rent, so the place was ejected, and the farmer collected every penny he had, and set off with his family to America. My father had a liking for the youngest daughter, and well become him to have it, for a sweeter creature ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850 • Various
... their cooperative establishments would be able to secure capital at slightly more than three percent instead of the nine or twelve percent which they were compelled to pay at the bank. Thereby they would be placed on a competitive level with the middleman, and the wage earner would be assisted to escape the wage ...
— A History of Trade Unionism in the United States • Selig Perlman
... but has its Mrs. Quickly and its Tom Jones. These good people never understand themselves, they go over their own heads, they speak in unknown tongues to those around them and the interpreter is the rarer and more important person. The vates sacer is the middleman of mind. ...
— The Note-Books of Samuel Butler • Samuel Butler
... liberal conditions we make, you incur no risk in placing an order, and we trust that we may be favored with one from you right away. By purchasing direct from us—the manufacturers—you eliminate all middleman's profits and are sure to get ...
— Business Correspondence • Anonymous
... censor and the publicanus with regard to the collection of the dues. The conditions of the tenure of the Roman public land in Africa are known to us from the Lex Agraria of 111 B.C. (Bruns, Fontes, i. 3. 11, vv. 85 foll.). Here the publicanus is the middleman between the state and the possessor, and purchases from the censor the right of collecting dues. The law places no restriction on bargaining between the censor and the publicanus, but enacts that no possessor or pastor shall ever be required by the publicanus to ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... and mean, and one or two got uncomfortable and shifted round uneasily. But presently the traveller came to the rescue. He said that no doubt the oranges belonged to a middleman, and the middleman was the curse of the country. ...
— While the Billy Boils • Henry Lawson
... naturally growing up in Ireland, with perhaps a little stimulus from outside from rural reformers and social enthusiasts. If this ideal of the organized rural community is accepted there will be difficulties, of course, and enemies to be encountered. The agricultural middleman is a powerful person. He will rage furiously. He will organize all his forces to keep the farmers in subjection, and to retain his peculiar functions of fleecing the farmer as producer and the general public as consumer. But unless we are determined to eliminate the middleman ...
— National Being - Some Thoughts on an Irish Polity • (A.E.)George William Russell
... property in the County Antrim, the property of a man who combines landholding as a middleman, with trade in linen fabrics and manufacturing or bleaching, or both. I cannot say that this gentleman is excessively popular, but he is exceedingly prosperous. His private residence, as far as taste goes, a taste that can be gratified regardless of expense, is as perfectly ...
— The Letters of "Norah" on her Tour Through Ireland • Margaret Dixon McDougall
... Liberal organs denounced Lassalle as the catspaw of reaction. The whilom "friends of the working-man," in their haste to overturn Lassalle's position, tumbled into their own pits. Schulze-Delitzsch himself, founder of co-operative working-men's societies, denouncer of the middleman, now found himself—in the face of Lassalle's uncompromising analysis—praising the Law of Competition, while that Iron Law of Wages, their tendency to fall to the minimum of subsistence (which was in ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... to buy the land, if I can only get it at a reasonable price," replied Yin, "and I shall be glad if you will consent to act as middleman and negotiate the matter for me. You might go at once and see Lin, and find out what are the terms upon which he is willing to ...
— Chinese Folk-Lore Tales • J. Macgowan
... the mining districts is a middleman: a Doggy is his manager. The Butty generally keeps a Tommy or Truck shop and pays the wages of his labourers in goods. When miners and colliers strike they term ...
— Sybil - or the Two Nations • Benjamin Disraeli
... a middleman with the manufacturer and the worker. If he did not deal with this kind of work, it would cost the manufacturer more to reach the worker than it does now; no sweater would be employed if he did not earn what he makes; then the manufacturer, ...
— White Slaves • Louis A Banks
... the causes of the rapid collapse of the Granger movement, the unfortunate experience which the farmers had in their attempts at business cooperation was probably chief. Their hatred of the middleman and of the manufacturer was almost as intense as their hostility to the railroad magnate; quite naturally, therefore, the farmers attempted to use their new organizations as a means of eliminating the ...
— The Agrarian Crusade - A Chronicle of the Farmer in Politics • Solon J. Buck
... be taken over by the state at a low rate, and held for a rise or forwarded to some centre where there happened to be a demand. There would be thus a certainty of market for the farmer, and an equal certainty for the state to make profits as a middleman. Another part of this scheme consisted in obligatory advances by the state to cultivators of land, whether these farmers required the money or not, the security for the loans being in each case ...
— The Civilization Of China • Herbert A. Giles
... this new phenomenon in our business life? In certain particulars the Standard Oil monopoly was the product of well-understood principles. From his earliest days John D. Rockefeller had struggled to eliminate the middleman. He established factories to build his own barrels, to make his own acids; he created his own selling firms, and, instead of paying large storage charges, he constructed his own warehouses in New York. From his earliest days ...
— The Age of Big Business - Volume 39 in The Chronicles of America Series • Burton J. Hendrick
... not take up all their time. Working on favorable wood on favorable days they could each earn two dollars a day; but these favorable circumstances did not come together very often. They did not deal with the boats themselves, and the profits were eaten up by the middleman. He, the middleman, had a good thing of it, because he could cheat the captains of the boats in the measurement of the wood. The chopper was obliged to supply a genuine cord of logs—true measure. ...
— Volume 1 • Anthony Trollope
... book is the lack of literary style; but I can quite understand how any ordinary critic would be strongly prejudiced against a work that was accompanied by a premature and unnecessary panegyric from the publisher. A publisher is simply a useful middleman. It is not for him to anticipate ...
— Miscellanies • Oscar Wilde
... I question if I was thoroughly reconstructed. Before our disabilities were removed, we ex-Confederates could do all the work, run all the risk, turn in all the cattle in filling the outstanding contracts, but the middleman got the profits. The contract in question was a blanket one, requiring about fifty thousand cows for delivery at some twenty Indian agencies. The use of my name was all that was required of me, as I was the only cowman in the entire ring. My duty was to bid on the contract; the bonds would be ...
— Reed Anthony, Cowman • Andy Adams
... They say that the one strategic man in every industry who can represent everybody if he wants to, who can be a great man and who can make a great industry serve everybody, must be eliminated because nobody believes America can produce a middleman. We say instead of weakly and helplessly giving up a great spiritual and morally-engineering institution like the middleman because the average middleman does not know his job, we say: Exalt the middleman raise him to the n-th ...
— Crowds - A Moving-Picture of Democracy • Gerald Stanley Lee
... alteration of the basis of their condition. He constructed a totally new moral order of things, founded on the teaching of Proudhon and other socialists regarding the annihilation of the power of capital, by immediately productive labour, dispensing with the middleman. Little by little he converted me, by most seductive arguments, to his own views, to such an extent that I began to rebuild my hopes for the realisation of my ideal in art upon them. Thus there were two questions which ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... "Eliminate the middleman," demands a contemporary. It might prove a simpler affair, after all, than the present system of ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, June 20, 1917 • Various
... are stored until the duties or revenues on them are paid. BONDSMAN. One who goes security for the faithful performance of a contract. BONUS. A premium for a loan or other privileges. BROKER. An agent or middleman between the buyer and the seller. BULLION. Uncoined gold or silver. CHARTER. A written authority from the proper National or State authority defining the rights and privileges of corporations. CHARTER PARTY. A written contract for the hiring or chartering of a ship. CHATTEL. Any kind ...
— Business Hints for Men and Women • Alfred Rochefort Calhoun
... peculiarly exceptionable, another middle person might have the Treasury. I fancy their middleman to be the same they had in their thoughts this time twelve-month—Lord Gower. They talked of the Duke of Northumberland as a proper person for the Treasury, in case of the Duke of Grafton's going out. The ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 350, December 1844 • Various
... retain the clients who had been recommended to him, and to attract fresh ones. But the work was never congenial. He had inherited from his father his love of the air of heaven, his affection for a manly and natural existence. To act as middleman between the pursuer of wealth, and the wealth which he pursued, or to stand as a human barometer, registering the rise and fall of the great mammon pressure in the markets, was not the work for which Providence had placed those broad shoulders and strong limbs upon his well knit frame. ...
— Beyond the City • Arthur Conan Doyle
... felt very bitterly towards Ray, claiming that there was no officer in the regiment whom he had treated with such marked courtesy, and to this, when he heard it, Ray made response in his characteristic way. He would have no middleman. He went straight to Canker and said his say in few terse words: "You consider me unjustified in refusing to treat you as a friend, Captain Canker; now let us have no misunderstanding whatever. Your conduct towards my best friend, Captain Truscott, ...
— Marion's Faith. • Charles King
... Middleman is cheatin' me the worst kind. I know the yaller Plymouth Rock eggs ort to bring mor'n the white Leghorns; they're bigger and it stands to reason they're worth more, and he don't give nigh so much. ...
— Samantha on the Woman Question • Marietta Holley
... traveller (that bustling and indispensable middleman) leads a life of mingled joy and pain. He is constantly on the move, and from meeting innumerable types of men, becomes very shrewd in judging character. Resource, readiness, abundance of glib phrases must in time become his. He must not, for fear of offence, show any marked ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes
... bargaining now commenced with the Legation Quarter acting as a species of middleman. No one was anxious to see warfare carried into the streets of Peking, as not only might this lead to the massacres of innocent people, but to foreign complications as well. The novelty had already been seen of a miniature ...
— The Fight For The Republic in China • Bertram Lenox Putnam Weale
... the middleman. They say that the one strategic man in every industry who can represent everybody if he wants to, who can be a great man and who can make a great industry serve everybody, must be eliminated because ...
— Crowds - A Moving-Picture of Democracy • Gerald Stanley Lee
... and thus proved his ability as an advertiser. He picked his men and charged all the traffic would bear. He took orders, on sample, from the nobility and sundry of the gentry, and thereby cut the middleman. All of the money he received for his skins he invested in "Indian Goods"—colored cloth, beads, blankets, knives, axes, and musical instruments. His was the first store in New York that carried a stock of musical instruments. These he sold to the savages, and also ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 11 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Businessmen • Elbert Hubbard
... often for Berkeley, and both Lord Bacon and Horace Walpole wrote Twitnam for Twickenham. Jeffcock, dim. of Geoffrey, becomes Jeffcott, while Glascock is for the local Glascott. Here the palatal takes the place of the dental, as in Brangwin for Anglo-Sax. Brandwine. Middleman is a dialect form of Michaelmas (Chapter IX). We have the same change in tiddlebat for stickleback, a word which exemplifies another point in baby phonetics, viz. the loss of initial s-, as in the classic instance tummy. To this loss of s- we owe Pick for Spick (Chapter XXIII), Pink ...
— The Romance of Names • Ernest Weekley
... for sale, and, {432} indeed, in the small shop of modern times where goods are repaired or manufactured. They represent customs which now are irregular, but which formerly were permanent methods. It was a simple system, requiring no capital, no undertaker or manager, no middleman. Gradually these customs were replaced by many varied methods, such as the establishment of the laborer in his individual shop, who at first only made the raw material, which people brought him, into the finished product; ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar
... lie flat in the sunshine and drink in the beauty of the "green things growing," who can live among the other little animals, his brothers and sisters in feathers and fur; who can put his hand in that of dear mother Nature, and learn his first baby lessons without any meddlesome middleman; who is cradled in sweet sounds "from early morn to dewy eve," lulled to his morning nap by hum of crickets and bees, and to his night's slumber by the sighing of the wind, the plash of waves, or the ripple of a river. He is a part of the "shining web of ...
— Children's Rights and Others • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
... partly entered into new paths. In the Middle Ages domestic, and to some extent international, commerce was carried on by fairs adapted to bring producer and consumer together and hence reduce the functions of middleman to the narrowest limits. Such was the annual fair at Stourbridge; such the famous bookmart at Frankfort-on-the-Main, and such were the fairs in Lyons, Antwerp, and many other cities. Only in the larger towns was a market perpetually ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... to go off slackly, he is ready with something new and appetising. He knows perfectly all the possible sources of income. Whatever he has to sell he'll get payment for it from all sorts of various quarters; none of your unpractical selling for a lump sum to a middleman who will make six distinct profits. Now, look you: if I had been in Reardon's place, I'd have made four hundred at least out of "The Optimist"; I should have gone shrewdly to work with magazines and newspapers and foreign publishers, and—all sorts of people. Reardon ...
— New Grub Street • George Gissing
... glances into their art, their trade, their navigation. All this Phoenician development the Greek looks at in a wondering way as if miraculous; he is reaching out for it also. To be sure the Phoenician has a bad name, as a shrewd, even dishonest trader. Still he is the middleman ...
— Homer's Odyssey - A Commentary • Denton J. Snider
... declare to be public domains and hand over to the company that would guarantee the payment of the largest revenue. But the sordid imperialism which animated the contractor and lessee must have been as nothing to that which fed the dreams of the true state-middleman, the individual who intervened between the taxpayer and the State, the producer and the consumer. Conquest would mean fresh lines of coast and frontier, on which would be set the toil-houses of the collectors with their ...
— A History of Rome, Vol 1 - During the late Republic and early Principate • A H.J. Greenidge
... have been that she could stop at any time as her work is never recognized. I found her doing up a parcel of excellent garments for a man and three women. They were to be assigned to the family of a respected painter of the Latin Quarter. They will never know who is the middleman, and it has chanced that she has dined in ...
— Defenders of Democracy • Militia of Mercy
... new instructions to the agents to identify and trace all dust and bullion offered to them went into force, you see, they can't get rid of their swag. All the gang are spotted at the offices, and it costs too much for them to pay a fence or a middleman of any standing. Why, all that flaky river gold they took from the Excelsior Company can be identified as easy as if it was stamped with the company's mark. They can't melt it down themselves; they can't get others to do it for them; they can't ship it to the Mint or Assay Offices ...
— A Protegee of Jack Hamlin's and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... buying pictures. The other artists laughed and asked for the gentleman's address. Then they fell foul of the picture dealers, dirty black-guards, who preyed on artists and starved them. It was really a pity that connoisseurs mistrusted painters to such a degree as to insist upon a middleman under the impression that they would thus make a better bargain. This question of bread and butter excited them yet more, though Claude showed magnificent contempt for it all. The artist was robbed, no doubt, but what did that matter, if he had painted a masterpiece, and had some water ...
— His Masterpiece • Emile Zola
... "middleman"? Does he perform a real service to the community? Should he be paid for his service? Why? Is it just that the middleman should be "eliminated" by cooperative marketing and buying ...
— Community Civics and Rural Life • Arthur W. Dunn
... That is true. But in the book-trade—that profit-devourer unknown to Mrs. Eddy's book—a three-dollar book that is made for thirty-five or forty cents in large editions is put at three dollars because the publisher has to pay author, middleman, and advertising, and if the price were much below three the profit accruing would not pay him fairly for his time and labor. At the same time, if he could get ten dollars for the book he would take it, and his morals ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... childhood's home. Then there was a handsome profit on the donation of eggs and butter and maple-sugar which came in the freight train before I started. I attended to the sale myself at the market, and had nothing to do with that Mr. Middleman people talk so awfully about as a cheat and a general grabber. Well, I dickered the things off at a good price, as I was a-saying, and have got the money safe in my bosom—a ...
— Phemie Frost's Experiences • Ann S. Stephens |
