Evening Star Newspaper, January 6, 1935, Page 68

THE SUNDAY STAR, WASHINGTON, D. C, JANUARY 6, 1035. capture Munich. They were temporarily successful. -Toller hid in a friend’s flat, But when lgyal troops and armed work- ers gave battle he emerged in time to patticipate in the last of the fighting. While he was thus engaged a young man in an automobile stopped outside the Toller lodging. Some one cried, “It's Toller!” and the crowd promptly set on the young man and beat him senseless. Toller’s luck was still in. But his conscience was beginning to worry him. He had vowed not to wear uniform or carry arms. But he had already compromised to the point of fighting and shedding blood in defense ‘of his ideals. And now the revolution leaders insisted on making him com- mander in chief of their scratch army. White and Red armies lay opposite one anothef. Parleying opened. The Whites agreéd to withdraw. But just a8 Comdr. Toller was congratulating himself on a bloodless victory one of his artillery regiments let go a salvo and the armi- stice collapsed. Hastening in the direc- tion of the firing, the dismayed com- mander in chief found his troops attack- ing. He could not disengage them now. He was drawn on in their wake and they took the town of Dachau by storm. lN THE last phase things got so con- fused that Toller got rather mislaid and two Red government} tried to func- tion at once in Munich. Toller went to the flat of a girl he had known in his student days and asked her to take him in. She took him in. His luck held. Outside, the Whites were marching in and the Reds were heing rounded up. Toller’s successor as president was tried in a cellar by some officers and shot. ~ Landauer, another of the Red leaders, was beaten and shot to death. Twenty- one members of the Catholic Working Lads’ Club were arrested and more than 700 had been killed. Then the new gov- ernment forbade the execution of fur- ther prisoners without trial. Police, sol- diers and informers hunted Tolier. A de- tective searched a suspected flat for him, A squad of soldiers knocked. The detec- STARTEDvEARLY WAR ON PRICE-FIXING Briton of Long Ago Is Credited With Devising Cash-Sales Methods, Making Cut-Rates Possible. BY WILLIAM S. ODLIN. HE firmament through which the Blue Eagle of the National Recovery Ad- ministration wings its way is not one which permits untrammeled progress, and among the most annoying of the obstacles encountered has been the highly controversial problem of price-fixing. ‘Some elements of the business world, of course, are keenly in favor of this restrictive provision in codes of the N. R. A, while others are as enthusiastically opposed to the whole idea. These latter, naturally, are those establishments which have made tremendous profits by con- ducting a strictly cash business, which enables them to undersell competitors extending credit. The issue is thus sharply defined and a mighty battle wages. The crusaders against price-fixing, which sets the minimum figure at which commodities may be sold, have by no means accepted defeat with the writing of price- fixing clauses into various codes and are intent upon obtaining revisions. Among their wit- nesses will be the shade of an Englishman, long gathered to his fathers, who has at length achieved recognition as the founder of the modern “cash only” principle of merchandising. How extensive this has become may be judged from the fact that, according to the most recent census of distribution compiled by Uncle Sam, American stores selling entirely for cash dis- pense 3493 per cent of all goods sold in the United States at retail, or more than one-third. Of course, there was cash selling, mostly of minor articles, however, before the time of James Lackington, Esq., but to this hitherto somewhat obscure Londoner must be accorded the laurel of first building a great commercial enterprise by wrapping up the goods only when the money was placed “on the line” and fur- thermore for bequeathing to posterity a whimsi- cal and careful record of the processes of reasoning by which he worked up a business system that won him fame, fortune and pleasure, UAMI'S LACKINGTON was a book-loving shoemaker in the British metropolis when, in 1774, he conceived the idea of opening a book shop. He started in a modest way in Featherstone street in the parish of St. Luke, but before he handed on the business to others The Cathedral of Berlin. tive peeped ont. “It’s Toller!” cried the officer, and a soldier promptly shot the luckless sleuth dead. At last they caught the poet. Women he prospered to the extent of selling upward of 100,000 volumes a year, all for cash. This was not accomplished without hard thinking, hard work and hard words and looks from his credit-extending competitors. But he was thoroughly imbued with a sense of the economic rightness and justice of his methods and persevered to perhaps undreamed-of suc- cess. Legend has it that so adversely did Lack- ington’s business affect that of his rival, a “Booksellers’ Association” was formed that had as its principle object the “erasure” of James Lackington in somewhat the same manner that racketeers of today remove annoying persons from their path. Nothing came of this, how- ever, and the pioneer died peacefully and in bed in 1815. But before the end came, James Lackington thoughtfully committed to paper the various steps by which he achieved eminence. The record is found in a series of letters to an un- identified friend and they are extremely en- lightening on the subject of cash or credit even at this day. Early in the series Lackington reveals that he had been in the bookselling busingss half a dozen years before he resolved “to give no person whatever any credit.” “I was induced to make this resolution from various motives,” he writes. “I had observed that where credit was given most bills were not paid within six months, many not within a twelve-month, and some not within two years. And some bills are never paid.” Lackington goes on to explain that the losses sustained by the interest of money in long credits and by bills never paid at all, the inconveniences attending not having ready money to lay out in trade to best advantage, together with the great loss of time in keeping accounts and collecting debts ‘““convinced me that if I could but establish a ready-money business without any exceptions, I should be enabled to sell every article very cheap.” Even Lackington’s friends greeted his revolu- tionary ideas with derision, but he persevered and “began by plainly marking in every book, facing the title, the lowest price that I would take for it; which being much lower than the common market prices, I not only retained my former customers, but soon increased their numbers.” “But, my dear sir, you can scarce imagine what difficulties I encounticred for several years ~—Photograbph by Underwood & Underwood. had saved him before, and now it was a woman who betrayed him. Police and soldiers burst into the flat where he was hiding in a cupboard, disguised, his hair ) together,” he continues. *“I even sometimes thought of relinquishing this my favorite scheme altogether, as by it I was obliged to deny credit to the most respectable characters, as no exception was or now is made, not even in favor of nobility, my porters being strictly enjoined, by one general order, to bring back all books not previously paid for, except they receive the amount on delivery.” ACKINGTON'S philosophical acceptance of the slings and arrows of outraged would-be customers appears early in his letters: “Many unacquainted with my plan of busi- ness were much offended, until the advantages accrued to them from it were duly explained, when they readily acceded to it. As to the anger of such as were still determined to deal on credit only, I considered that as of little con- sequence, from an opinion that some of them would have beeh as much enraged when their bills were sent in, had credit been given.” Among other early difficulties encountered was this: “Many came to my shop prepossessed against my goods and, of course, often saw faults where none existed; so that the best editions were, merely from prejudice, deemed very bad editions, and the best bindings said to be inferior workmanship, for no other reason but because I sold them so cheap.” Memory of those days rankled a little, how- ever, for he was moved to add: “It is also worth observing that there were not wanting among the booksellers some who were mean enough to assert that all my books were bound in sheep, and many other unmanly artifices were practiced, all of which so far from injuring me, as basely intended, turned to my account; for when gentlemen were brought to my shop by their friends to purchase scme trifling article, or were led to it by curiosity, they were often very much surprised to see many thousands of volumes in elegant and superb bindings. As every envious transac- tion was to me an addition spur to exertion I am therefore not a little indebted to Messrs. Envy, Detraction & Co. for my present pros- perity; though I assure you this is the only debt I am determined not to pay.” Three years after the first refusal of credit, Continucd on Tenth Page dyed red. They seized and jailed him. In the exercise yard he looked at_the wall where 36 Reds had been shot to death. The earth at its foot was dark. Was his blood to make a fresh stain there? No. Tried in open court and with a clever counsel stressing his war service, he was found guilty of high treason, but with honorable intent and confined for five years in the Niederschoenfeld fortress. His active revolutionary career was over. When they shut him up the name of Hitler had not begun to be heard; in prison he heard it for the first time as that of a faction leader sentenced to a brief jail term for breaking up a Bavarian Monarchist meeting. When they let him out Adolf’s name was beginning to mean something, and the Nazis were so strong in Bavaria that the authorities provided Toller with an escort into Prussia for fear the Hitler men might assassinate him. What had he left? Much. He had youth; he was only 30 years old. He had an immense reservoir of experience, a huge pool to draw upon for articles, plays, poems, books, lectures. All that he had done, seen, suffered, had ripened him, LSO, he had developed a formidable concentration. He had written “Masse Mensch,” that powerful indict- ment of force, in a week, writing at night lying on the floor of his cell under the table, a cloth hung to conceal the light of the candle. In jail he had planned to escape over the border into Austria. It could be done ecasily while visiting a dentist in the town under a warden’s escort. He had an a’complice, and every= thing was set. But at the crucial mo= ment he found himself in the middle of the third act of his play, “Hinkemann.” Escape—or stay and write the final scene of act III? He stayed and wrote, while the other prisoner escaped with ease. What else had he left? Fame, and some capital—his plays and poems, val- uable copyrights. He setmed cured of his passion for action to realize his ideals. He thought himself disillusioned, but some illusions still clung. He thought he would be welcomed in Moscow on his revolutionary record. But when he went there to lecture the official press denounced him as “an illusionist, a demagogue and a traitor.” He had ruined the promising Bavarian 8oviet. Instead of destroying the power of the bourgeoisie by a Red terror he had de- clared for a dictatorship not of physical force but of love! Back in the Fatherland, he saw the growth of the movement against reason. He saw, yet he did not see right through. He was as astonished as Einstein and Feuchtwanger at the violence of the anti-Semitism which accompanied the Nazi advent to power. He had not realized it would be quite like this—that there would be an edi:t exiling him, con= fiscating his money and copyright, doom= ing him to begin life over again in strange lands, to earn the means of subsistence by writing and lecturing in an unfamil- iar tongue. But it might have been worse. If he had not fortuitously been in - Switzerland when the blow fell he might have perished. Again he comes to the end of a phase; again events sweep him forward to a new life. Wars and revolutions have provided him with his themes so far. Around the social struggles of the time he has thrown the pearl of his dramatic genius—those poems and plays which have been trans- lated into 27 languages, including Tartar and Turkoman, Irish and Armenian. He now says resignedly that, after all, the artist’s business is not to prove theses, but to throw light upon human conduct. If he were asked what his mission now is he might echo the words of Hebbel: “To rouse the world from its sleep.” U. 8. Lnuspection Gains HE use of the Government stamp on food products is becoming more general, with the consumer finding it an assurance of quality when the “Government inspected” label is found on a product. Last year the Department of Agriculture ine spected 275,000.000 pounds of meat, 50,000,000 pounds of butter and 6,000,000 pounds of cheese, City officials are asking for an extension of the Government inspection and, in the case of Seate tle. even offered to pay the cost of the inspece tion eervice, T PR S e - -