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Updated: September 27, 2025
"But if not only wage earners but also small peasants and small capitalists, artisans, middle-men of all kinds, small officials, and so forth in short, the whole so-called 'common people' formed the masses out of which Social Democracy recruits its adherents, we must not forget that these classes, with the exception of the class-conscious wage-earners, are also a recruiting ground for our opponents; their influence on these classes has been and still is to-day the chief ground of their political power.
They are not a sea-beach folk, although each village has its beach, which merely means the place to which it brings its trade, these beaches being usually the dwelling places of the so-called Portos, negroes, who act as middle-men between the Bubis and the whites.
Far be it from me to question the wisdom of political economists, but I cannot refrain from remarking that of the three classes concerned small producers, middle-men, and consumers two fail to perceive and appreciate the benefits which have been conferred upon them.
These Spaniards, who were enslaved by the tenacious fancy that El Dorado still glittered for them in some distant place, needed to be attached to the soil by generous advantages, such as premiums for introducing and sustaining the cultivation of new productions, immunity from imposts either by Government or by the middle-men of a company, and liberty to exchange hides, tallow, and crops of every kind with the French, Dutch, and English, in every port of the island, to convert a precarious illicit trade with those nations into a natural intercourse, so that different articles of food, which were often scarce, and sometimes failed entirely, might be regularly supplied, until by such fostering care the colony should grow strong enough to protect itself against its own and foreign adventurers.
Perhaps the government had grown suspicious of the operations of the middle-men, and, since they had restricted their activity by limiting the amount of public land in Italy, deemed a similar policy advisable in relation to some of their foreign dependencies.
They first entered into wars and then alliances with these Scythians, who served them as middle-men in trade with the tribes beyond, and in time a Graeco-Scythian state of the Bosphorus came into existence.
The fear of differing with the authority of leaders on the one hand, and of contradicting the desires of the multitude on the other, induces them to give a careless and passive assent to measures in which they never were consulted; and thus things proceed, by a sort of activity of inertness, until whole bodies, leaders, middle-men, and followers, are all hurried, with every appearance and with many of the effects of unanimity, into schemes of politics, in the substance of which no two of them were ever fully agreed, and the origin and authors of which, in this circular mode of communication, none of them find it possible to trace.
Capital and wholesale enterprise have come into the field and are revolutionising the old methods of production and trade. Already whole groups of industrial villages have fallen under the power of middle-men, who advance money to the working households and fix the price of the products.
Here stray Moslems, mostly Mandengas, occasionally bring down the Melakori River ring-gold and dust from the interior. The colonists of Liberia assert that at times they have come upon a pocket which produced fifty dollars; the country-people also occasionally offer gold for sale. From the Bassam coast middle-men travel far inland and buy the metal from the bushmen.
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