ABSTRACT
In businesses of the smallest scale, the "one man" and comparable units, no real administrative problem arises; efficiency depends simply on individual capacity and fortune. As trade expands, an amorphous interconnection evolves, wherein the bounds of effective control are hard to demarcate. A well-known form of middlemanship is that which, naturally, long survived in the "domestic" processes of textile handicraft production. Hand-loom weavers of cotton goods in particular, scattered in villages throughout the South-Western Counties, worked in more or less relation to and dependence on firms established in Glasgow or Carlisle. A primitive variety of middlemanship was known as the "small cork" system; these entrepreneurs were represented to the Maxwell Committee as the villains of the piece; they were self-made men, who sold at cut prices to warehouses and to commission agents, and thus depressed earnings. In the early development of the heavy industries, a contract system was prominent, and may be regarded as a survival from pre-capitalistic conditions.
