§ 25 

I know a Peasant living five [Swedish] miles from the nearest town, who, amongst other peddling, buys cattle in the autumn for slaughter over a district of several miles around his farm, and every year he drives to town three or four droves of cattle of twenty or thirty head each.

The law permits no other Burghers than Butchers to go about the country to purchase cattle, but everyone is obliged to take his own cattle to town. Few of them have more than one or two animals to sell, which must be driven by two or three persons, as many as the Pedlar needs for the whole drove.

These two or three persons will lose four or five days' work each on this journey to town in a busy harvest time, so that the transport to town will cost eight or ten working days often for one small animal only, and that means a deduction of 4 or 5 plåtar from the payment, and the necessary work on the farm is being neglected. Therefore nothing is more certain than that the farmer will eat his ox himself rather than consume half of its value in transport expenses.

Thus, if the Statutes about peddling were observed, the town would, through this pedlar alone, lose fifty or sixty head of slaughter cattle a year, and of his many droves scarcely ten oxen would reach the town, nor would his neighbours any longer feel inclined to increase their stock. Who knows whether the lack of corn and Victuals in the Land is not caused by these and other similar Statutes, which are regarded as trifling matters by most people?

I do not recommend that a farmer should allow peddling to interfere with his farming. I would rather that the Townspeople, who especially in winter have plenty of time for it, would undertake to serve the country about the towns and thus be well served at the same time themselves.

But as our towns will not do this, it seems to me as if they wanted to be regarded as the Fathers of the country, who order their children to assemble around their chairs, so that each of them can put food into the children's mouths. What a time, when the offspring have begun to order their mother about, and the child wants to make a show of the grey hairs of its father's head!