The police were structurally fragmented and often divided by interest and ambition, but they shared a number of basic ideas about the provisioning question. This chapter deals with the police view of the grain trade and the ways in which the police translated their attitudes into action. It is the story of persistence rather than change, of an overwhelming sense of continuity informed by a belief that things— at least subsistence things—are at bottom always the same. The police clung to the old ways because they were proven ways. Yet it would be a mistake, I argue, to infer from the immobility and the tone of police regulations that the police operated in a mindless, mechanical, and timeless fashion. On the other hand, there were limits to flexibility and adaptability. The police were wholly unprepared for the radical innovations that they had to face in the 1760's when the government turned against the multisecular tradition of regulation.

I

The rules developed to govern the grain trade were based upon the tenet that grain was essentially unlike any other commodity commonly exchanged and thus must be treated differently. As an item of “first necessity” and ultimately a matter of life or death for millions of consumers, grain could not be legitimately compared with goods whose exchange merely complemented subsistence or enhanced pleasure. As a rule, in other sorts of commerce, shortage, tardiness, deception in transaction, or other defects and vices caused inconvenience only to individuals and never in lethal doses. In the grain trade, however, “the least error almost always affects the public,” threatening the entire community at its most vulnerable point. Given its special nature, those who undertook to deal in grain, the police believed, assumed solemn responsibilities toward society.

Since society depended entirely on grain commerce for its subsistence in ordinary times, the police viewed the trade as a kind of public service. They made demands and imposed restrictions upon grain traders that other merchants escaped. The grain merchant had obligations to the public that would sometimes require him to resist the promptings of his self-interest, which the police recognized as his chief source of motivation. He had to be satisfied with a “just and legitimate gain” based upon his investment, his labor, and the energy with which he served the public rather than on the cunning with which he manipulated supply and demand factors.