have clamored for more efficient marketing. To promote orderly marketing, American governments have given considerable aid to farmers' and consumers' cooperative associations. However inconsistent it may be, these same governments, under the pressure of organized interests, have placed various restrictions upon the chain stores, mail order houses, and department *stores which have been instrumental in introducing important marketing economies. The recent outpouring of legislative limitations upon chain stores and other large retailers, by taxation and otherwise, is reminiscent of the efforts shortly before 1900 to restrain the mail order houses and department stores and of the opposition at various times to technological advances in industry by workers and other groups. The anti-chain store taxes, which will be discussed in this paper, are only one phase of the campaign against chain store organizations, which are charged with instituting dangerous monopolies, unfair price cutting, coercing producers into giving excessive discounts on purcha es, evading taxes, practicing short weights, sending profits out of the community to absentee owners, unfair treatment of labor, not co6perating in community undertakings, and other abuses. The feeling against the chain stores originat s, in part, in the mistrust of large corporations in a period when the critics of corporation practices have besieged legislatures to adopt many reforms. The depression of the 1930's, with its hardships for numerous small retailers, wholesalers, manufacturers, and other groups, has embittered many of these elements against 1A paper read at the joint round-table of the American Economic Association and the National Association of Marketing Teachers, Dec. 29, 1936.