$13 per head expended for wheat flour when converted into bread, cake, biscuit, pastry and cereals equals $1,040,000,000.
What should be added for bread made of other grain? In the South corn meal is probably used in larger quantity per capita than wheat flour. Large quantities of corn meal, rye meal and oatmeal also serve as bread or as cereal food. There would probably be but a small margin of error if we computed the cost of other grains than wheat in the form of bread or cereal food at $6 per head, making the total grain bill $19 per head, or on 80,000,000 people $1,520,000,000; being considerably less than the expenditure for liquors and tobacco.[1]
This brings out the most important question in practical economics. If I can buy the best wheat flour and with twenty minutes a day of light exercise make one pound of bread each for twelve persons—breadmaking being one of the simplest arts and one most easily learned; and if this bread costs less than two cents a pound, why should the bread of the masses of the people in the cities cost them more than four cents; or, in other words, what are the relative charges for distribution? The barrel of flour of which my bread is made has been brought to me a thousand miles at a charge of 50 cents or less, of which 30 cents may represent the cost of the service and 20 cents the possible net revenue of the railway to be applied to the payment of interest on bonds or dividends on the stock. That barrel of flour, making 280 pounds of bread, divided into 50 cents, charge for railway transportation, makes the cost of that part of the railway distribution of the loaf less than two tenths of a cent per pound of bread. On the other hand, the cost of distributing the loaves of bread in the city after they have left the mouth of the baker's oven is more than two cents per pound. The misdirected energy of the community has been devoted to denunciation of the railway service and to misdirected efforts to cheapen the cost of food by compelling railway corporations to lessen their rates whether they are profitable or not, while little or no attention has been given to improving the methods of distribution of bread at retail or to getting rid of the exorbitant charge for distributing loaves of bread at the rate of two cents a pound or more as compared to two tenths of a cent a pound or less over the railway. This observation will apply to nearly every article which enters into the cost of subsistence, especially the distribution of fresh vegetables. How to reduce the cost of distributing the necessaries of life in small parcels and how to save the waste of good
- ↑ An observation in smalls discloses the fact that the one machine shop now making 45 per cent, of the twine-binding grain harvesters of this country now turns out one complete harvester every eighteen seconds during eight working hours of each day for 300 days in the year, and being unable to meet the increasing domestic and foreign demand the company is now extending its works so as to turn out one every ten seconds.
