R

even

THE MONTH
UTH LAW, a mere feather
in the "lighter sex,"
broke all American records
and all records for women
on November 19 by flying a biplane
590 miles without coming down. She
has only one serious competitor-the
cost of living. The latter is suspected
of being a craft lighter than air, a high-
flier free of the attraction of gravitation
and rapidly mounting to a place among
Professor Lowell's inhabitants of Mars.
A homely measure of the altitude of
the cost of living, more understandable
than the technical "index numbers" of
wholesale prices usually quoted, was
furnished last week by the New York
Association for Improving the Condition
of the Poor. The association gave out
a comparison of the cost of a typical
food order for a workingman's family
in November, 1915, and in the same
month of 1916. The total increase was
almost 30 per cent. Some common ar-
ticles in the list had doubled-potatoes
increased 114 per cent. The associa-
tion, which luckily for the poor is not
bound to live on a salary, must raise
$35,000 extra this year to pay the food
bill for the families in its care and the
inmates of its institutions.

As to causes, there has been more or
less general understanding that cheap

New York Evening Journal

THE STAFF OF LIFE

money meant dear goods; that war in-
creased consumption, trampled grain
fields and took the best of the young
men of Europe out of agriculture. But
beyond that, the International Institute
of Agriculture at Rome, founded by Da-
vid Lubin, of California [see the SUR-
VEY for January 16, 1915] has issued
a report showing that short crops of cer-
eals are common to almost the whole
world. Russia, which alone has a siz-
able surplus, is unable to get her wheat
to market. There is, moreover, the diffi-
culty of transportation, due to the heavy
shipments of munitions for export and
back of that to the curtailed car-build-
ing program of the railroads during
their hard times preceding the war.
These make for a real local shortage in
These make for a real local shortage in
some commodities, such as coal in and
about New York city, where there is
the further ugly charge of an attempt
to corral the supply and boost prices.
And New York has also the extra cent
a quart for milk, which the recent milk
strike added to the price paid by deal-
ers to farmers-a penny which the milk
companies promptly added to the retail
price.

So it is that in England and France
there is talk of following Germany's ex-
ample in taking charge of the food sup-
ply and issuing bread-cards. While in
New York the three-pound rye loaf of
the East Side, which still sells for eight
cents, weighs only a pound and a quar-
ter now and the grocer will cut it for
you into halves or even quarters. Grade
B milk is ten cents a bottle. A rise
of fifty cents or one dollar a ton in coal
at the mine is the excuse for adding a
nickel to coal by the bucket-which adds
up to five dollars a ton.

The poor are feeling it keenly and
many families ordinarily unafraid of
charity are believed to have been forced
down close to the poverty line. A few
cents more on bread and meat and they
must seek relief. But so great a rise
makes itself felt far up in the economic
scale, as provident loan societies, some
savings banks and the loan departments.
of life-insurance companies can testify.
The clerks, bookkeepers, stenographers,

salesmen, small shopkeepers, many
skilled workmen, have not generally
shared in the great profits and the in-
creased wages which have come in some
industries.

Thus there has been a great increase
in cost of living, but no recent in-
crease in the pay of the large classes
represented by the man who wrote this
piece, the girl who typed it, the man
who set it on a linotype, the man who
printed it, the girl who bound and
wrapped it, the postman who delivered
it, nor those others who contributed in-
directly to its making, through secur-
ing and recording and accounting for
each reader's subscription, through stok-
ing the furnaces which heat office and
print-shop, or operating elevators which
lift them or street cars which carry them
home-no, nor for the woman who
cleans up nightly in their careless wake
and scrubs the floor they have tracked
over. Old Mother Hubbard had noth-
ing on her.

On the other hand is the big new
crop of millionaires, dealing in muni-
tions and other articles of export, who
have swelled deposits and resources of
the nation's banks to the greatest in
their history. And with their fortunes
have gone unprecedented increases in
wages in certain industries. In Massa-
chusetts 40,000 operatives of the Amer-

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ican Woolen Company and the Ar-
lington Mills have a 10 per cent in-
crease. In New Bedford 33,000 cotton
workers recently received their third ad-
vance this year, amounting to 271⁄2 per
cent increase over former earnings. In
Augusta, Ga., 1,400 in the cotton mills
will earn 10 per cent more. The Glove
Manufacturers Association, of Glovers-
ville, N. Y., is willing to pay $250,000
or $300,000 more a year to retain its
daily output of thumbs up.

On November 22, the United States
Steel Corporation announced its third
raise within the year, totalling 33 per
cent and costing the company $28,000,-
000 a year. Immediately the Colorado
Fuel and Iron Company followed with
its third increase, giving to the 5,000
men of the Pueblo plant an additional
10 per cent. The Republic Iron and
Steel Company, and the Brier Hill Steel
Company raised 11,000 men 10 per cent,
and the Youngstown Sheet and Tube
Company was expected to grant a simi-
lar advance. In Wilmington, Del.,
3,000 employes of the Atlas Powder
Company received a bonus of 10 per
cent of their year's wages. Further
south in Lexington, Ky., 3,500 coal
miners laughed the wolf from the door
with another 10 per cent increase. In
Milwaukee, in Racine, in San Francisco
and in Kansas City gains have been com-
ing to lumbermen, box makers and rail-
road men.

And some few have noticed that their
office forces must pay for bread what
the coal miner pays. The Consolidated
Gas Company in New York city has
declared a 7 per cent bonus for 17,000
workers earning $3,000 yearly or less.
The Eastman Kodak Company, of
Rochester, N. Y., has provided for clerks
earning up to $50 a week; and 3,000 to
4,000 office men of the Westinghouse
Electric Company have been given a
boost.

GOVERNMENT INTERVEN-
TION IN PRICES

N SPITE of these increases, how-

a sense of crisis in the air.

In the face of such need there has
been a scurrying about to propose reme-
dies "something must be done and done
quick"-much as in the first weeks of
an unemployment crisis. The most pre-
tentious plan is that of Congressman
John J. Fitzgerald, of New York city,
who announces he will press for the pas-
sage of a food embargo act immediately
after the opening of Congress next
week. Quite at the other end of the
scale from such a national scheme are
the tests now being made in Chicago.
through which the health commissioner
proposes to disclose how little food will
suffice to keep body and soul together.

Most of the proposals strike at the
cost of distributing food, which the ex-
perience of cooperative associations here

and abroad has shown to be a major factor in retail prices. Thus Commissioner John J. Dillon, of the New York State Department of Foods and Markets, who made a study in Europe of marketing and cooperative agencies, recommends for New York city adequate and convenient terminal facilities for food and provision for auctioning farm products. Another has proposed that food be brought down the long stretch of Manhattan Island by night freight trains on the subway instead of by plodding wagons. And Mayor Mitchel has made public a letter in which he tells the coal companies that, unless he is convinced they are doing their utmost to get coal to bucketful buyers at a fair price, he will set the city's ash-carts at delivering it. Private citizens have offered to supply a fund for selling coal at cost, he says; carts dump at the waterfront, where the coal arrives, and go back empty to collect ashes in the very tenements where the coal is grievously needed.

The trend of all these plans, it will be noted, and of many others, is toward government interference in the high cost of food. In previous crises it has tended more toward urging the formation of private cooperative enterprises and of enabling consumers to deal directly with producers, through parcels post deliveries or the famous public markets established by Mayor Shanks in Indianapolis four years ago.

New York got an illuminating idea of the cost of hauling and delivering food when the recent milk strike brought out that the milk farmers get only 40 per cent of the retail price; in household terms, 4 cents on a 10-cent bottle of milk. Mr. Dillon has arranged, through his state department, for a real contribution to cooperative experience. After January 1, he has announced, the neighborhood butcher shops of New York city will sell grade B milk, shipped in by the Dairymen's League, at eight cents a quart. The theory is that tenement mothers will take home their milk along with the chuck-steak, and thus save the expense of the wasteful competition of carts from all the milk companies traveling the same routes.

WHAT IS A FAIR PRICE FOR COAL?

HE most far-reaching plan of all is

sion which has under way a study of the whole vast industry of mining and marketing coal. The purpose is to find answers to two questions: What is a fair price for a ton of anthracite coal? What steps, if any, should Congress take to secure the delivery of coal at this fair price?

Never before has the national government sought to determine what should be paid for a given commodity

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by the consumer, upon a basis of the actual cost of production. The nearest analogy is the treatment of the franchise-holding public utilities, such as gas, electricity, water and street-railway service, by municipal and state governments. In these cases the public assumes the right to regulate the selling price after a full inquiry into the cost of production.

While the federal Trade Commission has not yet formally decided upon the details of its procedure in the coal inquiry, it appears to be determined upon one principle of action-that the coal industry differs from most of the productive industries in its primary character. It considers that coal, petroleum, timber and hydro-electric power are natural resources, and that the industries built upon the marketing of these natural resources must be treated differently than are industries built upon mechanical or chemical processes in which raw materials are not so great a factor. While the coal industry is not yet declared to be a public utility, it is at least in a "twilight zone" which may be changed at any time into public control.

Anthracite goes by the hodful into the homes of the people. Bituminous coal goes by the carload into powerplants. Any stoppage of either supply of fuel becomes a public calamity, whether it be due to famine prices or to shortage at the mines. Hence the commission will devote a year to studying anthracite in eastern Pennsylvania. where 94 per cent of it is produced, and bituminous in half a dozen states. In both cases the task is undertaken in the belief that social and industrial welfare will be served by public regulation of the nation's fuel supply. Whether regulation shall be exerted through an enlightened public opinion, a legal control of prices, or through the purchase of the business itself by the public, will be left to Congress to decide.

But the commission is not primarily interested in demonstrating that the increase in prices established last summer was out of proportion to the wage increase. That was but one of many steps in the upward path of retail prices. and stock market quotations. The government now is undertaking to find out what the service performed by the coal companies in getting the fuel from the earth into the hands of the consumer is actually worth.

He

Attorney-General Gregory is chiefly responsible for the inquiry. On May 6 he sent to the federal Trade Commission a letter urging that the then proposed raise in the price of anthracite be scrutinized in the public interest. cited the three general advances in wages since January 1, 1900, with accompanying increases in the price of coal. And he suggested that, in the event of another increase, the commis

sion "institute a searching investigation into the operations and accounts of the great producing companies for the purpose of ascertaining all the facts upon which such increase in price may be based, including the relation between. any increase in the cost of production due to advance of wages and the increase of profits caused by the increase in price."

The commission promised to look into the situation if the price of coal should actually be advanced. Now the advance has taken place and the inquiry is on. A petition to similar effect from the annual convention of the Pennsylvania Federation of Labor made little impression on Congress. But when Senator Hitchcock of Nebraska offered in the Senate on June 22 a brief resolution asking the federal Trade Commission to make an inquiry such as had been suggested by the attorney-general, the resolution was adopted.

How far the commission will probe into wages of the million employes in the coal industry has yet to be developed. Facts as to wages and hours of miners and transportation workers will be presented, both from an inquiry into the history of the business year by year, and from public hearings in the mining. and marketing centers. The relation of wages to prices will be made the subject of a special section of the report. It was because the coal companies raised the price of anthracite last summer following a grant of higher wages that the investigation is being made.

For more than a year past the commission has been at work on timber. It has brought forward the exhaustive study of the timber and lumber industry made by the former Bureau of Corporations, and has cooperated with the Bureau of Forestry in seeking to determine a fair price for lumber. At the same time it has been working on petroleum-the cost of pipe-line transportation, of oil production and of distribution. And the Bureau of Forestry has compiled a report upon the recent concentration of ownership of hydro-electric power throughout the country in the hands of a few corporate groups. This is in line with a report on water power made by the Bureau of Corporations in 1912. In each instance the investigations have endeavored to show the actual relation of the operating companies to the public. In each report has been an implication that the public must exert a better control over the industry, or must itself compete in the development of natural resources.