Salt, pepper, and sundries..

Total food for seven persons for one year

$94.39 This makes a cost of three cents and seventenths per day per person. If the five children under thirteen be computed as two and onehalf adults, making the family equal to four and one-half adults, the average per day is only five and three-quarter cents.

In my investigations of the food question I have found no statement of the food supply of a thrifty workingman and his family so meager as this, or at so low a cost per capita.

It may be interesting to give the other items of expenditure of this thrifty German peasant:

It is interesting to consider the dietary of this prosperous Prussian farmer. The food is nearly one-half black bread made of rye. The proportion of meat is very small, as compared with the rations of this country. His family consisted of nine persons, three being children of over fourteen years of age. Their total living expenses for the year were $736.28, divided as follows:

$39.97

Clothing..

Fuel and light.

23.89

Sundries...

Making a total expenditure for a family of seven persons..

$226.14

Average wages per year, $44.25, or less than $4 per month with board.

But when we turn to the production of a first-class Prussian farm and its cost, we find the product of a fraction less than ninety-one acres of land, which had been cultivated in a most skillful and intelligent manner, valued in all at $3,942.47. Part of this product consisted of wheat, the cost of which is given at eighty-four cents per bushel of sixty pounds. Another portion consisted of rye, the cost of which is computed at sixty-eight cents per bushel of fifty-eight pounds.

It will be observed that although the wages of the farm laborer in this section average less than four dollars a month, with board added, the money cost of a bushel of wheat is set at eighty-four cents. In our great wheat-producing States and territories of the Far West wages are four- to five-fold, with board, and yet the cost

The cost of food per person each day is nine and a quarter cents.*

It is singular to compare the school expenses, the support of the son in the army, and the beer, wine, and spirits with the food bill. The food supply of this farmer, whose book accounts appear to have been kept with the accuracy of a merchant, and whose method of cultivation, as described, might serve as a lesson anywhere in scientific agriculture, is less in quantity and variety, and less in cost by at least one-third, as compared with the rations which are served in the prisons of Massachusetts.

The significant item in this expense account is the maintenance of the son in the army.

There are, of course, many other causes, aside from the military system of Europe, for the differences which are to be found in the subsistence of the people, which cannot be treated in the limits of this article. For instance, the relative area and population of European states, aside from Russia and Turkey, enter into the consideration. The area is about one-half that of the United States, while the population is little more than eight

ing people in different countries, reference may be *For further comparisons of the food supply of workmade to the first report of the National Bureau of the Statistics of Labor, by Hon. Carroll D. Wright.

fold, the ratio to the square mile being a little less than twenty in this country and one hundred and sixty in Europe.

This area is divided into fifteen empires, kingdoms, or states, omitting the petty states of eastern Europe, which are separated from each other by differences of race, creed, and language. Their commerce is obstructed among themselves by as many different systems of duties upon imports as there are states. The natural outlet for the crowded population of central Europe might be in southern Russia and in the fertile sections of Asiatic Turkey, were the relations of these several states to the eastern country the same as those of the Eastern States of this country to those of the West. There is land enough, and to spare; but the armies of Europe are sustained in order to prevent this very expansion of the people; and the misgovernment of the Turk, which renders Asia Minor almost a howling wilderness, is protected by the mutual jealousies of these very states, which are thus being destroyed by their own standing armies.

As war becomes more scientific, it becomes more costly. Victory rests not only on powder and iron, but yet more on bread and beef. It may have been the German sausage by which France was beaten, quite as much as the German rifle.

The food question in Europe may be one of possible revolution and repudiation of national debts, and of the disruption of nations as they now exist; and to this branch of the victualing department attention may well be called, because its conditions are so greatly in contrast to those of the United States; but this phase of the question will be treated separately in a subsequent article. May we not find in these costly armies, excessive debts, and excessive taxes not only the cause of pauper wages, but also the cause of the ineffectual and costly quality of so-called "pauper labor"? May there not also be found in these figures the incentives to socialism, to communism, and to anarchy? What hope for men and women, the whole of whose product would barely suffice for subsistence, when ten, twenty, and perhaps even thirty per cent. is diverted from their own use, and even food is denied them sufficient to maintain health and strength, in order that these great armies may be sustained? The victualing department is therefore presented in these three phases:

First. In our own country the only question is how to save the waste of our abundance, and how to teach not only the working people, but even the prosperous, the right methods of obtaining a good and wholesome subsistence at less cost in money than they now spend for a poor and dyspeptic one.

Second. In Great Britain and Ireland the victualing department underlies a system of land tenure which is now on its trial, and which has led to such artificial conditions that great areas of good land have been thrown entirely out of cultivation, while half the people are being fed from fields from five thousand to fifteen thousand miles distant.

Third. Upon the continent of Europe the victualing department stands face to face with a forced method of distributing and wasting a food-product which, as a whole, is insufficient to maintain the whole population in vigor and health even if it were evenly distributed, as food must be equally distributed by weight if not by quality, in order that men and women may be equally well nourished.

When a famished democracy becomes conscious of its power, what will be the end of privileges which are not founded on rights, and of national debts which have been incurred by dynasties without the consent of the people who are now oppressed by them? How will standing armies be disbanded, which now seem to be as incapable of being sustained as they are impossible of being disarmed?

Such are some of the appalling questions to which we are led when we attempt to analyze the way in which men, women, and children now obtain the modicum of meat and bread which they must have every day in order to exist, and that daily ration of dairy products, of fruit, of sugar, and of spice which is needed for common comfort.

There is but one element of life which all have in common, and that is Time. Who can teach us how to use our time so as to obtain the substantially even weight of food which is necessary to the adequate nutrition and to the common welfare of rich and poor alike?

The writer can only put these questions, and report the facts and figures which he has given. Some of them may be already familiar to the readers of THE CENTURY; but their true significance he himself hardly comprehended until they had been grouped together under the title of "The Food Question."

Edward Atkinson.