Now, let me give you the cost of food of a French Canadian family of ten persons who have not changed their habit in any great measure since they moved into Massachusetts. In this family there are four adults and six children, from two to eighteen years old. Three of the children are two years or under, and we will therefore compute the family as equal to eight and a half adults. Their ration was as follows:

Now you will observe that there is a difference in the cost of animal products between these two cases of 6.81 cents, and which is almost exactly the difference in the average cost of food per day, but the French spent 14 cents more on vegetables, chiefly on dried pease, and I think Prof. Atwater will show you that the actual nutriment in the pease added, is about as much as the meat displaced. I think that when Prof. Atwater examines, as he will, the relative value in sustaining life of the particular kinds of food represented in these two schedules, he will find that the French Canadians have substituted dry peas and beans to such an extent for meat as to have obtained the same amount of nutrition at the difference in cost, which he will presently show you in his diagrams and in his tables. It is also true, I believe, that the French Canadians use the stew pan where we use the frying pan, and herein lies a vast difference. Now this may seem trifling, but you will bear in mind that a saving of five cents per day for the cost of the subsistence of each adult person in the United States at the present time represents in money $1,000,000,000 a year, and the difference between these two rations is nearly 7 cents per day, or more than $1,300,000,000 per year. It is curious to think of this. We cannot save this quantity of food-what should we do with it? We cannot sell it— where is the market? If we could apply such intelligence as would make this measure of saving possible, all that we could save would be time; all that we could gain would be leisure. But during the partial adoption of a true method he who learned it would save money, and thus get on in life.

Again, recalling the fact that half the struggle of life is a struggle for food, and that more than half the price of life is the cost of food, I am now able to make one comparison between two periods of time in respect to food in the exact manner which I have suggested to you in the several circulars which I have sent to you. Referring to the first example of the ration of nine adult males and five females for six months, at the present time, I have obtained the data from the same boarding house of the cost of subsisting the same number of adults in 1873. In that year the cost of their food for six months was $1,033.51, or 42.52 cents per day, now 28.72 cents, a reduction of very nearly 33 per cent. The difference between these two periods in the cost of fuel, light and soap was over 30 per cent. Rent in this village was an arbitrary sum. The factory tenants were charged with barely enough rent to keep them in repair, and were not looked to as a source of income, so that I have no opportunity in this case to compare the relative conditions of shelter. Neither have I been able to make an exact computation of

the reduction in the cost of clothing; but, judging from certain elements which enter into the cost of clothing, I am of the opinion that the reduction has amounted to more than thirty-three per cent. You will observe that the prices of 1873 are in the depreciated currency of that period. It would not suffice for an accurate comparison even to reduce them to the terms of gold, the malignant effect of bad money, or mock money, as the greenback has so well been named, being to vitiate all our statistics. Suffice it that where these figures show a reduction in the cost of living at the present time as compared to 1873, averaging at least thirty-three per cent, the wages of factory operatives who are in continuous employment at the present time are less in gold than the currency wages of 1873 by a difference not exceeding twenty per cent. Wages in gold are now as high or higher than they were then. I think it is proved that the lower wages of the present period will buy very much more food, fuel, shelter, and clothing than could be purchased for the wages of the period of inflation from 1869 to 1873. In fact, I am sure of it, and one of the most useful applications of the standard ration on your part will be to make this fact so plain that "he who runs may read," if you can do so. There is nothing new under the sun. When I made the suggestion to Prof. Atwater to prepare for me a variety of bills of daily fare at varying price, each of which should contain the necessary quantity of protein, fats and hydro-carbon, I did not suppose anything of the kind had ever been done. We will submit to you several examples which are to be perfected for our use at the meeting of the American Association in August. But he also showed me a German pamphlet prepared by a man who is interested in the import of Texas beef and Australian mutton, in which this idea has been fully carried out. There is a bill of fare for a fortnight at a cost of about eighteen cents per day, and it is curious to note how meagre it is for the money.

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Let us return to our own problems. It has been shown how great a reduction there has been in the cost of living in recent years. But it may be said, on the other hand, by so much as the factory operatives now purchase their subsistence at less cost than they did in former years will the producers of food, of timber and of the materials for shelter and of manufactures receive less. May not they suffer as much as the operatives gain? By no means. Herein is to be found the enormous beneficence of the saving of force in the production and distribution of products. The work of the farmer has been enormously reduced by the application of machinery to agriculture, and I need not refer you to the tables which I have compiled on the railway question, by which it appears

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that the cost of distribution by railway between 1869 and 1885 represented a sum nearly if not quite equal to the reduction from the currency price of food to its gold value to the present day. We have learned so well how to save the expenditure of force in the matter of primary production and of wholesale distribution, that I think it is perfectly safe to say of Uncle Sam, considered as a concrete individual, that if he works the same number of hours in 1885 as he did in 1865, at the end of the civil war, he can produce or distribute one-third more now than he could then, and this is the secret of what we call overproduction. It follows that if we choose to work as hard as we did then we must find a wider market for the special product of our agri. culture; or otherwise, if we do not care to work so hard we may work less; that is to say, we may save our time. I think we are saving our time. I believe that the general struggle for life is less arduous, and that remuneration is more evenly divided now than in any previous period in our history, notwithstanding the apparent loss, depreciation and specific lack of employment in certain directions. You overlook a vastly wider field than can possibly come under my supervision. I ask you whether the following statement is not a true one. Accepting the tables which I have submitted to you in regard to the distribution of occupations, it appears that not less than nine-tenths of the population who are engaged in any kind of gainful occupation, that is to say, ninety persons in each one hundred of those who work for money, are either in the position of a small farmer who must work harder than any of his men, or else of a wage earner or salaried person. Now I ask you with respect to the wage earners if it is not true that seventy-five per cent, in point of number, are now in continuous employment at as high rates of wages as they ever received before? Furthermore, is it not true that of the remainder fifteen per cent are at work at rates of wages which have not been reduced on the average twenty per cent from the highest point, and, therefore, are as well off as ever before? Is it not also true that five per cent of the remainder, or more, have partial employment as they usually had? Is it not, then, true that the proportion who are out of work constitute less than five per cent of the whole force? Where is there a large body of unemployed persons at the present time, aside from the two or three particular branches of occupation in which there has been a temporary congestion? If you answer these questions affirmatively, do you not, then, declare in terms that the working people, as a whole, are to-day more prosperous than they ever were in the history of this country; Is this not the fact when we get to the bottom of it? If so; whence the loud cry of hard times, of loss and of depreciation? Is not our whole problem,

how to make the work continuous and how to avoid the great fluctuations in the demand for labor, even if only a small proportion are adversely affected by these variations of demand? I can only say, in a very few words, that in my judgment that which is now happening, or has been happening during the last two years, has been an adjustment of labor and capital to new conditions which have been developed since the war, and of which we are now feeling the secondary effects. These new conditions are of the most profound and revolutionary character. They represent a vast saving of force in production, in distribution, and in the great commerce of the world. What are they? First, the abolition of slavery in this country and the effective application of free labor; second, the extension and consolidation in the railway service, especially of this country, but also in other countries; third, the opening of the Suez canal; fourth, the invention of the Bessemer process for making rails; fifth, a vast improvement in steam engineering, whereby the application of fuel to the arts has been reduced more than one-half in quantity and in cost; sixth, the extension of the telegraph system; seventh, the invention of the telephone; eighth, the restoration of a specie standard of value in countries which had for many years been on a paper basis. Each one of these changes, improvements or inventions has eliminated a part of the cost of subsistence, if cost be measured in terms of labor. Aside from these startling changes and new inventions, almost every customary process has been made easier, quicker or more productive. It was, therefore, in the way of progress that the elimination of cost in terms of labor should find its ultimate expression in a reduction in prices or in an advance in the rate of wages;* the ulti

* Very able arguments have been presented by Mr. Goschen, Mr. Giffen and others, in which this great decline in prices is imputed to an increasing scarcity of gold. In Mr. Giffen's recent article in the June Contemporary Review" he gives a very clear statement of all the facts in the case, and while referring somewhat incidentally to the improvements which have been made in the processes of production and distribution, he yet attributes the reduction of prices to the diminishing product of gold. I can only regard this as an hypothesis unlikely to be proved, because both Mr. Goschen and Mr. Giffen seem to me to give very little regard to the element which I should consider the chief cause of a reduction in price. They take note, it is true, of the increasing quantity of staple products as a factor, but they do not appear to give any attention to the fact that the increased product is the result of the same or of a less quantity of labor. In order to demonstrate the effect of this important element in the case we may also present hypothetical conditions.

First.-Let us suppose a given community engaged in manufacturing and farm, and supplied with all the coin it needs to serve for its instruments of exchange