2. It has reduced the ratio which interest, rent or profit bear to the total product to a less proportion of such product, than is to be found in any other country.

3. I has established the highest rates of wages by working such a distribution of the joint product of capital and labor, that the more ef fective both become, the larger becomes the share of the laborer in the constantly increasing product.

4. It has assured a good subsistence to lower and lower grades of labor while diminishing the hours and the intensity of the work.

5. It has diminished the proportion which the great fortunes bear to the total accumulated wealth. It has increased the relative number of persons possessing moderate wealth. It has vastly increased the number who possess small savings.

6. It has greatly increased the number of lucrative occupations which are open to women or to men who are out of full vigor.

7. It has rendered the saving or accumulation of a considerable property less necessary to assure a comfortable subsistence.

8. It has reduced the number of hours of work necessary to be devoted to procuring subsistence.

If we accept the misnomer of "the poor" as a generic term for all who do not yet possess property, the poor, as a class, are becoming richer by way of competition, while the rich, who have already become possessors of property, may become no poorer, but are more numerous. In other words, competition is the force which tends to equalize the distribution of the annual product, while steadily increasing the product of each decade, as compared to the previous one.

I do not present these propositions to you with any attention of attempting to prove them at this time. I submit them dogmatically as being capable of proof. Perhaps they cannot all be proved, except by your own work. One of the most important parts of your work may be in this very direction. I think you cannot have failed to observe how very few grades of labor there are, and how evenly, on the whole, a certain share of the annual product is even now divided in each grade. For instance, in New England, where capital is the most ample and effective, the mechanism of exchange most complete, and where specially skilled labor has concentrated in greatest measure, their are certain broad divisions, and in each division the earnings are very uniform. In the. lowest plane or grade, the earnings of common laborers do not vary greatly. In the next grade above, the earnings of factory operatives and domestic servants and of women in many other arts are nearly alike, if the cost of boarding the servant be added to the wages. In the next above come the skilled mechanics, railway and telegraph em

ployes, and with them may be classed a great body of clerks, salesmen and women and a large proportion of teachers. In the next may bē found a greater proportion of persons of moderate means and income than can be found elsewhere. And, finally, although there is a great deal of wealth, yet, in my judgment, the wealth of those who are distinctly rich bears a much less proportion to the wealth of the whole community than it does anywhere else. In the State of Massachusetts nearly every other person-man, woman or child-is represented by name on the books of some savings bank, and the aggregate of their deposits is about $275,000,000. Where has competition been more free than in New England, so far as its own people are concerned? And yet my own computations, which were examined, verified and sustained by Commissioner Wright, and which were made on the basis of his most excellent census of Massachusetts of 1875, proved that the whole capital of the State could not possibly exceed in value three years' production. I therefore present to you one of the most difficult and yet one of the questions most requiring an answer. What proportion of each year's product is or can be saved and added to capital? You will observe that this is a very different and much more complex problem that the question of what is the income of capital, because the income of capital is largely consumed. The capitalist who receives it is in many cases a mere distributer. Let us assume the cases of two men, each of whom receives $10,000 a year from the earnings of the same railroad or factory. One spends or consumes it in the support of a large family and of many servants and dependents. The other spends or consumes $5,000 and invests $5 000 in a new form of capital-a new mill or a new railroad—and it is only this last sum which is added to the aggregate capital of the State in which these two men live. Suppose this joint income of $20,000 had represented a dividend of five per cent. upon a factory worth $400,000, then the $5,000 saved would be only 14 per cent. added to the productive capital in this or some other factory. All my investigations have led me to believe that the actual addition to capital is very small. I dò not believe five per cent. of our annual product for the last 100 years can now be found in existence as capital or even as realized wealth. It would be a matter of the utmost interest if this point could be worked out. The average population for the 100 years has been somewhat over 20,000,000, which would be the same as 2,000,000,000 for one year. If each person saved $1, or if each worker who supports two others saved $3, the wealth which this saving represented would be $2,000,000,000. Assume that each person has saved $12 or that each worker has represented a saving of $36 per year, then the aggregate of wealth aside from land would be $24,000,

000,000 in 1880. I don't think as great a sum could be found, and the greater part of what there is has been saved in recent years. If $12 per head per year be an approximate estimate of the total savings which have been maintained, what ratio does that bear to the cost of subsistence? Can we solve that problem? Are my computations approximately accurate when I assign as the average value of our present annual product per person what would sell for $200, if all were sold at current retail prices including what is consumed on farms? Is ten per cent, as against five or six per cent, formerly, of such $200-or $20now annually added to wealth or capital? It would be over $1,000,000,000 this year. If ten per cent. of the product of the year has been saved or set aside for the maintenance or increase of capital, how much must we take off from the apparent gain to represent the actual depreciation of the capital previously saved? After all repairs have been made that are possible, mills, works, warehouses and dwellings depreciate; the inventor destroys the accumulations of years; there is nothing constant but change; there is no fixed capital in an absolute sense, and all life is but a conversion of forces. Stability is death. How much can we set aside for reproductive purposes? How much of this will be even moderately permanent? What proportion of the useful things now in existence are more than one generation old? What material work of man is permanent except the opening of the ways. Is the addition to capital more than sufficient to maintain an increasing production? Did the few in whose hands capital and wealth slowly accumulated in the first fifty years of our existence secure more, even for a short time, than $5 to $10 per head? Do the many in whose hands capital and wealth are now being accumulated secure, even for a short term, more than $15 to $20 per head? Would not future production decrease if any less than is saved were saved and added to capital? These questions are vital; they lie at the very foundation of all the issues to which your time and skill are devoted. Now, if both production and savings are so limited, wherein can greater progress be made, and how can greater welfare be assured? May it not be in a more intelligent use of what we do produce rather than in striving to increase it so fast, small as it may be when considered in ratio to our numbers? Our great fault is a waste of force. We waste in two directions; first, in respect to what is commonly called fixed capital. I will only treat the waste by fire. We burn about one dollar's worth in each hundred of each year's annual product, and we spend more than half a dollar more in a hundred in our clumsy attempts to exten L. R.-16

guish fires or to spread the loss more widely among insurance companies. If my previous computations are correct as to the possibility of saving or adding to our capital at the rate of $1,000,000,000 a year at the present time, then we might add 10 per cent to our savings, or $100,000,000 more, by avoiding two-thirds of the useless waste by fire and of the useless expenditures contingent thereon,

We waste in useless taxation. Our taxes-national, state, county and municipal—approximate $12 per head. A large portion of this is, of course, well spent. Taxation itself does not constitute an unneces sary burden when the avails of taxes are expended by the government in doing what governments must do or what they can do better than the people can accomplish for themselves. On the whole, it may perhaps be assumed that we get, in value received, 75 cents on $1 of the sum of our taxes, and our waste approximates 25 cents on $1.

But my main object in this address is to treat the waste of food. What is the standard or average ration of the working people of this country, and what does it cost? What might be a true ration, and how much could be saved in the cost of food if some of the more simple principles of science could be made a part of the common knowledge of the people? It may be asked, why should we be urged to save when nearly all our present difficulties are attributed to overproduction? The general application of this term always exasperates me. I desire to examine the outside of the head of any one who pleads a general overproduction in order to see how his brain is constituted and what element of common sense has been omitted in his make-up. What we all have in common, and about the only thing we do have in common, is time. What we need most to save is time. What the world requires more than anything else, is time to be devoted to leisure and rest. If we waste our capital, or if we waste our labor, we are making a great waste of time. Now, it is no benefit to any one to shorten the hours of labor by force. It is no benefit to limit the freedom of contract of adults, who are capable of making their own contracts, by legal provisions as to their hours of labor, in my judgment. I am of opinion that all snch acts, except such as apply to children whose parents are not suitable guardians for them, work more harm than good. What we have to do is to increase the general measure of intelligence so that all people who are at work will earn leisure by saying force, and when they have thus earned a part of their time and have saved it from the arduous struggle for life, then they will know what use to make of it, and will use it well. Now, half our effort, measured in money, and more than half our time is spent on food. Do we overproduce food or do we misuse it? This question brings me

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to the waste of food. It will have become apparent to you from your own investigations and from the consideration of the figures of statisticians, both in this country and in Europe, that aside from those who have earned leisure, either by their own accumulation of wealth or by that which has been devised to them by their ancestors, half the struggle of life is a mere struggle for food.

This is demonstrated by the ratio which the cost of food bears to the cost of all other elements of subsistence, clothing and shelter. But I suspect that if we were to measure the struggle for life in terms of hours rather than in terms of money, we should find that a very much greater part of life was devoted to the production and preparation of food than is represented by the measure even of one-half. You will observe that in these computations of the cost of living which are made in money, all that we obtain is the cost of the food delivered at the house, but no computation is or can be made in terms of money of the labor of the housewife or children in preparing that food for use. Every one knows how continuous and how arduous this is, and herein lies the great waste of force. I do not mean to deal in generalities upon the necessity of teaching women how to cook, although that is fundamental. There is yet more to be done in the way of teaching both men and women what to buy for the purpose of being cooked. I had this conviction long ago without any approach to scientific knowledge in the premises, but by great good fortune, through conversation with Prof. Sedgwick of our Institute of Technology, I have had correspondenco with Prof. Atwater, who is here to day, and who will presently exhibit to you diagrams and charts which will prove to you the value of the nutrient material in different kinds of food and its measure in money at the prices which are now paid for food. To him I will leave the burden of treating that subject; but in order to enforce in some degree the principles which he will present to you, I beg to submit some statistics of the practice of two classes of people. According to my observation in past years, when I was directly connected with a manufacturing village, I reached the conclusion that the French Canadians were more skillful in obtaining a good subsistence out of cheap food, 2. e. low-priced, than any other class of people of whose practice I had any knowledge.

I now present to you the statistics of the cost of food for six months, chiefly in this year, 1885.

I will first give you the cost of the food of nine adult males and five adult females in a boarding house. These people are mostly Irish.