12 FLIGHT FROM THE CITY 



And when it came to determining how much elec- 

 tric current had been used how much to charge for 

 salt, spices, and other supplies the very smallness of 

 the quantities used made it difficult to arrive at a fig- 

 ure which approximated the facts. However, by aban- 

 doning the effort to determine gardening costs, and 

 labor costs, and substituting the market value for both 

 raw materials and for labor, we did finally come to 

 figures which I felt we might use. 



Then we still had the problem of determining what 

 it had cost to buy canned tomatoes; we had to buy 

 canned goods in a number of different stores so as to 

 get a fair average price on the cannery-made prod- 

 uct; of making certain that they were of a quality 

 similar to those which we had produced at home, and 

 of reducing the quantity in each can and each jar to 

 some unit which would make comparison possible 

 quantitatively as well as qualitatively. When we 

 finally made the comparison, the cost of the home- 

 made product was between 20 per cent and 30 per 

 cent lower than the price of the factory-made mer- 

 chandise. 



The result astonished me. That there would be a 

 saving, if no charge were made for labor, I expected. 

 I was prepared to find that it paid to can tomatoes 

 whenever the cash income of a family was so low that 

 anything which might be secured for the housewife's 

 labor was a gain. But after every item of expense had 

 been taken into account, and after analyzing the costs 

 of domestic production as carefully as I would have 



