THE "CUEAP" LOAF CRY 141 



your readers can sue quite easily for themselves that us bread did not 

 tall in price for over a quarter of a century after the adoption of 

 ' Free-trade,' the subsequent cheapness, which set in five and thirty 

 years after the abolition of the duties on corn, must have arisen 

 from some cause other than ' Free-trade.' The other cause, of 

 course, was that the prairies in our Colonies, and in the United 

 States and the Argentine, were opened up by railways and were put 

 under the plough, and tlie newly-invented ocean ' tramp ' brought 

 the wheat at a mere fraction of the freight that had to be paid even 

 for many years after the abolition of the duty. 



" ' For instance, there has been a drop in the rate of freight of 

 wheat from Chicago to Liverpool of 12«. per quarter since 1<S70. It 

 was the application of steam power to transit, both by land and sea, 

 that gave us cheap bread, not ' Free-trade.' ' " * 



Then we have the weighty evidence of the Gainsborough 

 Commission, quoted in another chapter, which tells us that, 

 when it visited Germany in the autumn of 1905, bread was 

 practically the same price both in Germany and in this country, 

 in spite of the fact that Germany grows her own corn, and is, 

 moreover, literally bristling with tariffs — 



"At Hochst, near Frankfort, as w^e pointed out in a previous 

 report, people eat white wheateu bread as well as bread made of 

 wheat and rye flour mixed. A loaf of white bread made at Hochst 

 weighing four English pounds should cost 4^(1. The Gains- 

 borough quartern loaf costs i^d., so that the difference is hardly 

 perceptible." f 



The Writer's Personal Testimony 



The writer would add his own disinterested testimony to 

 this somewhat long list of irrefutable evidence in proof of the 

 utter fraud of this Party catchword. 



At his request a well-known member of the London Corn 

 Exchange, who is a German, kindly interested himself in this 

 subject and collected information with regard to it. He took 

 July 3, 1907, as the date basis of his operations, and through 

 his Continental correspondents he ascertained the prices of 

 wheaten bread in eight of the European capitals, including our 

 own, on that date. 



The following table is instructive, but it should be borne in 

 mind that prices for wheat were many shillings per quarter 

 higher on July 3, 1907, than when the Gainsborough 

 Commission, for example, visited Germany : — 



♦ Monthly Notes on Tariff Reform, August, 1908, pp. 132, 133. 

 t " Lifo aud Labour in Gcrmauy," pp. 118, 119. 



