THE COST OF LIVING 377 



THE COST OF LIVING 



BY HENRY PRATT FAIRCHILD 



ASSISTANT FBOFESSOB, TAUS DNIVBESITT 



'^rr^HE increased cost of living" is a phrase familiar to almost every 

 -L American tongue in these days. Newspapers and magazines are 

 full of the topic. A wide variety of investigators are earnestly searching 

 for the causes, and divers explanations have been offered. Over-produc- 

 tion of gold, the tariff, the trusts, cold storage and a host of other things 

 have been mentioned — all, probably, with more or less of truth. Yet it 

 is amazing to note how little attention has been paid to the most obvious 

 and easily comprehended cause of the high prices of one great class of 

 commodities, i. e., the food of the people. This is by far the most im- 

 portant aspect of the problem, and its primary and fundamental expla- 

 nation lies in a perfectly simple and concrete fact — namely, the increas- 

 ing proportion of the population of the United States which may be 

 classed as city dwellers rather than country dwellers; in other words, 

 the preponderance of the urban population. 



The food element of the high prices problem is so thoroughly pre- 

 dominant in all discussions of the topic that one might almost say that, 

 in the popular mind, the high cost of living is synonymous with the 

 cost of food. The high prices which are causing such consternation 

 in the families of the land are the prices of meat, eggs, butter, milk, 

 bread and vegetables, and it is to this class of commodities that the fol- 

 lowing considerations apply most directly. These are all, primarily, 

 the products of the country. We may then carry our analysis a step 

 further and say that the cost of food is the cost of agricultural products. 

 It may be observed, in passing, that many other necessaries of life, 

 beside food, are products of the country. In fact, practically every 

 commodity is derived ultimately from the land, and what is true of food 

 is more or less true of other commodities, in proportion as they are the 

 products of the extractive, rather than of the manufacturing indus- 

 tries. At the same time, most of the present discussion of this topic 

 centers around that class of commodities, originally mentioned, which 

 make up the food supply of the nation, and are directly the result of 

 the application of labor to land. It is to this group that we wish to 

 confine our main discussion. 



Let us hasten, however, to disclaim any inclination to minimize the 

 value of the contribution which is made to the wealth of society by the 

 manufacturer, the merchant and others engaged in distinctively " city " 



vol.. LXXVIII.— 26 



