Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 25.djvu/36

28 The fair-trade statement, if I remember rightly, showed an average fall of 5s. in the price of wheat, comparing the whole period since the repeal of the corn-laws with a long period before. This may have been right or wrong for the purpose in hand, but for our present purpose, which is to compare the present period with that of half a century ago, it is important to note that it is mainly within the last ten years the steadily low price of wheat has been established. Comparing the ten years before 1846 with the last ten years, what we find is that, while the average price of wheat in 1837-'46 was 58s. 7d., it was 48s. 9d. only in the last ten years—a reduction not of 5s. merely, but 10s. The truth is, the repeal of the corn-laws was not followed by an immediate decline of wheat on the average. The failure of the potato-crop, the Crimean War, and the depreciation of gold, all contributed to maintain the price, notwithstanding free trade, down to 1862. Since then steadily lower prices have ruled; and when we compare the present time with half a century ago, or any earlier part of the century, these facts should be remembered.

There is a still more important consideration. Averages are very good for certain purposes, but we all know in this place that a good deal sometimes turns upon the composition of the average—upon whether it is made up of great extremes, or whether the individual elements depart very little from the average. This is specially an important matter in a question of the price of food. The average of a necessary of life over a long period of years may be moderate, but if in some years the actual price is double what it is in other years, the fact of the average will in no way save from starvation at certain periods the workman who may have a difficulty in making both ends meet in the best of times. What we find, then, is that, fifty years ago, the extremes were disastrous compared with what they are at the present time. In 1836 we find wheat touching 36s.; in 1838, 1839, 1840, and 1841, we find it touching 78s. 4 d., 81s. 6d., 72s. 10d., and 76s. 1d.; in all cases double the price of the lowest year, and nearly double the "average" of the decade; and in 1847 the price of 102s. 5d., or three times the price of the lowest period, is touched. If we go back earlier we find still more startling extremes. We have such figures as 106s. 5d. in 1810; 126s. 6d. in 1812; 109s. 9d. in 1813, and 96s. 11d. in 1817; these figures being not merely the extremes touched, but the actual averages for the whole year. No doubt in the early part of the century the over-issue of inconvertible paper accounts for part of the nominal prices, but it accounts for a very small part. What we have to consider, then, is, that fifty years ago the working-man with wages, on the average, about half, or not much more than half, what they are now, had at times to contend with a fluctuation in the price of bread which implied sheer starvation. Periodic starvation was, in fact, the condition of the masses of working-men throughout the kingdom fifty years ago, and the references to the subject in