Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 61.djvu/329

Rh material after it has been distributed are the real problems for practical economists to deal with.

Item No. 4, Sugar.—The import and production of sugar are well established in quantity and value; the consumption per capita is known; it is one of the articles on which the cost of refining has been reduced to the smallest fraction, and both the wholesale and retail profits to the lowest point. The latest consumption has been fixed at 68 pounds per head, without counting molasses. If we add the molasses at a very small fraction, we may count the average consumption at 70 pounds per head at an average price of five cents a pound or $3.50 per head for refined sugar. But a quantity which cannot be measured is converted over into jams, jellies, preserves and condensed milk. In the latter industry one single establishment is reputed to consume more than the entire product of all the beet-root sugar factories in this country, estimated at about 150,000 tons. If sugar were free of duty an immense impulse would be given to agriculture and to fruit growing. A very small number of persons can ever be employed in raising beets for sugar, because the weeding of the beets must be done by hand and there are very few sections of the country where the people are so poor as to find suitable employment in this occupation, but with free sugar an immense impulse will be given to the making of condensed milk for home use and export, and to the saving of fruit now wasted, for conversion into jams, jellies and preserves. We should take the commerce of the world on these lines, and by free sugar provide excellent employment for ten where one can ever be occupied in raising beets.

Another large quantity of sugar is converted into candy. None can measure this factor. The highest rentals at the corners of the most frequented streets in cities are paid for occupation in the distribution of candy. I happen to know of four corners now occupied in Boston on which the rental is more than $25,000 a year, these shops being devoted exclusively to retail traffic in candy of all sorts with prices of from ten to forty cents a pound. It follows that at least fifty cents per head should be added to the retail price of the refined sugar, making the total expenditure for sugar four dollars per head, or on a population numbering 80,000,000, $320,000,000 a year.

Item No. 5, Meats and Vegetables.—It will be impossible to deal with the average expenditure for meat at the present time. Poultry and eggs at farm values come to $3.69 per head. The product of slaughtering establishments large enough to be included under the head of 'Manufacturers' in the census comes to $10.31 per head at the works. Butter, cheese and condensed milk at such works as are big enough to be included in the census come to $1.72 per head. But more animals are slaughtered outside the large establishments than in them. The figures of poultry and eggs, of butter, cheese and