Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 61.djvu/331

Rh is distributed by way of railway charges, duties, national expenditures, support of schools, fire losses and losses by commercial failures.

Item No. 7, Tea, Coffee and Cocoa.—The editor of the American Grocer computes the annual expenditure for tea, coffee and cocoa by a method that leaves very little margin for error and which gives $2.34 per head; which assessed on 80,000,000 comes to $187,200,000. This sum added to the amount computed for liquor and tobacco gives a fraction over $25 per head for beverages and tobacco, or over $2,000,000,000 a year.

Item No. 8, Textile Fabrics.—The census data on cotton, woolen and silk fabrics, deducting exports and adding imports, gives approximately $15 per head for clothing materials and carpets at the works. The extension of these values at mills in clothing and other uses will give approximately $30 per head as the expenditure of consumers on this class; which assessed on 80,000,000 comes to $2,400,000,000. After consultation with clothing manufacturers, I put cotton clothing at $8 per head, woolen, $12, silks, linens, laces, embroideries, etc., etc., at $10, subject to further study.

Item No. 9, Boots and Shoes.—The value at the factories is $3.42 per head, approximately $5 to consumers; which assessed on 80,000,000 comes to $400,000,000.

Item No. 10, Wool.—The average value of the annual wool clip of the United States at the farms and ranches comes to 66 cents per head. The maximum value of the largest product of beet root sugar is 10 cents, making together 76 cents; which sum assessed on 80,000,000 people amounts to $62,800,000, or a sum not exceeding 1 per cent. of the total product of agriculture in a normal year. Yet the farmers have been led to believe that their interests demand almost prohibitive duties on these two petty products, leading them to support a policy which costs them in the price of their clothing and sugar twice or thrice the total value of these two products, which duties obstruct the export of their surplus of the principal crops and the development of domestic industry in the most obnoxious way.

We may now deal with a few other problems of distribution which may be of interest.

The freight charges on all the railways of the United States in the year 1900 amounted to a little over $1,071,000,000, which was at the rate of three quarters of a cent per ton per mile, and at the rate of $13.79 per capita, which may be compared with $23 per head for liquors and tobacco.

For this sum of $13.79, 14 tons of food, fuel, fibers and fabrics were hauled 142 miles for every man, woman and child of the population. The average capital invested per capita amounted to $151, on which