THE COST OF LIVING.
THE author of the paper on "The Cost of Living" in the April number of the Cornhill is all wrong, and as if he were right he would be a most aggravating person, it may be worth while to tell irritated housekeepers why he is in the wrong. All his facts are, we doubt not, correct, but the instinct which so illogically or absurdly denies them all is, as we think, correct too. In feminine phraseology, "He may prove all he likes, and it does'nt matter, because after all you know it isn't so ;" or in more mascu- line phrase, he has omitted one essential datum in his calculation. His thesis as he puts it is quite conclusive. You are bound, he says, when comparing the present with the past cost of living, to compare actual prices, and not prices as affected by new wants. You have no right to say rent is higher because you seek a bigger house, or education costs more because you desire a higher form of tuition, or rates are more oppressive when you want so many new comforts paid for out of them. Your expense for lighting is not to be calculated by your bills for oil and gas, but by your bills as they would be if you required only the light with which your grandfather was content. You ought to compare the old article at its old price with the old article at its present price, and then you will find that there has in most departments of life been very little increase of cost at all. You can get the bad old accommoda- tion at the old price. You need not give any more for the apology for education. You can stay at home if you like, as your forefathers did, in spite of all the cost of modern travel. It is most unfair to count your increased wants as if they were increased privations, or as the writer puts itl—" Perhaps the oddest, one might rather say the coolest assumption often made in discussions upon this sub- ject, is one which really amounts to a claim that all loss arising from increase of cost is to be regarded as a privation, and there- fore a ground for complaint, whereas all saving arising from diminution of cost in other directions may fairly be regarded as being swallowed up by the greater demands' of the present age. Beef and butter are dearer, therefore here is a privation ; but when it is urged on the other hand that travelling is vastly cheaper, the answer will very likely be, Oh ! but people are obliged to travel so much more now than they used to do ; every one does so now, even those who formerly never thought of such a thing, and therefore we, like others, are forced to do the same.' Still more is the same answer resorted to in the case of every sort of social display. It need hardly be remarked that every plea of this sort must be peremptorily rejected." After rejecting every plea of that kind, it will be found that the cost of living has scarcely increased at all, certainly not more than ten per cent., if so much. Meat has about doubled in price, and rent outside London is a trifle dearer, say 20 per cent., but every other necessary excepting service is perceptibly cheaper. Taxes arc less; the cost of travelling is less ; books cost less; clothes are nearly the same, and servants' wages, though they seem to have altered, do not in a household of £1,000 per annum differ by £30 a year. Every word of this argument is as true as to all housekeepers over fifty it will be aggravating, and the whole of it is all the same distinctly false. The writer has forgotten or omitted one great factor in his problem,—namely, a definition of his idea of "necessaries." The question is not whether a pound of meat now costs more or less than it did in 1800, but whether a meal costs more or less; not whether "education " can be obtained as cheaply, but whether education of equivalent use does not cost more ; not whether " living " is as cheap as of old, but whether living in the same friendships is not very much more costly. The essayist is right when he says that there is no justice in placing good drainage against bad, and saying good drainage is the dearer ; but he is only right so long as the drainage is optional, and not a matter of com- pulsion. The moment a purchase becomes inevitable, and inevi- table for some other reason than the mere development of a new desire, the cost to the purchaser becomes a true addition to the cost of living ; and there have been many such additions. This every one of sanitation is such an addition. If it were open to a .man to live as his grandfather lived, it would be unfair to quote tthe plumber's bill against the good old times, but in a city no such choice is left to the economical housekeeper. He must pay his plumber's bill, or be fined, or die of typhoid, and that bill is a direct increase to his inevitable expenses. To take an even better illustration, the cost of education as a necessity has been extrava- gantly increased. It is quite true that our sons can get for £20 a year just as good an education as our fathers got for that amount, that is to say, as much of positive knowledge or positive discipline of the mind, but then of the direct object sought through that education they cannot get so much. The middle-class man of 1800 bought for his son with his £20 a year a chance of success in life which he now scarcely buys for six or seven times that sum. One end, at least, of education is to obtain an armour for the battle of life ; and if that armour is essential, and not to be obtained without increased expense, there has been a direct addition to the cost of living. As a matter of fact, we all know this has been the case. The essayist's exemplar, a professional man in a country town with £1,000 a year, would in 1800 have been liberal if, with a family of two sons and two daughters, he had spent £100 a year —that is, a tithe of his income—on education. He would now, unless very exceptionally fortunate, have to spend £330—that is, a third of his receipts—to secure identically the same article, that is, an education for his children which should fit them for their position as well as the previous generation was fitted for a third of the money. It is nonsense to say the education is better. So is the meat. But a man wants within a fraction as many ounces a day of good meat as of indifferent, and education has become as great a necessary as food,—that is to say, without it the man or woman of the professional grade is weak for the ordinary work of life. Education is a necessity, not a luxury, and its increased cost, which is excessive, and will be greater yet, is a direct addition to the cost of living. So is the cost not of hiring servants, but of feeding servants when they are hired. The essayist says, and says rightly, that the wages of domestic servants are not much heavier, but there has been no decrease in the necessity for service or in servants' appetites for meat, and he himself admits that meat is twice as dear. The price of the joint is not the point in the comparison he is making, but the extent of the inevitable butcher's bill. It is quite fair to strike out of the account the master's increased eating—if it has increased, which it has not—but it is not fair, if the servant is inevitable, to strike out his. That, on the conditions given, is a necessary, as completely a necessary for the argument as if the expense were required to keep the master alive. As to coals, light, travelling, dress, and many other things, we admit his argument fully. And we will even concede that the cost of furniture is less, though with a little shade of doubt. That furniture is cheaper than it was in nurfathers' time is certain,
yet it actually costs more, and we do not feel certain that the extra expense is altogether voluntary. No doubt we renew furni- ture more frequently, and that is our own fault ; but furniture also wears out more quickly, and that is not our own fault. Old house- keepers say it is worse made, but that is not quite the case, as we could buy furniture, if we pleased, just as durable as the old manu- facture, and very nearly of the same design. The truth is, we believe, that furniture in London perishes much more quickly than it did, from the immense increase in the deposit of dirt, which the housekeeper cannot control ; and that in the country it suffers from an unconscious change in ourselves, —the loss of the power of considering its preservation part of the business of life. We can't remember to draw down the blinds lest the carpets fade, or do our deck-pacing from time to time in fresh places, lest the pattern wear unequally. That change is involuntary, and produced by the enlargement in the horizon of men's and women's interests, and the loss which it involves may be fairly set down to loss from the cost of living. Whatever the truth about furniture, however, we do get more of most things that we pay more for, and we could do with less, and the expense therefore is not a fair addition to the "cost of living ;" but the butcher's bill is, and the Principal's bill is, and so is nearly all we pay for sanitation. It is not open to us to choose to get acclimatised to sewage. We believe, if a fair account were strut*, and no expense considered a new necessity, unless ordered by law, or commanded by doctors, or essential to success in life, or required merely to purchase articles always purchased before, it would be found that the loss in half a century on £1,000 a year would be £400 at least,—that men with defined incomes in 1875 were two-fifths less easy about money than men with the same incomes in 1815. Be it remembered that the greatest of all the per contra items, the reduction in taxation, is considered in the estimate of prices. In 1815 an Englishman paid, we believe, 6s. 8d. in the pound of his income to the State, and now he pays only 2s. at the outside ; but he paid it then, as now, mainly in higher prices, and his payment must not therefore be counted twice over. We are not at liberty in this argument to say tea is cheaper, and also to say the taxation on tea is less.
In stating our case, we have not only kept within the truth, but we have made a concession to the essayist which the great majority of those who keep house will declare to be unreasonable, and about the reasonableness of which we have some doubts our- selves. We have surrendered the whole question of grade. He says it is not fair to calculate the new advantages we purchase as additions to the cost of living, and economically he is right, but his dictum ought to be subject to one " rider." One of the things purchased by an expenditure of £1,000 a year in 1815 was liberty of living among a certain class of persons with good education, good manners, and the freedom of life which comes of exemption from care. To secure that liberty certain expenses were incurred, and if they are greatly increased, that is surely a direct addition to the cost of living. Such an increase has certainly taken place both in the cost of locomotion and in the expense of dress. Locomotion for long distances is amazingly cheaper, cheaper by at least 500 per cent., but locomotion for short distances is per- ceptibly dearer. The professional, whether in London or the country, wants horses as much as ever he did, and the cost of buying and keeping or hiring horses has doubled in the country— price, food, and wages taken together—and very nearly tripled in the metropolis. In 1815 a man in London with £1,000 a year could keep a carriage of some sort, while if he tried it now, he would find it cost him nearly double his rent; and the increase in the country, though not so oppressive, is still very great. It is the same with dress. Print dresses are as cheap as ever they were, but if women wearing print dresses cannot now associate with their equals without mortification, and still more if they cannot associate at all, then the price of association has risen, and with it the cost of living. "Society " is one of the articles to be paid for, and its price has gone up fifty per cent. We admit that it is not, rigorously speaking, a necessity, like meat or education, but still it is so nearly one— it is so clearly a constituent part of "living"—that all but the most rigid economists will account it one. " Living," in the essayist's sense, is not merely keeping alive. We pip nothing of the new mode of entertaining, or of the higher expectations all acquaintances form—for entertaining can be done cheaply, and selfish acquaintances can be dropped—and confule ourselves to requirements which may be fairly called necessaries. And one of those, we take it, is, after all, a certain equality in refinement among close friends ; and that equality, in the face Of the general rise in average incomes which the Cornhill fnualy admits, is, of all necessities, the one which costs most money.
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