itthl PRICE OF BREAD.
MBE first bad consequence of war, a rise in the price of
Bread, has already fallen upon this country ; but its effect will not, Fe believe, be so serious as some of our contempo- raries expect. Wheat and flour have risen, speaking broadly, twenty-five per cent., and as we import, in round numbers, about £1,000,000 worth a week of those articles, the war would appear at first sight to inflict. on the United Kingdom a fine of 136,000 a day—money absolutely lost to the country and tkansferred to foreigners. This conclusion seems the more certain because of the first specialty of the corn trade,—that while prices in that trade fluctuate as violently as in any other, so violently indeed as to give rise to a good deal of heavy gambling, supplies do not fluctuate to anything like the same extent. The people will have about the same quantity of corn and flour, whatever their price, and a " rise " is not marked, as it is in every other case, by a decreased demand. The people could no doubt, if they were hardly pressed, save a con- siderable per-centage on their consumption by new arrange- ments as to the use of meat, by more care in eating up frag- ments, by co-operative bakeries, and by suspending their pre- judice in favour of white bread and against bread baked with the bran in it—that prejudice, which is utterly unreason- able, adds ten per cent, to the cost of bread—but until very hardly pressed, pressed as they were in the old Revo- lutionary War, they will make no changes, and will put up with anything rather than go without their usual supplies of bread of the accustomed kinds. The quantity imported, therefore, will remain almost the same, and the whole increase of price would appear, at first sight, to be lost to the community. The positive loss sustained is, however, very much less than the nominal. In the first place a severe rise in price like that which has taken place during this April is not likely to last for twelve months. The United Kingdom does not depend for its food, to any im- portant extent, upon any one kingdom, or even any one con- tinent. Neither the Russian supply, nor the Roumanian supply, which is nearly as large, will make, except for the few weeks necessary to readjust arrangements, any serious difference to the market. If Odessa is closed and the Roumanian stocks are sold to the Russian armies, there will be an increased de- mand upon the farmers of the American West and the peasants of Northern India, and the supplies will again come forward with the utmost regularity, the only sub- stantial difficulty being transit, which is mainly a dif- ficulty of expense, removable by the increase of a very few shillings—about 5s., we believe, at the outside—on the price per quarter. The Americans are always talking of the difficulty of " forwarding " their crops, but with an extra crown per quarter in full sight, they always do forward them somehow • and the same remark is true, though to a less extent, of the Indian grain exporters, who ought, this year, if they have capital enough, to make fortunes. So vast are the fields now tapped by the importers, that it is doubtful whether, if Northern India had only double instead of single lines of rail- way—an improvement which ought to be the basis of the new contract between the State and the Railway Companies, to be arranged in 1880—even an American war would raise the price of corn to an unendurable figure,—whether, granted an average harvest at home, we could be seriously injured, injured sufficiently to provoke bread riots, while the sea was open to our grain trade. The loss of the freedom of the seas would, of course, produce for a year acute misery, placing the country, so to speak, in the position of a besieged city ; but that is a far-distant speculation, into which it would be unprofitable to enter. We shall not have much left worth living for if the seas are shut. As matters stand at present, unless there should be a prospect of a bad harvest in three continents—in Great Britain, in the American West, and in Northern India,—prices, though high, cannot be forced up to any dangerous level. Free-trade has rescued us from the terrible dangers which forty years ago accompanied dear bread, and made Sir James Graham, one of the hardest men who ever lived, declare that the position of a Home Secretary with the Corn Laws un- repealed was unendurable. The evil is a temporary one at worst, and even as a temporary evil has mitigations. The upper and middle classes scarcely feel the rise in the price of grain at all, or feel it many of them as a relief. Rents are safer and all connected with grain production richer, while citizens are scarcely moved. Bread is the one grand necessary which is cheaper than of old. What with its diminished price, and the increase in the national wealth, which has altered perceptibly the whole scale of thinking about expenditures, and the great rise in most other articles of food, especially meat, butter, milk, and fresh vegetables, the baker's bill is now the least important item in household economy, and the " respectables " down to classes with very modest means feel the increased price of corn chiefly in the increased amount of poor-rate, the expenditure on relief rising of course in almost exact pro- portion to the price of flour. Among the poor, and especially the very poor who still maintain themselves, the effect is, of course, very much more serious. The position of an agricultural labourer or an unskilled artisan—the man who,
like a hodman, for instance, is really a skilled artisan's servant--with bread at a shilling a loaf, and no war expenditure to create a fictitious prosperity, is one to make a philanthropist sigh and a statesman almost despair, but still he does to an immense extent meet the pressure by readjustment. The ex- penditure on liquor is not waste, as far as the contentment of the people is concerned, but it is waste as far as the national resources are concerned, and it is in this expenditure on liquor that the average poor man, who is not a drunkard at all, but likes a glass as an enjoyment, commences his retrenchments. In an expenditure of £160,000,000 a year on alcohol there is a large margin for savings, which, though no doubt they annoy the sufferers, certainly do not deplete in any way the national reservoir of strength, and which are not only made at once, but made in an immense majority of cases with a patience and almost good-humour which raises any observer's permanent estimate of the English character.
The great importance and noteworthiness of any rise in the price of bread under our present arrangements arises almost entirely from two facts,—that it falls with such dispropor- tionate severity upon the very poor, and that it is so exception- ally perceptible to everybody. The poor have a traditionary idea of the price of bread, and are worried by their wives, who find the household allowance suddenly insufficient to pro- vide the daily meals. The placards with "Bread risen again" frighten them as taxes do not do, raise visions of the workhouse in their minds, and rouse that feeling of dread of the future which excites men even more than present and therefore endurable hardship. The price of bread, within reasonable limits, does not matter much to anybody with more than two pounds a week. If he keeps servants, he can afford a small addition to the cost of their food ; and if he does not, he has practically very little additional to pay. To the man, how- ever, with less than a pound a week, the price of bread is the thing most important in this world. His main expenditure is on loaves, and he cannot decrease their number without posi- tive danger to health, or a discomfort and sense of personal priva- tion such as the rich can hardly estimate. A time of dear bread is therefore always more or less a time of discontent, of complaint, and of the political agitation which discontent and querulousness are sure sooner or later to evolve. If the price of corn rose to eighty shillings, which is most improbable, we should not indeed have bread riots throughout the country, as of old, but we should have a temper of the public mind widely dif- ferent from that which has prevailed for the past four years. If Tories knew their own interests, they would not exult in the present rise quite so sincerely as their squirearchical proclivi- ties now induce them to do, and would press on their Govern- ment efforts for facilitating the transit and import of grain to which, as at present advised, they would lend very unwilling ears. There are no restrictions remaining to be abolished, but there are facilities to be given in the way of bargains with Railways when the Passenger Duty is abolished, of rearrange- ments of port dues, and of provisions for Railway transport in India, which would most seriously assist to keep the prices of bread tolerably level. At present, a European commotion, though it inflicts no hardship on the well-to-do classes, and can be borne by the poor through a certain sacrifice of com- fort, presses on cottagers very much as a two-shilling income- tax would press upon the taxpayers.
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