The rate on dressed beef from Chicago to New York is forty-five cents per hundred pounds. The average price of this beef to the consumer in New York is (or was) approximately twenty-five cents per pound. A 10 per cent increase in freight rates would add less than five one-hundredths of one cent per pound.
If freight rates were advanced 10 per cent, the increased cost in New York City of a two-rib roast of the best quality, weighing eight pounds, retailing for $1.92, would be less than one-half cent.
Surely this is not an excessive price to pay for National prosperity and industrial peace.
LESSON X.
Freight on Eggs, Butter and Poultry.
Eggs were cheaper when Columbus experimented with them than they are now, but it cost more to carry a dozen eggs or a firkin of butter ten miles in 1492 than it would to carry them 100 miles now.
The rate on butter and eggs from points in Eastern Iowa to New York—a distance of approximately 1,200 miles—is eighty-four cents per hundred pounds. On dressed poultry from the same points to New York the rate is ninety-six and one-half cents.
The eggs are sold to the consumer by the dozen and the other commodities by the pound; and the consumer pays every farthing of freight that has accrued from the time the egg is laid, which he buys in the "original package," or as dressed poultry, or from the time the cow is milked, from which the butter is made.
An increase of 10 per cent would add eight one-hundredths of one cent per pound to the price the consumer pays for butter and eggs, and it would add nine and one-half one-hundredths of one per cent per pound to the cost of dressed poultry, for which he pays from twenty to thirty cents per pound.
LESSON XI.