The Donaldsonville chief. [volume] (Donaldsonville, La.) 1871-current, 1884-06-28
OUR LETTER FROM BRoADBRIM.

OUR LETTER FROM BROADBRiM.
The Labor and Food Problems-Ominous
Spirit of fUnrest-Prfnces and Paupers-
Political Points-The City Baths-Sui-
cides Still Epidemic-Saints and Sinners.
NEW YORK, June q, 1884.
EDITOR CHIEF:
While / am willing to confess that it is
wonderful how the two millions of people
in New York and Brooklyn are fed every
day, still this hard fact is staring us in the
face, that every day the problem is becom-
ing more and more difficult; and what
makes it more difficult, not to- say alarm
ing, is, that while the price of every kind of
food is rapidly increasing and rents are be-
ing raised every year, wages are diminish
ing, and now the question is where is it all
to end2 A pound of tolerably good beef by
the time it reaches the consumer, costs any
where from eighteen to thirty cents. A
bushel of potatoes dollar. Chickens from
rs to 80 cents, and 50 on through the entire
food list. The papers teem with accounts
of the wonderful harvests, the estimate of
the wheat crop of 1884 reaching the enor-
nous figures of $50 millions of bushels,
and the corn crop almost two thousand
millions, but it avaiIs US not in New York,
for the numerous hands through which
they pass have so enhanced the cost, that
any article of food is worth four or five
times as much in New York as it is on the
spot where it is produced. lot Of
philanthropists with Seth Green and Eugene
Blackford at their head, have been engaged
in the pious work of building up the Fish
Commission for stocking cur rivers with
fish, for they said, and very truly, the la
boring man must have animal food to sus-
tain him, and if he can't have porter-house
steaks we will give him plenty of excellent
fish. No bad thing that, eh? And it would
not be if we got them, but we don't. Not
withstanding all the noise the Fish Com
mission makes, fish was never dearer than
it is now and as for poor folks eating it
they may possibly get a smell of the tails
and fins, but as to going in for the best por-
ton of it, they never think of it, and it
looks to me now as if dish of boiled cod
fish few years hence would be luxury
only to be INDUCED in by the rich-the Jay
Goulds and Vanderbilts. The way you get
the reports of the New York markets is
through the ubiquitous reporter. He goe
probably to Washington market, which is
the principal wholesale market Of the city.
all the dealers know him. and they fairly
stuff him with intelligence as to the cheap
ness of everything. He takes it all in as
gospel, but even allowing the quotations he
receives were true, by the time that same
food has reached the remote parts of New
York and Brooklyn it has frequently doubled
its cost. 1t is not at all surprising that
Henry George finds multitudes of eager
listeners when he announces as the new
gospel, "that no man has any right to the
ownership of land, nor should he be allowed
to hold any more than he himself can culti-
vate." Men who are hungry can under
stand logic like that without the aid of
scientific analysis.
When pound of halibut which cost at
the nets three cents, costs sixteen and
eighteen cents by the time it reaches the
consumer, he begins to think that he is the
victim of the speculator, and when he is
asked to pay his landlord twenty or thirty
per cent. on his Investment for very indiffer-
ent accommodations, any gospel appears
true which promises to help him out.
There never has been a time when the labor
were SO strong at they are to-
day. Every night sees meetings Of work
ingmen discontented and mutinous, all
over the city. They may not understand
the science of political economy, or the in
tricacies of the tariff, but they do know
that they are poorly fed and poorly clad,
and poorly housed, and yet many of them
work from the rising of the sun to the going
down of the same. Everything is dear ex-
cept advice, and that is so cheap as to be