New-York tribune., 1900-05-29
THE RANGE OF PRICES.

A reader Of more than average intelligence
illustrates by single question the difficulty
which those have to meet who discuss the mon
etary problem How can it be true, he asks,
that after all the great advance In prices Of
products last year and this the general average
at the highest point this year is still only S0OS
per cent Of the average on January 1, 1850?
Have not Americans been aware that their prog
ress In inventions, in the sciences and in the ap-
pcation Of new inventions to labor saving de-
vices has given them advantages over the
labor of the whole world so that they ought to
be able to reduce the cost of almost everything
much it has been reduced elsewhere2 Is
it possible that men even now ignorant that
the superiority Of American machinery and tools
is the chief cause this year of their extraordi-
nary increase in manufactured exports, which
produces heavy balance due to this country in
gold even when exports of the great staples
have shown most decline?
The things which men know perfectly we'll
and yet all the time forget are making them
good deal Of trouble Back in 1878. when men
noticed that the preparation for specie re-
sumption had already gone so far that prices
of commodities Were really 20 per cent lower
than they had been in 1860, it gave men
great hope that specie resumption would be
accomplished without trouble and with splen-
did success. 1t was accomplished because
prices had been reduced in advance below
the prices of the commodities in Great
Britain. Since that time this country has had
more than twenty years in which to go on
gaining in every industry and has gained so
far that American machinery and tools are
going into every corner of the globe because
they do better work than others. Surely it
would not be natural to suppose that prices of
manufactured products had been less cheapened
here through progress in all the arts than they
had been in most other progressive nat tions.
The naked fact that such exports do go to all
the world long columns of seventy to ninety
lines being taken TO enumerate in official tables
the many lands supplied from this country,
shows clearly enough where prices of manu-
factured products will be found in their normal
relation to those of other countries.
At the lowest prices ever known in this coun-
try on July 2, 1897. business had been for some
time steadily recovering from the prostration
under Cleveland's Administration. The Dingley
tariff was expected, but not yet enacted. Prices
of articles in the clothing class, taken together
with its relative Importance allotted to each.
We're only $40 per cent of the prices of the
same articles in January, 1860 and prices of
metal and mineral products were only 44.34 per
cent more than their prices in 1850. There was
a curious similarity in ratios of metal products
and also of breadstuffs, the latter averaging
A 76 of their prices in 1860. Dairy and garden
products averaged close to clothing or textile
goods, only 1.50 per cent of their prices in 1860.
Meats were higher, 1896 per cent of their prices
in 1860 and prices in the miscellaneous class,
embracing lumber and its manufactures, brick,
lime, paints, oils, glass, soap fertilizers drugs,
and chemicals, averaged 74.15 per cent of their
prices in 1860. 1t is not difficult to trace the in
fuence of the widely varying progress in eff
cheney of invention and machinery in these
bottom prices which may indeed have been
lower in some cases than would leave fair
profit for producers but vet were natural re-
suits of competition, mainly between domestic
manufacturers of the various classes. The eff
feet when demand came to surpass the supply
In many lines was to raise the ratio of prices to
those of 1860 in each class from the lowest
point in 1897 to the ratios given below for the
highest point in 1900 and the figures added
for Nav Is two months later: