Camas Prairie chronicle. [volume] (Cottonwood, Idaho) 1901-1917, 1907-03-29
THOSE GOOD OLD TIMES.

Had you lived in the fourteenth
century, says American Farmer,
you could bough draught horses
at 72 cents each and oxen al
SIPS. In the days of Henry II
$500 would have equipped a farm
with three draught horses, hall
a dozen oxen, twenty cows anc
two hundred sheep, leaving g
balance of So toward the pay
ment of rent, which was about
S. a year. In England pasture
and arabic lands were ridicuI-
ously cheap, 2 cents an acre fol-
the former, IL cents an acre
for the latter being considered
a fair annual rental. Two cents
or its equivalent would buy a
pair of chickens in those blessed
days of old. For the value of a
nickel one could acquire a goose
fit for a Christmas dinner or two
ducks that would make fine
roast. A penny would purchase
dozen strictly fresh eggs, and
wheat sometimes fell as low as
40 cents a quarter, or eight
bushels. This period seems to
have been the paradise of topers,
as the brewer was compelled by
law to sell for 2 cents three
gallons of beer, the equivalent
OF forty-eight glasses. 1t will
give our modern labor unions the
cold shivers to read that three
cents a day was considered good
wages for an ordinary laborer.
Our farmers will probably have
a sigh of sympathy when they
learn that even at harvest time A
cents was the highest amount
paid. Young couples about to
marry had no such terrors be-
fore their eyes as confront them
in this era of prosperity.
Housekeeping might safely be en-
tered upon by the most timorous
in those good old days. +"
House rent was so low that the
Lord Mayor of London paid only
$3.50 a year to his landlord.
The Chancellor of the British ex-
chequer, the man who does the
work of our Secretary Of the
Treasury, had an annual salary
of S192. When,a father sent his
son to a university A cents a day
was looked upon as a comfort
able allowance, with a margin
for such luxuries as wine at 8 to
IL cents a gallon. A salary of
$24 year was considered NUM-
ficent. King Edward the vi
gave his daughter an allowance
of $3.50 a week, with an addi-
tional $247.6O a year for the
maintenance of her eight ser
wants. The bed that a king then
slept on would now be stunned
by the humblest farmer in the
land. There is not a renter in
the West that would not be
considered rich by comparison.
Remember, too, that they had
no railroads in those days, or
decent roads of any kind. A
trip of a few hundred miles was
a momentous undertaking, and a
man setting out from London to
Edinburg made his will with
little hopes of getting back. Of
course, there were no interur-
bans, or street cars, or even
canals, and wheeled vehicles
were entirely out of the reach of
any but the aristocracy. But it
is not necessary to go back to
the fourteenth century or to
England to find out what was
meant by 'the good old times. 4"
Come along to the nineteenth
century and to our own country
and see how people lived much
less than hundred years ago.
Many men now living remember
how one had to work all day at
the hardest kind Of work for one
bushel of wheat. Fifty cents in
trade was what one got for be-
ginning at daylight and grabbing
or splitting rails until the sink