By & Trades Unionist.
Both letters and newspapers from abroad indicate that the Englishman who has been away from the home land for the last one or two Years possesses a very vague idea of what the cost of living really is. It is such a commonplace, course, here that the newspapers rarely refer to it—everybody knows that a small loaf costs 44d. and quart of milk lid, so why labour that point? And it is seemingly beneath the dignity of Reuter to wire out that butter is rationed and that the individual allowance per day is just the weight of a Mexican 20-cent piece.
Seven shillings would purchase in the Spring of 1914 as many the necessities and the small luxuries of normal civilized life as one pound will purchase to-day.
Seeing that this statement is flatly at variance with the Government estimate, a house-keeping account for one week in 1914 is printed below with. the present prices for the same quantities in a parallel column.
The present estimate of the Gov: ernment is somewhere between 128, and 148 per cent. increas: in the cost of living today compared with 1914. the fact of the rase being that the increase is nearly 200 per cent. when the all round cost of living is taken into consideration and not a few selected necessities.
The family, whose weekly bouse-keeping bill we have here, consisted of four persons, three adults and an eight-year-old child. As may be seen, they had plenty of plain substantial food. To abbreviate what otherwise would have been a very long list, about cighteenpence worth of small items, polishers. condiments, and siniilar trifles, have not been included, but the advance in cost of these articles is about the same as in those that are given.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.