THE COST OF LIVING.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XXXI, Issue 474, 31 August 1909, Page 3

THE COST OF LIVING.

FIFTY YEARS AGO AND NOW. Speaking as one of the surviving pioneer members of the Canterbury Chamber of Commerce at the annual meeting of that institution recently, Mr W. H. Hargreaves said, among other things that had struck him during late years, and especially to-day, was the complaint against the high cost of living. It would surprise many who were not in New Zealand in the early days to learn that certain necessaries of life, from forty to forty-six years ago, cost very much more than they did to-day. Take flour, for example. The price at present was about £lO per ton. In 1863, before the electric telegraph enabled them to keep in daily touch with the outside markets, he and his brother, who were in partnership as general merchants in Lyttelton, charged ,£24 per ton wholesale to the baker. They paid their headstoreman £2 10s per week, which was the accepted rate. Casual hands received a shilling per hour, and there was no complaint from any of them. Those men invariably had their small freeholds, on which they cultivated and grew vegetables, without interfering with their ordinary avocations. He mentioned that to show them the difference between the endeavours of the early colonists to economise and live within their means and the present day system of living. He was not complaining that the working man and the artisan were living under better conditions than prevailed fifty years ago, but he contended that the chief articles of consumption were infinitely cheaper now than then. He did not remember in the old days selling decent tea at less than 2s 6d per lb wholesale, by the chest —• by the half-chest and box it was dearer. To-day tea of equal quality could be bought at less than half the price. Sugar, which they sold wholesale at from £52 to per ton, nowadays cost from to Foreign loaf sugar in the loaf sold at per lb wholesale then ; now it sold at 3id per lb retail. He did not see any justification for the outcry against the Flour Millers’ Association so long as flour was quoted at from £9 to £lO 10s. It was to be feared that in many instances much of the old-time spirit of self-reliance had been extinguished. They needed three things nowadays—first economy, second economy, and third economy.