Tobacco was manufactured and sold in three grades, viz., cigars, which
were sold in packages twenty cigars for a dollar, and smoking tobacco
and chewing at one dollar a package. No cigarettes were manufactured or
sold by the Government or admitted into Eurasia, as it was recognized
by all intelligent people who took a warm interest in human progress
that the use of tobacco in the form of cigarettes had an injurious
effect on the young, through the pernicious habit of inhaling the
smoke. Coffee and tea were put up in three grades at one dollar a
package, the packages weighing in proportion to grade, and sugar was
made and sold in two grades, viz., common sugar and refined. The common
was put up in twenty-five-pound sacks and sold for one dollar a sack,
and the refined sugar in twenty-pound sacks and sold at one dollar a
sack. Salt was put up in one-hundred-pound sacks and five sacks of
common salt were sold for one dollar and four sacks of refined salt for
one dollar, or at the rate of four dollars a ton for rock salt and five
dollars a ton for refined salt.
The Government manufactured charcoal on a large scale in fireproof
brick kilns, that turned out ten thousand bushels of charcoal to the
kiln, with elevated railroad tracks running between the rows of kilns,
so that the wood was unloaded from the cars into the kilns and on the
outside of the kilns were sunken railroad tracks so that the charcoal
when drawn from the kilns could be loaded into the cars with the least,
amount of labor, enabling the Government to sell charcoal in
one-hundred-pound sacks at one dollar for two hundred pounds, or at the
rate of ten dollars a ton. The Government reserved for its own use all
anthracite coal, but sold bituminous coal in two-hundred-pound sacks
for a dollar, at the rate of five dollars a ton. The Government
reserved for its own use crude petroleum, but refined it as coal oil
and sold it at ten cents a gallon in dollar lots.
Pig iron and bar steel were sold by the Government at a price yielding
a profit of twenty per cent. over cost of production; lead and copper
at the same rate of profit, and all the gold and silver mined or
brought into Eurasia was coined and went into circulation. Every
commodity produced or manufactured by the Government in the above list
was sold at the same price, whether the Government warehouse where the
goods were sold was in the most populous city of Eurasia or at a lonely
fishing-station in the icy regions of the Arctic or in the torrid
deserts of the Tropics.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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