"A further evidence that the Food Administration could not avoid the onus of price fixing lies in the reasons for which the Administration was brought into existence and the services it was created to perform. The Food Administration is a war agency. Its chief purpose is the feeding of warring nations, our own nation and the Allies. All its other activities, its conservation, its stabilization of trade processes, its encouragement of production, are tributary to the one purpose of segregating stocks of food for the effective prosecution of the war. This latter purpose, in fact, takes the Food Administration directly or indirectly into the market.... By Section 14 of the Lever Bill, which became the Food Control Law, the President is authorized from time to time to determine and fix a reasonable guaranteed price for wheat and this section itself fixed the price for the crop of 1918 at not less than $2 per bushel at the principal interior primary markets. Pursuant to this section the President has, by two separate decrees, set the price of 1917 wheat and of the 1918 crop at $2.20 per bushel. Section 11 of the law authorizes the President to purchase and store and sell wheat and flour, meal, beans, and potatoes. Manifestly any purchase so made by the government would in effect fix the price. Aside from these delegations of power no authority is given by the Food Control Law to fix prices. And yet a study of the operations of these provisions as well as a regard for the implications of other functions of the Food Administration carry the conviction that price fixing is a necessary and inescapable corollary of the effective prosecution of the Food Administration program." PRICE LEVEL, NOVEMBER, 1918 With the close of military operations there was noted a slight decline in commodity prices; how far the downward tendency would reach was considered a moot point. The apparent zenith point in prices was attained in July, 1918, but _Bradstreet's_ prudently thought it unwise to indulge in any prophecies regarding low prices. The increased demand for food products among the stricken peoples of Europe would, it was believed, prevent any considerable fall in prices. There was not much to encourage consumers in the study of the index numbers of food commodities. The writer in _Bradstreet's_ shows a wide range of price movements in the following table, in which are given the index numbers based on the prices per pound of ninety-six articles: