Many are now telling the people that the tariff is solely responsible for the high cost of living and for the prevalence of social unrest and discontent. Such phenomena are world-wide and exist abroad as much as, if not more than, they exist here. In England, which has no protective tariff, the complaint against the high cost of living has been even louder than here. The real causes of the increase in the cost of living with us undoubtedly are: (1) enormous increase in the world's supply of gold, necessarily diminishing the purchasing value of the dollar, for the world's gold production, which from 1850 to 1890 averaged $120,000,000 per annum and was $130,650,000 in 1891, increased to fully $461,000,000 in 1911, (2) rapid increase of population without a corresponding increase of the production of food and other necessaries of life, (3) flocking to the city and abandoning the farm, (4) appreciation in land values, (5) increase in the price of raw materials, (6) higher rates of wages and decrease in the number of hours of work, (7) better standards of living, (8) exhaustion of some sources of supply, (9) extravagance in public expenditures, and (10) withdrawal of armies of civil servants from productive industry. These are the principal and controlling causes that tend to the higher cost of living; they are world-wide, and, if explained, they will be easily understood and recognized by intelligent and candid business men and workmen, who will at once perceive that these causes will not be removed in any degree by free-trade legislation. Last year serious disturbances occurred in Europe as a result of the prevailing high cost of food supplies there, and the British board of trade is now making an investigation into the cost of living, not only in England but also in Germany, France and Belgium. In fact, an international commission is at this moment inquiring into these causes. How preposterous it would be to say that the American protective tariff was the cause of the high cost of living in free-trade England or elsewhere in Europe!