If they do not learn this at school it is impressed upon their receptive minds by every illuminated billboard and painted rock that meets their gaze from Eastport to California. There are half a dozen brands of flour ground at Minneapolis and every one is better than all others. The rate on this incomparable product in carloads from Minneapolis to New York is 25 cents per hundred pounds. That is 12½ cents per fifty-pound sack. This flour is sold to the consumer in New York at approximately $1.85 per fifty-pound sack (or it was when this was written). An increase of 10 per cent in freight rates would add but one and one-quarter cents to the price of a fifty-pound sack, or a little less than two one-hundredths of one cent per pound. The freight rate on a fifty-pound sack of flour from Minneapolis to Chicago is five cents per sack. An increase of 10 per cent in rates would add only five mills per sack between these points, or _one one-hundredth of one cent per pound_. LESSON IX. FREIGHT RATES AND DRESSED BEEF. The reason cattle are butchered and carried to the consumer as dressed beef rather than driven to market on foot or hauled as live stock, is that the freight charge is less and the beef arrives in better condition. Little children in New York and Boston appreciate this, if the wise grown-ups of the West sometimes seem to doubt it. The rate on dressed beef from Chicago to New York is forty-five cents per hundred pounds. The average price of this beef to the consumer in New York is (or was) approximately twenty-five cents per pound. A 10 per cent increase in freight rates would add _less than five one-hundredths of one cent per pound_. If freight rates were advanced 10 per cent, the increased cost in New York City of a two-rib roast of the best quality, weighing eight pounds, retailing for $1.92, would be _less than one-half cent_. Surely this is not an excessive price to pay for _National prosperity and industrial peace_. LESSON X. FREIGHT ON EGGS, BUTTER AND POULTRY. Eggs were cheaper when Columbus experimented with them than they are now, but it cost more to carry a dozen eggs or a firkin of butter ten miles in 1492 than it would to carry them 100 miles now. The rate on butter and eggs from points in Eastern Iowa to New York--a distance of approximately 1,200 miles--is eighty-four cents per hundred pounds. On dressed poultry from the same points to New York the rate is ninety-six and one-half cents. The eggs are sold to the consumer by the dozen and the other commodities by the pound; _and the consumer pays every farthing of freight that has accrued from the time the egg is laid, which he buys in the "original package," or as dressed poultry, or from the time the cow is milked, from which the butter is made_.