An increase of 10 per cent would add eight one-hundredths of one cent per pound to the price the consumer pays for butter and eggs, and it would add nine and one-half one-hundredths of one per cent per pound to the cost of dressed poultry, for which he pays from twenty to thirty cents per pound. LESSON XI. FREIGHT RATES AND LEATHER BELTING. Some little children and many of their mothers do not know that a great deal of the power that makes the wheels go round in this industrial beehive is transmitted by belting. The shops of the Lake Shore & Michigan Southern Railway at Elkhart, Indiana, are equipped with 13,288 running feet, or _practically two and one-half miles_, of leather belting. This belting cost the railroad company $6,235, or an average of 46.9 cents per running foot. The belting was shipped from Boston to Elkhart, a distance of 937 miles. The total freight charges amounted to $18.37, or fourteen one-hundredths of one cent per running foot. An increase of 10 per cent would add $1.83 to this cost, or _fourteen one-thousandths of one cent per running foot_. This belting, moreover, cost the railroad company $1,082 more than it would have cost at the prices prevailing in 1899, representing an increase of 21 per cent. During this same period there was no change whatever in the freight rate. LESSON XII. THE RAILWAYS AND NATIONAL DEVELOPMENT. Now listen to the sober words of the one man who has perhaps given more official attention to the subject than any other citizen of the republic: "Without regard to the personnel of railroad officials, without regard primarily to the interest of stockholders, but in the interest of public welfare and national prosperity, we must permit railway earnings to be adequate for railroad improvement at advantage and profit. "To my mind it is a most impressive fact, so great as to elude the grasp of imagination, that the railway traffic of the country fully doubled in the first seven years of this twentieth century. This enormous addition to the volume of transportable goods overtaxed, as you know, the existing facilities, and the resulting condition perhaps accounts for much of the hostility which has been manifested in various quarters. For the man who has raised something by hard labor or made something with painstaking skill, which he could sell at a handsome profit in an eager market, and finds that he cannot get it carried to destination, and so sees his anticipated gains turned into a positive loss, is naturally exasperated and unthinkingly 'blames it' on the railroads, and is ready to hit them with anything he can lay his hands to; and as the state legislature seemed to be the most convenient weapon he wielded it for all it was worth.