In response to inquiries made concerning certain staple articles of daily and general use in various of the smaller cities and towns extending from Massachusetts to Georgia and Illinois, and from Michigan to Mississippi, it has been ascertained that throughout this region the transportation charge on such articles ranges as follows: On a man's suit of clothes, from two to eight cents; on calicos and ginghams, from one-fiftieth of a cent to one-fifth of a cent a yard; the freight charge paid on the entire apparel of a fully dressed man or woman in this section would range perhaps from six or seven to 16 or 18 cents. The rate on an ordinary dining room suite consisting of table, sideboard, six chairs and a china closet would average from 75 cents to $5, on a parlor suite of sofa and four chairs from 50 cents to $4, on a bedstead and its equipment from 75 cents to $1.50, in each case from the factory to the home. The lumber used in the ordinary eight-room house will have paid the railroads from $35 to $150, and the brick from $6 or $8 to $50 or $60, as the kiln may be near or remote. A fifty-pound sack of flour from the mill, even at Minneapolis, in but a few cases has paid a freight rate of over eight or nine cents to the consumer. Products of the beef or the hog are carried from the western packing houses throughout this territory at rates that vary from a fifth of a cent to not exceeding a cent per pound. It has not been difficult to secure such information as applies in the main to the transportation charge borne by a manufactured article from the place of making to the final market, or on foodstuff from the place of growth to the place of sale to the consumer. Data as to the amount of transportation charge carried by the various kinds of raw material entering into a manufactured product has not in many cases been so easy of ascertainment. A principal reason has been that the manufacturers in numbers of instances do not know what it is themselves. Many kinds of material are bought at a price which includes delivery at the factory, the freight rate not coming under the cognizance of the purchaser. The different materials used in a product may have come from such diverse sources, and paid such varying rates of freight, that the ascertainment of the total freight charge in any given unit of manufacture would be too difficult to be worth while. In numerous other cases the freight charge is confessedly so small an item that no attempt is made to apportion it as an item of expenditure per unit of product, the total simply being grouped in the aggregate of expense.