If one would know with something like scientific precision what it means for a family to live on $500 or less a year in a city like New York, for instance, if he would realize the relation of a rise of even a cent in the cost of a necessity to the comfort of the multitude of working girls in this country on $6.00 and $8.00 a week, he should study the various investigations recently made into the budgets of these two classes. They demonstrate that if one is to take care of a family of five persons in New York City on $500 a year, or of himself on a wage of $6.00 or $8.00 a week, he must think before he buys a penny newspaper, and he must save and plan for months to get a yearly holiday for the family at Coney Island; that there is practically no possibility of a nest egg or of schooling for the children beyond fourteen years of age, that sickness means debt or charity, and that the accumulation of those things which make for comfort and beauty in a home is out of the question. To these families an increase of a cent in the price of a quart of milk is something like a catastrophe. To these girls, every penny added to the cost of food, of coal, of common articles of clothing, means simply less food, less warmth, less covering, when at the best they never can have enough of any one of these necessaries. These budgets are a powerful demonstration that the rapid rise in the cost of living under the Dingley Bill was to a vast number of people of this country nothing less than a tragedy, for what is true in New York City is equally true in Chicago, in Pittsburg, and in many factory towns. The statistics, which show the rise in prices from 1897 onward, are as sensational as those which show the increase in national wealth. For instance, take what the bulletin of the Labor Bureau calls the “annual per capita cost of the necessaries of daily consumption.” It rose from $74.31 in 1896 to $107.26 in 1906. Coal which cost $3.50 a ton in 1896 cost $4.50 in 1906. Manufactured commodities were 32 per cent higher in 1906 than ten years before, raw commodities, 50 per cent higher. “All commodities” averaged 35.4 per cent higher. Rents soared everywhere. That wages increased largely in many industries in this decade is equally true, but that they increased correspondingly in any but the most favored industries—those where either the Unions exercised compelling power or those where the managers were unusually enlightened—is doubtful. A government investigation of the wages in about 4000 establishments, employing 334,000 persons, engaged in manufacturing and mechanical industries, the kind of establishments where, of course, the forces which raise wages act most freely and successfully, shows that in 1906 the weekly wages of the 334,000 were 19.1 per cent higher than in 1896, while, as said, the cost of all commodities was 35 per cent higher. Wages increased 3.9 per cent in 1906 over 1905, while the cost of the commodities increased 5.9 per cent.