to refund excess profits or to make a contribution to some patriotic organization. But the whole hearted desire to aid and coöperate with the Food Administration in its efforts to solve the food problem and meet the food necessities of the time was so nearly universal that the few exceptions were noteworthy chiefly because they were so few. Under war conditions it was inevitable that prices for all food commodities should rise far above their level in pre-war years. But the control of the situation which was kept by the Food Administration and the carefully organized and consolidated buying of our own and other governments, enormous beyond comparison with any market situation in all the history of the world, reduced prices below what they were when we entered the war and kept them down to a level much lower than they would otherwise have reached. When we had been in the war for a year the Food Administration estimated that during that time the price of food commodities had decreased twelve per cent to the consumer and increased eighteen per cent to the producer. For instance, the price of flour, which reached a maximum in 1917 of $16.50 per barrel at the mill-door, at the end of April, 1918, stood at $10.50. Without the stabilizing influence of the Food Administration it would have mounted in that time, in the opinion of experts, to $40 or $50 per barrel. The plea to conserve food met with enthusiastic response. In the spring of 1918, when there was dire need of more wheat for export, whole towns and counties, in some of the states, pledged themselves to use no wheat until the new crop should be available. A conference of 500 managers of first-class hotels and restaurants voluntarily gave their pledge to one another and to the Food Administration to use no wheat flour in their kitchens until the next harvest was ready. Households innumerable throughout the land did the same thing. We entered the war with only 20,000,000 bushels of wheat available for export. The need grew sharp in England and France and Italy and we sent them 141,000,000 bushels, having saved 121,000,000 bushels out of what we would ordinarily have eaten ourselves. Because the armies and the peoples across the ocean needed sugar, the request was sent forth that individual consumption of sugar should be limited to three and later to two pounds of sugar per month. Its consumption was voluntarily reduced by about one-third. In four months in the summer of 1918 we saved and sent abroad, out of our usual consumption, 500,000 tons of sugar. Increased production and conservation were responsible for 1,600,000,000 more pounds of pork products ready for export in the fall of 1918 than were available the previous year, while for the three summer months of 1918 the records showed an increase of 190,000,000 pounds of dressed beef.