was the farmer, then, who was really getting the profit from my seventy-twocent-porterhouse steak.

The trouble was to find a farmer who knew what his profits were. Eugene Grubb, who is perhaps the greatest potato grower in the country and something of a cattle man himself, thought that Col. J. B. Power might know, and Dan Wallace, the editor of the Minnesota Farmer, was pretty sure that the Colonel could enlighten me. Then I met Tom Cooper, the North Dakota better farming man, in Minneapolis, and he was positive of it.

"Sure, Colonel Power can tell you what a steer costs," said Mr. Cooper. "I'm going back to Fargo to-night come on and go with me."

Colorado, Minnesota, and North Dakota seemed to be unanimous for the Colonel, so early the next morning I was telephoning from Fargo to the Helendale Farm, nearly forty miles away.

"I want to come out and see you, and find out why porterhouse steak costs me 32 cents a pound," I told Colonel Power.

THE COST OF RAISING BEEF

"Perhaps I can help you out on that," was the cheering response. "You can get a train out of Fargo in twenty minutes."

When I got to the farmhouse Colonel Power was ready with facts and figures. Not only has he been raising beef cattle for thirty years, but he has been keeping track of the cost. It is second nature to Colonel Power to keep track of figures. A New England farm boy seventy-odd years ago, he was for thirty years a surveyor and railroad builder before he settled down at fifty on the Helendale Farm. He is nearly eighty now I wouldn't have guessed it within twenty years if he hadn't told me — and he keeps his farm records with the same mathematical accuracy with which he ran the lines for the Northern Pacific, when the Indian and the buffalo were the principal inhabitants of North Dakota.

porterhouse steak," said Colonel Power. "Another reason is that the 'cattle barons' of the old days of the free range are going out of the cattle business. This is proved by the records of the shipments of cows and calves to the Kansas City and Omaha stockyards, where these western cattle are principally sold. The Texas steer will soon be as extinct as the buffalo, because there will be no more cows left on the western ranges.

"The raising of beef cattle has already become an industry for the small farmer, and the cattle ranch of the future will have, instead of tens of thousands of head of native stock, a few hundred head of pure-bred stock of the beef varieties. But until there are enough farmers raising these small bunches of cattle every year to bring the supply up to its former proportion to population, there will be a long interval in which beef will constantly go higher. It takes years to rebuild the cattle industry, once the breeding stock is sold off."

"How much does the farmer make on a steer?" I asked.

"Here on the Helendale Farm I am breeding shorthorns exclusively not pure-bred, but high-grade stock that is almost equal to pure-bred. I do not believe in selling steers for beef before they are three years old. The younger, lightweight steers do not bring enough to justify selling them. I figure that it costs a little more than $25 to produce a steer weighing 1,000 pounds at three years old, provided the pasture land is not worth more than $15 an acre. On native uncultivated pasture, under normal conditions, it takes four acres to feed one steer.

"The first year the principal expense is the maintenance of the cow — about $8. The calf will not require more than $2 worth of feed through its first winter, at the rate of a half a pound of grain a day, and a little hay. In its first season in pasture it will gain from 200 to 250 pounds

I nodded.

"That's one of the reasons why you are paying thirty-two cents a pound for

on a $15 land value, of $3.60 for rental, and a labor cost of about $1. That is, one man will get $75 during the season for taking care of 80 steers. This makes the

cost of adding 250 pounds of beef to the weight of a steer about $4.60, or 1.8 cents per pound.

"The winter feeding, being principally consumed in the growth of bone, costs another $3.40, making the cost of carrying the steer through its second year about $8. The feeding cost includes hay, at the cost of making it, which is about $2.50 a ton on our farm, and grain at its market value at the elevator at Leonard.

"The third year the cost of adding another 250 pounds to the steer's weight is the same and at the end of the third year it weighs 1,000 pounds, or thereabouts, which has cost, including everything, a little more than two and a half cents a pound. After this, it must be fattened. The farmer's real profit comes in fattening the steer. Most of our steers are sold to men who fatten them before selling them to the butcher.

WHAT THE CATTLE-RAISER MAKES

"To find out for myself exactly what part of the price of your thirty-two cent porterhouse steak I was getting, and who else was getting profits out of it, and how much, I made an investigation a little more than two years ago, which may help you to judge whether your retail butcher was cheating you. On September 8, 1909, I took thirty-five steers out of the pasture. They were from thirty to forty months. old and averaged 1,040 pounds apiece. Their value on the farm at that time I estimated at four cents a pound, a total of $1,456.

"I put these steers in a new pasture and for thirty days fed them some corn on which they gained 100 pounds apiece. Then I selected the fifteen heaviest, (weighing 1,245 pounds apiece) and put them on fattening feed. The other twenty I left in the pasture but I continued to feed them corn. At the end of seventyfour days from the time I first took these steers out of pasture, they had made an average gain, the whole thirty-five of them, of three and six-tenths pounds apiece per day. Then I shipped them to the stockyards at South St. Paul.

"The weight of the fifteen fed steers on our scales at the farm at the time of ship

ment averaged 1,386 pounds. The twenty partially fattened steers averaged 1,246 pounds. They had to be driven seven miles to the railroad and the train on which they were shipped to the stock yards was caught in a blizzard and held up for thirtysix hours, during which time the cattle were fed and watered but once, so that the shrinkage in weight in transit, always a considerable item, was unusually high, averaging more than eighty pounds each. At the stock yard weights the twenty steers which had not been fattened brought five and a half cents a pound and the fifteen partially fattened sold for six and a quarter cents. After deducting freight charges, yardage, commissions, and feed in transit and in the yards, amounting to about $140, the net proceeds for this bunch were $2,374. They had been valued at $1,456 on September 8th. The market value of the feed they consumed during seventyfour days was $324. The labor cost for the same period was about $1 a day, making the steers cost $1,854. The net profit from feeding was $520, earned in seventyfour days. In other words I made a profit of from one and a half to two and a quarter cents a pound on these steers by feeding, which must be added to the profit I would have made if I had sold them in September at four cents.

THE PACKER'S SHARE

"At the South St. Paul stockyards these fifteen fat steers were bought by Swift & Company. I did not have to sell to Swift & Company or to any of the members of the so-called beef trust. I sold to them because they were the highest of a dozen or more bidders. Every animal offered for sale in the stockyards is sold on its individual merit. An extra fine grain-fed steer, weighing 1,400 pounds, that will dress out 60 per cent. of marketable beef, from which can be obtained a choice lot of roasts and steaks, is always eagerly bid for by the packing houses, by the local butcher, and by the buyer who is making up a car-load of that class of cattle for the eastern market. The highest bidder always takes it. The only class of cattle the packers have a monopoly on is the 'scrubs' which are fit only for canning.

Only the large packing houses are able to utilize these poor grades of cattle at all. They can make them up into bologna sausage, corned beef hash, and other delicacies which the small butcher is not equipped to manufacture.

"I followed this bunch of fifteen steers through to the retailer just to find out whether any one was being robbed, and if so, who was doing the robbing. This sale was made to Swift & Company on November 19, 1909. One of these steers weighed 1,313 pounds. It cost the packer, at $6.25 per hundred, $82. This steer, when dressed, produced in beef 58 per cent. of its live weight. There were just 760 pounds of marketable meat which the packer got for his $82 almost exactly ten and three quarter cents per pound. Only 26 per cent. of this beef was in ribs and loins the latter being the part from which your porterhouse steak was cut. Another 25 per cent. was in the round and rump and 49 per cent. was in the cheap cuts -the chuck, plate, brisket, flank, and shanks. And for it all Swift & Company paid ten and three quarter cents a pound.

"On that date Swift & Company were selling dressed beef, entire carcasses, at nine cents a pound. At that rate the beef from this steer, for which they paid $82, would have brought them $68.40. I did not discover any traces of robbery there, nor even when I found that in selling it in the commercial cuts, they could still get, at the prices which ruled on that day, only $75.52 for the beef they had paid $82 for.

THE RETAILER'S FAIR PROFIT

"Then I went to the retail butcher. I got him to cut up the carcass into the different classes of beef. Figuring each of these classes at the highest obtainable retail price, I found the retailer was getting a fraction more than twelve cents a pound for the whole carcass. He was getting from twenty-five to thirty cents. a pound for the 26 per cent. in the loin and ribs; the round and rump brought him from fifteen to twenty cents a pound, but the 49 per cent. of the carcass included in the cheap cuts, he had to sell at from three to ten cents a pound, or not sell it at all.

At the prices which prevailed at that time the retailer could get $91.50 for the steer that I had sold for $82 and that Swift & Company had then sold to the retailer for $68.40. The retailer's profit figured out very close to 25 per cent. gross on sales if he bought an entire carcass, and round 20 per cent. if he bought the commercial cuts.

"On the face of these figures Swift & Company lost money on every one of those fifteen steers they bought from me at $82 a head. But though Swift & Company are not philanthropists and though they do not lose any money in their business, I satisfied myself that the 133 per cent. profit on their capital stock of $60,000,000 which they made that year was not made from selling beef. Where they made their profits on a steer, I discovered, was in the by-products -the hide, the various animal oils that are extracted from the fats and offal, oleomargarine, stearin, tallow, soap, fertilizers, medical extracts, dye stuffs, buttons, glue, bone charcoal-the hundreds of by-products which the big packing houses are compelled to utilize to make profits from their business. And the big packers can utilize for canning the cheap cuts and the poor stock which the city. butcher can hardly sell over his counter. Besides, a good share of the packer's profits are made on hogs and sheep."

THE DEMAND AHEAD OF THE SUPPLY

"Well, if you are not making too much, and the packer is losing money, and the retailer is only making a fair profit, why am I paying thirty-two cents a pound for the porterhouse steak that cost me only twenty cents ten years ago?" I insisted.

"It all comes back," replied Colonel Power, "to the one law that Congress has so far been unable to repeal - the law of supply and demand. There are not as many cattle as there were and there are more people demanding beef. And long before there are enough cattle being raised to supply the demand for beef there will be millions more people in the cities demanding beef: You will probably not live long enough to buy porterhouse steaks again for less than thirty-two cents a pound."

T

HE housekeeper is abroad in her city. There isn't so much to do at home as once there was. The spinning wheel had long been silent, the sewing machine was beginning to gather dust, the architects were drawing kitchenettes in their blue-print plans, when, in the dawn of the twentieth century, the more well-to-do women of Boston arose in their drawing rooms and, with skirts gathered in one hand, stepped firmly over their thresholds to find new duties.

The streets were filled with workingpeople on whom they looked with awakened interest. For science had recently confirmed our democracy by the revelation that, when Boston had 1,200 deaths a year from tuberculosis and 1,600 cases of typhoid, the Back Bay would have to have some of them. Beacon Street and Commonwealth Avenue might no longer live to themselves alone. Through this moving throng they were close linked to all the "ends" of Boston. Here were the tailors who fashioned the suits for the most exclusive Colonial Dame. Here were the seamstresses who sewed her lingerie. Here were the bakers who baked her bread.

The housewifely mind paused to ponder. Mary, the cook, who used to bake the bread in the kitchen, had to be carefully watched to see that she always wore a clean apron and washed her hands. Did the Superfine Baking Company wash its hands?

The committee a few years ago sent out to see, and came back with a shocked

te in their report: "My dears, my

dears," they said, "there are flies in the molasses and rats in the flour and there are weary, perspiring men who drop on the very moulding boards to sleep."

So the Consumers' League went to the legislature to ask for a law that should. forbid the Superfine and other bakeries to make bread in a cellar and that should require medical inspection for employees as a guarantee against disease mixed in the dough. It is a woman's notion that has not yet been dignified by legal enactment.

But lacking a law, feminine ingenuity is using a "white list." It directs a discriminating purchaser to about twenty bakeries in Boston that have been investigated and found clean enough to meet the housewifely standard. There is likewise an "approved list" of fifty-six tailor shops that are light enough and airy enough so that the workers are not liable to disease. And once a month in two of the leading newspapers there is published the "Shopping Guide" to such department stores as are selling "white label" lingerie of sanitary manufacture to insure that it is not a menace alike to those who make it and to those who wear it.

Four years ago, in the season when the feminine mind turns energetically to thoughts of spring cleaning, the woman who cares looked across Boston Common with a friendly nod to Everywoman: "Come," she said, "let us join hands in a Woman's Municipal League." A platform of wide welcome was arranged to include alike Gentile and Jew, Syrian and Greek and Italian. This ideal was

being explained at a parlor meeting in one of the ends of Boston. The wife of The wife of Guiseppe Bacigalupo, a prosperous Italian contractor, was present in the front row. Complacently stroking her velvet dress, she looked up in a sudden glow of comprehension: "Why, after all," she exclaimed, "we're all of us just foreigners together, aren't we? For, really, one never sees any red Indian natives about."

Madame Back Bay, in the chair, caught her breath. Then she smiled bravely back, "foreigners together," with the wife of Guiseppe Bacigalupo. And the Italian woman went out to bring one hundred of her neighbors into the League that now has a membership list of nearly two thousand.

These are a Council of City Mothers of which Mrs. T. J. Bowlker is president. It is true that they are without the power of political action. But they have woman's influence organized to work for what they want. Within the League have been set up departments corresponding to every phase of the city's activities that affect the home. The office headquarters, at 79 Chandler Street, serves as the clearing house through which the Boston housewives' complaints or suggestions reach the City Hall. The officers of the League are working in cordial coöperation with the city officers.

The Department of Streets and Alleys first awakened Boston to the League's existence. They started a city cleaning crusade that swept from Jamaica Plain to East Boston, and from the Charles River Bank to South Bay. Committees were sent out to hang in Boston kitchens a neatly printed "Notice to Housekeepers," that cited city ordinances for the disposal of refuse and the penalty for throwing it into the street. They pasted the alleys with stickers that said, "Help keep the city clean!" They put advertising placards in the street cars that read: "Warning! The Health Laws demand that your premises shall be kept free from rubbish. Dirty air is death! You have no more right to poison the air that your neighbor breathes than the water he drinks!" Then they held meetings in every section of the city to urge that every housewife see how it was with her own back yard.

"What is all this fuss about?" demanded a Commonwealth Avenue matron. "I'm sure I haven't looked into my back yard in thirty years."

"Your neighbors have!" was the significant retort in a Beacon Street drawing room that sent her home for a private domestic survey. She found out the truth of what Genevieve Johnson, a little colored girl at a South Boston school, said in an essay on "Clean Back Yards": "Some of us live in houses that are like paper dolls with all fronts and no backs."

WOMEN SANITARY INSPECTORS

Boston was set in order. Then the League employed a salaried inspector to keep it so. She is a Wellesley College graduate, Miss Mabel Frost, and she daily patrols the streets and the alleys, especially the alleys. A garbage can uncovered or an alley littered with debris, brings from her a prompt notification to the householder that it is a violation of city ordinances. If anybody doubts the authority of this fashionably attired feminine person to speak her mind about garbage, she has only to flash the neat little nickel badge that is concealed beneath her coat lapel, and he realizes that what she says will go with the law. Not only private householders are thus regulated, some of the leading Tremont Street store keepers have come out into their alleys with shovels and hoes when she called. The North Station tidied up when she pointed out the debris that littered the pavement before it. The city increased its collections of refuse to three times a week and placed two hundred of the red metal "rubbish" boxes through the business district when the League laid her report of these needs before the Board of Health.

Then the officers of the City Park Department, when it was shown that the trees in some of the children's playgrounds had been planted, as it were, “man fashion," with the shade falling on the sidewalk outside instead of on the children, politely planted the trees right side about. And when they were told that the Prince Street playground, which they had surfaced with refuse from a nearby factory so that the children came home as black as