Jasper County Democrat, Volume 13, Number 65, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 23 November 1910 — THE COLD STORAGE AC COUNT. [ARTICLE]

THE COLD STORAGE AC COUNT.

With the rise in the price of eggs and the announcement that they are to be higher than last year, although shipments have been heavier than during the san e months l.a ef year, comes the statement that there are now 509,480,000 eggs in cold storage in tie country. The government’s official statement is that the stock in storage in six principal cities is 62,000,000 more cases than at this time last year, and yet the prices are higher. Perhaps here is where some of the “alchemy”is applied by which, although producers labor more and furnish greater supplies, yet the consumer pays more. The New York Evening Mail sayS4iThe nation already has jurisdiction over the packing houses of the country, through the pure food and drugs act. It should take jurisdiction over the storage houses, through which so much of the packing house product passes; Congress should enact a bill providing for this and do it at the coming short session. The flaw in the argument as well as in the analogy is that although the nation has jurisdicion over the packing houses thts n no wise controls prices. S’mi'ar jurisdicton over cold storage houses would amount to nothing. We do not so much want assurances as to "rots and spots’' as we want to know whether storage houses are used as “combinations in restraint of trade." Of cousre, the whole question of storage houses goes further than eggs. It is reckoned for example that the 636 storage plants in this country, last April, when a bib looking to their regulation was introduced in Congress, had with all sorts of meats, dairy products, fruits, poultry, eggs, vegetables and liquors a total oh stores amounting in value to $2,500,000.000. The bill alluded to proposed Jo limit all storage of stuff for interstate commerce to one year. Nothing came of the bill. It was part of Mr. Lodge's inquiry into the cost of high living and was pigeonholed. But it is a living question and one that the people of this country will have, to deal with sooner of later. Rightly'used cold storage belongs with all the wonderful improvements in transportation and business that add to the betterment of living. Wrongly used it becomes, a terrible engine of oppression. If men may buy without limit they can keep the price- at the time abnormally high and in times of scarcity dole out supplies at extortionate rates. . It is a device as old as Joseph’s granaries in Egypt. The difference is merely in extension and variety that whereas he prudently laid in a supply of grain against the lean years, this modern method works always and keeps abnormal • prices against which fat years of full industries

avail nothing. Here we are con- ' fronted with another condition and one that bears very directly on that mysterious something bv which in a land of plenty, with industries well occupied, labor well paid, yet month after month almost, it takes just a little more of earnings or incomes to live—merely to live. The problem of

living grows harder continually irt a land under conditions where nothing is visible to account for It.-—lndianapolis News.