Iii.—: Necessary Allowance for the French People.

Lagrange, in his “The Internal Needs of France—an Essay in Political Arithmetic,” reduced food to butcher’s meat including pork, and corn, under which he included wheat, rye, and barley. His basis was the military ration—28 oz. of bread and 1/2 lb. of meat. In estimating a family budget, Lagrange assumed that in a family consisting of a man, his wife, and three children under ten, the man would eat as much as the rest taken together. On the hypothesis that one-fifth of the population is under ten, he assumed that the consumption of this fifth, added to that of the women, is equivalent to that of the men; so that, while allowing for the lower consumption of the old, the consumption for the whole of France might be rated as four-fifths of that of a population of soldiers. Following his example in taking the peace ration of the soldier as the standard, I divide the population into general classes according to the Census returns of 1876-1896, so as to be able to work out the reduction involved in the lower consumption per head of children below fifteen, women from fifteen to fifty-nine inclusive, and old people above sixty; and I exaggerate the number in this class by estimating the number of children below one year of age at 20 per cent. instead of 16 per cent.

Physiologists estimate the food of a woman as three-fourths of that of a man, and equal to that of an old person; the food of a child as three-fourths of a woman’s. Leaving out the food of children below one year of age, the table of rations for 1,000 inhabitants is:—

The adults in the table are four-fifths of the population. Modern returns and investigations on the subject confirm Lagrange’s results exactly, and Atwater’s figures correspond very closely to them.

But I reduce to a fourth the proportion of the fifth, and if, to simplify the figures, I raise the population of France to 40 millions instead of 39, I have a total of 30 million rations.

By imposing a 2s. 10d. duty per cwt. on corn, and duties of 8s. per cwt. on live oxen, and 10s. per cwt. on live sheep, which raised the duty on the net weight of butcher’s meat to 14s., the capitalist landowners insured their monopoly of the French bread and meat supply. I now examine the extent to which they were capable of meeting demand.