at every
handling, at every chance at profit making. The unavoidable
inefficiency of the private milk trade reflects itself in infant
mortality--we pay our national tribute to private enterprise in milk,
a tribute of many thousands of babies every year. We try to reduce
this tribute by inspection. But why should the State pay money for
inspection, upon keeping highly-trained and competent persons merely
to pry and persecute in order that private incompetent people should
reap profits with something short of a maximum of child murder? It
would be much simpler to set to work directly, employ and train these
private persons, and run the dairies and milk distribution ourselves.

There is an equally strong case for a public handling of bakehouses
and the bread supply. Already the public is put to great and entirely
unremunerative expense in inspecting and checking weights and hunting
down the grosser instances of adulteration, grubbiness and dirt, and
with it all the common bakehouse remains for the most part a
subterranean haunt of rats, mice and cockroaches, and the ordinary
baker's bread is so insipid and unnutritious that a great number of
more prosperous people now-a-days find it advantageous to health and
pocket alike to bake at home. A considerable amount of physical
degeneration may be connected with the general poorness of our bread.
The plain fact of the case is that our population will never get good
wholesome bread from the Private Owner's bakehouse, until it employs
one skilled official to watch every half-dozen bakers--and another to
watch him; and it seems altogether saner and cheaper to abolish the
Private Owner in this business also and do the job cleanly, honestly
and straightforwardly in proper buildings with properly paid labour as
a public concern.

Now, what has been said of the food supply is still truer of the trade
in fuel. Between the consumer and the collier is a string of private
persons each resolved to squeeze every penny of profit out of the coal
on its way to the cheap and wasteful grate one finds in the
jerry-built homes of the poor. In addition there is every winter now,
whether in Great Britain or America, a manipulation of the coal market
and a more or less severe coal famine. Coal is jerked up to
unprecedented prices, and the small consumer, who has no place for
storage, who must buy, if not from day to day, from week to week,
finds he must draw upon his food fund and his savings to me