Note 162-4 — Chapter III

As regards food alone, the cost of the support of a plowman on Count Podewil's estate, reduced by Rau, Lehrbuch, § 191, to the unit of rye, is annually 1,655 lbs. of rye. According to Koppe, it is 1,952 lbs.; to Block, 2,300 lbs.; to Kleemann, from 1,888 to 2,552 lbs.; to Möllenger, 2,171 lbs. The first three estimate the cost in meat at 78, 160 and 60 pounds. Compare Block, Beitr. Z. Landgüterschätzungskunde, 1840, 6. Exhaustive estimates for all Prussian governmental districts in von Reden, Preussische Erwerbs, und Verkehrsstatistik, 1853, I, 177 ff., according to which the requirement, per family, varies between 71 thalers in Gumbinnen and 204 thalers in Coblenz, the average being 105 thalers. According to more recent accounts, a laborer's family in East Prussia, gangmen not included, get along very well on 177 thalers per annum. (von der Goltz, Ländl. Arbeiterfrage, 1872, 9 ff.) In Mecklenburg, omitting Hofgänger, on 183 thalers. (Ann. des. patr. Vereins, 1865, No. 26.)

The necessary outlay of the family of an agricultural day laborer in England, in 1762, was estimated as follows: for bread and flour, £6 10s. per annum; for vegetables and fruit, £1 1-2/3s.; for fuel, light and soap, 2-9-5/6s.; for milk, butter and cheese, £1 1-6-5/6s.; for meat, £1 6s.; for house-rent, 1-6s.; for clothing, bedding, etc., 2-16-1/3s.; for salt, beer and colonial wares, 1-16-5/6s.; for medicine, expenses attending confinement of wife, etc., 1-6½s. (J. Wade, History of the middle and working Classes, 1853, 545.) Concerning 1796, compare Sir F. M. Eden, State of the Poor, I, 660, 1823; Lowe, on the present Condition of England. Compare on the receipts and expenses of ten working families in and about Mühlhausen, the tables in the Journal des Economistes, October, 1861, 50; and further Ducpétiaux, Budgets économiques des Classes ouvrières en Belgique, 1855. According to Playfair in Knop, Agriculturchemie, I, 810, ff., different classes of grown men need daily food.