Actually food is not dearer to-day than it was in Rome under Cæsar. The fact is that money is cheaper, and money is cheaper because it is more plentiful. Let me quote a case that is somewhat abstract, but very applicable here.
Why should the farmer sell food when the money he gets for it will purchase little by virtue of having no longer its former purchasing power? He can be induced to sell such food if he is given enough dollars and cents to buy again for the proceeds of his soil and labor what he obtained through them before. That means that he must be given more money for his wares. But that he is given more money does not leave him better off. What difference does it make to him if for the bushel of wheat he gets one dollar or two dollars when the price of an article he must buy also jumps from one to two dollars? The result is a naught in both cases. To be sure, he could save more, apparently, from two than he could from one dollar. That, however, is fiction, for the reason that the twenty cents he may save of two dollars will in the new economic era buy no more than the ten cents he saved from the one dollar.
It is clear now that the farmer has not profited by the increase in food prices. All others are in the same position. Money has ceased to buy as much as before. The worker who is getting twice the wages he received before the outbreak of a war is obliged to pay twice as much for food. Like the farmer, he is no better off than he was. He, too, sees nothing but zero when expenditures are subtracted from income.
The body politic is a living organism for the reason that it is composed of living organisms--men and women. As a living organism this body has the inherent quality to repair or heal the wounds it has received. The men lost in war are replaced by the birth of others. In our time, at least, the women are no longer killed off, and since the remaining males are able to fertilize them a decade or two generally suffices to make good this loss which the body politic has sustained. It is a well-known fact that the average man is able to produce many times the number of children to which monogamy limits him. At the conclusion of the Thirty Years' War, when polygamy had to be legalized in southern Germany, Nuremberg boasted of a citizen who had thirty-seven children by six women.