* \0 2_ f ^ -3 Cornell University Library HF1025 .S65 1913 Industrial and commerc al geography by olin 3 1924 032 416 137 Cornell University Library The original of this book is in the Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924032416137 INDUSTEIAL AND COMMEBCIAL GEOGBAPHY BY J. RUSSELL SMITH PROFESSOR OP INDUSTRY IN THE WHARTON SCHOOL OP FINANCE AND COMMERCE, UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA NEW YORK HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY 1913 Copyright, 1913 BY HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY A A?l/7i THE • MAPLE • PRESS- TOBK • Pi PREFACE This book aims to interpret the earth in terms of its usefulness to humanity. Since the primary interest is humanity rather than parts of the earth's surface, the book deals with human activities as affected by the earth, rather than with parts of the earth as they affect human activities. The mass of facts pressing upon geographers is so great that space for discussion, as distinguished from description, is always too short, and this space is still further reduced by the repeti- tions involved in the usual regional arrangement of matter. That is one reason why I have employed, in the first part of this book, the alternative arrangement by industries. The wheat industry, for example, proceeds from certain environmental conditions and exists in every continent. Its treatment as a unit brings causes and results together in their explanatory relation and makes the facts not only appeal to the reason but also grip the memory. Such a conspectus of the world industries, when properly illus- trated by charts and diagrams, should give a sound knowledge of the trade activities of each country, without sacrificing the no less valuable knowledge of the industries themselves. In the second part of the book there is an attempt to increase and reinforce this regional knowledge by a description of the com- merce of the world. Here the great ports of traffic are considered and the geographic and economic reasons for their greatness indicated. The description of the principal trade routes and the commerce that passes over them is still another means of making the various countries of the world stand out in the mind of the reader in their commercial individuality. I believe this method permits results that cannot be attained in the same space by the more usual method of presentation. In the preparation of this book, I am greatly indebted to Professor Walter S. Tower, of Chicago. It is impossible for me to estimate the influence that he has had upon it through years of friendly conference and cogent criticism. He has also rendered vi PREFACE me the very great service of carefully reading the manuscript and suggesting innumerable changes. My associates, Messrs. George B. Roorbach and Joseph H. Willits, have also critically read the manuscript. All three of these gentlemen are, however, absolved from any responsibility for the final errors of fact and of style, for after their work was done, I spent months in work- ing the book over and in adding illustrative data. Mr. Willits prepared the alphabetical index, and he and Mr. Alfred G. White assisted me in the preparation of the statistical diagrams. I also wish to express my appreciation of the counsel given me by Professors Wesley N. Clifford and Calvin O. Althouse, of Philadelphia. The unending willingness of the numerous scientific writers of the U. S. Dept. of Agriculture places me under great obligation. It is a pleasure also to recall the cheerful aid given me by the Philadelphia Museum. J. Russell Smith. Wharton School op Finance and Commerce, University of Pennsylvania, March 7, 1913. CONTENTS Preface . . Bibliography , PART I INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY Chapter I. Our Changing Environment II. The Place and Nature of Agriculture . . . III. The Cereals . . IV. Starch Foods V. The Animal Industry ... VI. The Vegetable, Fruit, and Wine Industries VII. Sugar VIII. Condiments and Tobacco IX. Fisheries . . . ... X. The Fundamentals of Manufacture XI. The Forest Industries and Paper. . XII. Fibers, Textiles, and Clothing XIII. Leather and Rubber XIV. The Machinery, Ship-building and Metal Industries XV. Chemical Raw Materials and Manufacture . XVI. The Mineral Industries . . . XVII. The Expansion of Industry and Resources . . Page V ix 3 22 41 102 119 201 260 288 323 340 419 468 530 554 582 600 640 PART II COMMERCIAL GEOGRAPHY General References . . . ... 674 Chapter I. The Law of Trade 675 II. The World Highway — The Ocean and its Carriers . . 684 III. The Trade Routes of North America 693 IV. The Trade Routes of Europe 717 vii viii CONTENTS V. The North Atlantic Route ■ .... 731 VI. The Tbade and Trade Routes op Asia .... 742 VII. The Mediterranean — Asiatic Route 760 VIII. The North Pacific Route . . . 772 IX. South American Trade and Trade Routes 781 X. The Trade and Trade Routes op Africa and the Good Hope Route 802 XI. The Trade and Routes op Australasia and the South Pacific . . 823 XII. The World Carriers and the Panama Canal 832 XIII. The Trade Center and its Development . 839 XIV. The Work op the Trade Center 867 XV. The Balance op Trade and its Relation to Industrial Development 883 XVI. The Influence of Geographic Factors on the Commercial Policy op Nations . . . 892 Index 903 BIBLIOGRAPHY GENERAL REFERENCES The world of industry which this book aims in part to explain and inter- pret is, in this second decade of the Twentieth Century, undergoing changes with a greater speed than ever before. Some users of this book may wish to enlarge or bring down to the moment their knowledge of particular subjects treated here. For their aid, brief bibliographic direction is given, partly at the ends of the various chapters and partly in the immediately following paragraphs: GENERAL REFERENCES FOR PART I OF THIS BOOK A. Agriculture. — The U. S. Department of Agriculture, Washington, publishes much valuable information about the agricultural industries of the United States and other countries. See its "Yearbook" and "List of Publications," both of which are to be had without cost. Persons wishing to make use of current agricultural statistics should by all means have a copy of this "Yearbook," which has a very complete collection. "The Crop Reporter" issued monthly by the Department also has many valu- able presentations and comparisons. The Encyclopedia of American Agriculture, by Bailey, is a valuable reference work. "The Country Gentleman," Philadelphia, may be men- tioned as a journal aiming to cover the whole field of agriculture. Numer- ous agricultural journals discuss the various phases of agriculture, thus: "Hoards Dairyman" — Dairying, Janesville, Wis. "Breeders Gazette" — All animal Industries, Chicago. "The Fruit Grower"— St. Joseph, Mo. "Better Fruit" — Hood River, Ore. Many are devoted to certain regions, thus: "Rural New Yorker" — New York. "California Cultivator" — Los Angeles. "Louisiana Planter" — New Orleans. "The Iowa Farmer" — Des Moines. The International Institute of Agriculture, Rome, has valuable publica- tions. Anyone who scans for a few months the U. S. Daily Consular Re- ports will find himself in a veritable shower of information covering the whole field of this book, and valuable in supplementary work. B. Manufacturing. — Persons desiring detailed or current information on particular industries are especially recommended to consult the more serious trade journals, of which the following are suggested as a partial list. ix BIBLIOGRAPHY Subject Canning Cane Sugar Beet Sugar Spices Coffee Tea Cocoa Fisheries Iron Coal Petroleum Lumber General Textile Cotton Trade and Manufacture Wool Trade and Manufacture Leather Tanning Rubber Manufactur- ing Rubber Growing Machinery Trade and Manufacture Jewelry Chemical Industries Fertilizer Industry Coal Tar and Dye Stuffs Vegetable Oils and Extracts Soaps Mining and Mineral Industries Cement Pottery and Porce- lain. The Commercial America," a monthly statistics, usually of agriculture Name of Journal Published American Grocer New York International Sugar Manchester American Sugar Journal Chicago Tea and Coffee Journal New York Tea and Coffee Journal New York Tea and Coffee Journal New York Tea and Coffee Journal New York Fishing Gazette New York Iron Age New York Black Diamond Chicago Coal Age New York Petroleum Review London American Lumbermen Chicago Textile World Record Boston American Wool and Cotton Re- Boston porter American Wool and Cotton Re- Boston porter Shoe and Leather Report Boston Shoe and Leather Facts Philadelphia Hides and Leather Chicago India Rubber World New York India Rubber World New York American Machinist New York American Jeweler New York Pharmaceutical Era New York Chemical Trade Review Philadelphia American Fertilizer Philadelphia Paint, Oil, and Dye Review Chicago Paint, Oil, and Dye Review Chicago Soap Gazette and Perfume Jour- New York nal / Engineering and Mining Journal New York \ Mines and Minerals Scranton Cement New York Glass and Pottery World Chicago Museum of Philadelphia publishes "Commercial journal containing many valuable presentations of manufactures and commerce, but occasionally of BIBLIOGRAPHY xi C. General. — Of especial value in the field of this book are "The Ameri- can Review of Reviews," "The Worlds Work," "The Technical World Magazines." It should be noted that geographic, industrial and economic questions are gaining a rapidly increasing share of space in many periodic publications. The contents of nearly 400 leading periodicals are indexed in Pooles Cumulative Index of periodic literature, and in the Engineering Magazine. Search through these indexes will give a wealth of titles on the topics covered by this book. PARTI INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY CHAPTER I OUR CHANGING ENVIRONMENT i. THE VALUE OF LANDS TO MAN A group of people can only prosper, increase and grow powerful when their environment furnishes them an abundance of food and of materials for making appliances to supply the other necessities of existence. Examine them as we may, we find that every want of man, whether Eskimo or banker, is a desire for one of these six classes of goods: food, clothes, house or shelter, fuel, luxuries, and tools and materials of industry which enable him to produce and handle the others. So nearly universal are these wants that practically all men have all six classes of goods. Even savages have luxuries in the form of toys, ornaments,- and musical instruments. All these materials for a living come directly or indirectly out of the soil or crust of the earth. The man in a ship at sea or in a steel sky-scraper in a modern city gets his sustenance from the soil just as surely as does the farmer who takes potatoes from the furrow. Each particular method by which a man gets some useful commodity leads to an industry often of world- wide distribution. To understand the way the human race turns the earth into its home, we have but to study the various industries by which groups of men achieve their living. While ultimately depending upon the contents of the earth's crust, most of our living comes indirectly through the inter- mediate stages of plant and animal life, the crust itself supplying directly but a small part of our wants. In and upon the earth is the indispensable water without which we would promptly perish. While the more solid substances of the earth's crust are also directly available and of great value, as salt, building stones, and metals, we depend chiefly upon vegetation for our support. The plants grow from the soil. We eat them or 3 4 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY clothe ourselves with their fibers, cut them into pieces, shape them into tools, and build our houses and barns, extract their juices and dig their roots for drugs and medicines. We burn them for fuel, shape them into articles of luxury, and thus make them help in the supply of some of the wants of each of the six classes. The animals in turn eat the plants and each other, and furnish us their meat and milk as nourishment; their wool and furs become our clothing, their tougher hides make our shoe leather, the tents of the nomad, and the belts of the engine wheel, while the cultural services are hinted by the soft leather bindings of our choicest books. The environment upon which we depend, then, and which supplies our six wants is, in a broad sense, land. From our human standpoint, a country is good or bad in accordance with the good or bad manner in which it supplies these six wants. The most important exception to this is the influence upon man of the climate, which sometimes turns into an empty Eden what would otherwise be an economic paradise. To an extent little appreciated, the environment makes the race. It is a common mistake of the historian to give the idea that peoples have certain qualities inherently. It is much more correct to say that primitive or savage peoples are primitive or savage because of the niggardliness or peculiarities of nature's gifts to the land in which they happen to live, and not because of bad qualities which they may inherently possess. The environ- ment, in making the race, has given the qualities. The Eskimo upon the bleak, windy, treeless, bitter-cold shore of the Arctic Sea, in a climate where he constantly faces the danger of freezing and starving and where he, therefore, needs much protection from the cold in the form of fuel, clothes, house or food, has almost nothing with which to build houses, make clothes, or prepare food. Accordingly, the population is exceedingly sparse and can support itself only along the seacoast where the few advantages of the land may be combined with the more numerous advantages of the sea with its fish and seals. Shall the Eskimo be dismissed as a barbarian or praised as a master of a ferocious environment? In winning a living from such meager and almost exclusively animal sources the Eskimo has shown great ingenuity. Even the kyak or canoe, the most OUR CHANGING ENVIRONMENT 5 complex of his implements of industry, is made of bones and tough skins bound together with sinews and rawhide thongs, unless perchance the ocean currents bring a little drift wood from afar. For fuel, with which they cook their food but do not heat their houses, they use the fat of seal, walrus or whale blubber. Yet the Eskimo himself is not a bad, weak, or stupid fellow. His many fine qualities are highly praised by explorers. Upon being put to school he has shown that he can learn with the rest of us. The severity and poverty of his environment have made economic progress impossible. Peoples Dependent on One Resource. — Other peoples have succeeded in living in countries with almost as few natural aids as are possessed by the Eskimo, but culture has been held in check. The South Sea Islander has lived on coral islands a few feet above the waves, where his resources, were limited to the cocoanut-palm upon the strand and fish that came from the sea. Yet with these limited resources he has managed to keep strong and healthy and fill in some manner all his needs. When he wanted a saw, he got it by fastening shark's teeth into a piece of wood. His other equipment was made by equally ingenious devices. Upon the plains of central Asia people have for ages lived in a land where the one resource was grass. Flocks of sheep, cows, horses, goats and camels fed upon the grass. The herdsmen upon their horses followed the flocks as they roamed the flat plains in search of grass. These people were nomads because they had to go wherever they could find grass. Their diet was milk, cheese, and meat, and wheat obtained by barter at some oasis; their clothing, wool and skins; their shelter, a felt or leather tent stretched over a few precious poles which they had carried with them for hundreds of miles from the banks of some mountain stream. Burning cow dung made the fire. A little metal was bought from trading caravans. 2 . INFLUENCE OF CLIMATE IN THE ORIGIN OF CIVILIZATION Civilization is a product of adversity. The great civilizations of all time seem to have arisen where nature made production possible only a part of the year, and thus made it necessary for 6 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY man to work and save up for the time when he could not produce. Man does not naturally like to work steadily, and if nature en- ables him to avoid it he usually seems content to loaf rather than labor and progress. Accordingly, there have been no great civilizations in the warm, moist parts of the torrid zone, where nature does the most to make easy the support of life. Man's wants there are so easily met and the climate is so enervating that he does not get the habit of work or become ambitious. The Fig. 1. — The Jamaica negro finds life in the tropics to be easy. American S. S. Co.) (Hamburg climate is continually warm, and the rainfall is sufficiently regular over vast areas to keep vegetation always green and growing. The native of Jamaica, or Cuba, or central Africa, or the Philip- pines, or the East Indies can build himself a little shelter of palm leaves to keep off the rain; the warm climate removes the need of further shelter or many clothes. A few banana plants by the hut, and a little patch of sweet potatoes will live and yield for years, for there is no frost to kill the plants. The forest is full of nuts and wild fruit and game; the streams are alive with fish, a variety OUR CHANGING ENVIRONMENT 7 common in southern Asia burying themselves in the mud, where they can be caught with the bare hand. Wood in abundance supplies the little fuel he needs for cooking, and if he would make himself a drum or any other simple luxury, the raw materials of the forest lie at his hand in great abundance. Accordingly, the native of these regions may sit and doze most of the time, as, for untold generations, his ancestors have done before him — en- ervated by plenty. The Influence of Tropic Abundance. — This abundance with- out effort does not require or induce the work habit. For this reason lands of perennial plenty have never been lands of power. The lands of perennial plenty therefore fall prey to the more ambitious peoples from the lands of alternating scarcity and plenty in the temperate zone. Thus nearly all of Africa and that part of Asia within the tropics have been taken as colonies by the peoples of Europe. The only absolutely in- dependent territory in all Africa is Abyssinia, where the cool climate of a high plateau stimulates the people into a vigor and activity that has enabled them, with the aid of a powerful leader, to protect themselves from annexation. Faced by starvation, man will work. Civilizations have arisen where this annual threat of nature was followed by con- ditions permitting fruitful harvests. If fruitful harvest is fol- lowed by the stimulus of frost we have the best conditions for the development of energetic races. After our summer, the growing season, our winter's frost and snow bring death or hibernation to the whole vegetable kingdom, and drive man to the protection of house and warm clothing. In such climates we must either starve, eat wild animals, or eat what we have saved by our work during the summer. Therefore we have worked. A similar but less severe climatic goad to man's activity is furnished by climates that are alternately productive and non-productive through variations in the rainfall. The first great nations in the world's history had their empires in the valleys of the Euphrates and the Nile, where a fertile soil and a good moisture supply made great crops followed by blistering drought, a kind of warm winter so far as food production was concerned. Thus Babylon and Nineveh were rich and cultured cities at a time when all Europe lay in barbarism, and the pyra- 8 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY mids were built before the drought-driven Joseph went down to Egypt. These valleys got their early start because their advan- tages as the home of man were almost unrivalled. They had a warm climate, fertile soil, and a protected location. Each year the rivers overflowed, fertilizing the soil with the muddy waters and promoting the growth of a crop by irrigation. The surplus of food to last through the dry season naturally produced the habit of working and saving, and resulted in a sufficient surplus of goods to support life while attention was given to learning and the things we call civilization. Short Tons 5 4 3 2 1 °< C 1840 1850 1860 1870 1880 1890 1900 1910 Fig. 2. — Per capita production of coal in United States, 1830-1910. The Influence of Coal and Iron. — When man could resist cold and keep himself fed, civilization could go north. This depended upon the improvement of agriculture and the building and heating of houses. For ages this fight with the cold environment was slow. In recent times it has been most swift. The railroad with its accompanying car of coal has emancipated man from the dependence upon the local fuel supply furnished by forests, or OUR CHANGING ENVIRONMENT 9 annual crops as in China; and has permitted a great rush of civilized humanity into cold interior regions such as the Mis- sissippi Valley and the plains of Canada, Russia, and Siberia. Million Long Tons 85 20 15 10 5 c c / / 1840 1850 1860 1870 1880 1890 1000 1905 1910 Fig. 3.— U. S. production of pig iron, 1830-1910. A / \ 1870 I 1 V. | | Doto2po^jBL E32to6 ■ - • lH6tol8 • " ■ Hl8 and over Fig. 4. — (a) Map showing distribution of population in region of Red River of the North in 1870. (ft) Population map of region of Red River of the North in 1880. (From W. S. Tower.) (The open plain is easy to settle after the coming of the railroad. The human race is thus being much more exposed to frost than formerly, probably to its benefit. Cold is a great stimulus to activity. Men and animals alike want to move more rapidly 10 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY on a brisk, cold day of winter than on a sultry summer afternoon. This is as true of nations as of persons. The most energetic and powerful nations therefore are those living in a climate where frost forces them to activity and where the warm summer enables them to produce vast supplies of food. The great cities of the world's so-called Great Powers are surprisingly close to the middle latitude between the extremes of heat and cold. The cities that make the policy of world politics are New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Washington, Chi- cago, London, Liverpool, Edinburgh, Paris, Berlin, Hamburg, Leipzig, Vienna, Rome, Milan, St. Petersburg, Moscow, Pekin, and Tokyo. Every one of them has snow in winter and a hot summer. They all lie in the middle third of latitude, none being above 60° or below 30° N. North of this line of centers of world leadership, the population and power decline because there is too much frost to allow production, and south of it power and national energy decline because there is too much heat to permit activity, although the tropics teem with unmatched possibilities. The Influence of Natural Protection and Beasts of Burden. — The origin of civilization cannot be explained solely on this basis. These factors are present but others also enter. Shaler, with his keen appreciation of man's relation to his environment, has pointed out the influence of easy defence. The community that has become agricultural is, with its stores of food, the natural prey to hungry nomads. One of the essences of war is transpor- tation — speed, mobility. This is the daily practice of the nomad. From the times of the shepherd kings of Egypt to the raiding Apaches of Arizona, and doubtless back to the very dawn of progress, one of the commonest cycles of human history has been the conquest of the shore or valley farmer by the nomad — Mede, Goth, Vandal, Hun, Angle, Northman, Arab, Tartar, Turk. The American Indian suffered greatly from this cause as well as from the poverty that lack of beasts of burden imposed upon him. In the open country of eastern America any locality was open to easy attack; not so the cliff dwellings of New Mexico and Arizona where in an arid region the greatest Indian progress was made by people who lived in fastnesses easy of defence and laboriously tilled fertile patches of irrigated land in the valleys below. OUR CHANGING ENVIRONMENT 11 For similar reasons civilizations arose in such nooks as Athens, Sparta, Crete, and Etruria, while the great open plains of Russia and North America have remained half barbarous until the nineteenth century brought governments strong enough to keep order and give the same protection that was afforded by a shel- tered valley in Greece. 1 3. THE NECESSITY FOR COMMERCE Commerce Evens Up the Inequalities of Lands. — The limita- tions of support for a people living by one resource serve to emphasize the necessity for commerce. The early South Sea Islander's saw of shark's teeth set in wood was much more expen- sive in labor than that which his descendants get by trading coprah over the schooner's side for the product of Sheffield. Few localities are capable of supplying, even in a poor fashion, all the many goods desired by civilized man. Hence the imperative necessity of commerce to get the products of other lands. Com- merce has been essential to the spread of civilization, and civili- zation has very naturally lingered in those localities that afforded food, order, and opportunity for commerce. Without commerce, the means of selling as well as buying, a locality with a great 1 What is an Arab to do when his camels, his sheep, his wife, his children, and himself are all suffering the pangs of hunger? The only resource under such circumstances is plunder. The man who is starving has little thought of right or wrong. To have such thoughts would seem to him fatal. If considerations of humanity or any other moral idea prevent him from engaging in raids upon the tribes around him the doom of his family is sealed, for his children die of hunger. Thus through the thousands of years since Semitic nomads first lived in Arabia, the hard conditions of climate have steadily weeded out all who withheld their hands from violence. "The man who would succeed and who would keep his children in health must not only be ready to commit depredations and be utterly dishonest according to our standards, but he must also be strong in the endurance of heat, thirst, and the weariness of long rides; unfortunately, however, he has little need of steady industry or of strength to endure long physical labor. In a word laziness, according to our definition of the word, is no great disadvantage provided a man is able to summon up his powers in a crisis when the camels have strayed far away, when they have been driven off by raiders, or when the man himself goes on a foray. Hence the Arab is lazy as well as utterly disregardful of the commonest principles of honesty. Just as he thinks of raids as a part of the ordinary routine of life, so he thinks of steady work as something scarcely to be demanded even of women and fit only for slaves." — From The Arabian Desert and Human Character, by Ellsworth Huntington, Journal of Geog., Jan., 1912. The career of the Arabs in Spain under another environment is an interesting contrast. 12 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY surplus of natural wealth could make no use of it and therefore could have no large production, for large production requires wide markets. Production itself, the industries of any region, and the way it supports its population, can only be understood by noting the influence of commerce in stimulating the indus- tries and making possible the support of large or small numbers of people. Commerce is first of all dependent upon transportation. Men can trade without money and by signs without even understand- ing each other's speech. The important thing in all commerce is the fact that the goods can be moved. Accordingly, commerce is great only where transportation's good. Since the boat moves more cheaply than the pack animal, the wagon, or the railroad train, we find that waterways, the sea, the river, and the canals are the routes of greatest commerce. The greatest cities are seaports, and so great is our dependence upon water transporta- tion that one might name a hundred of the world's largest cities before coming to one where boats did not discharge their cargoes. Transportation that Depends upon Animal or Man Power. — Without the boat or the railroad, commerce is a minor thing. The horse-drawn wagon enters into commerce that is modern only by taking goods to and from the railway or boat. Where commerce depends entirely upon animal muscle, as the horse- drawn wagon or the caravan, we have the commercial conditions which made the Middle Ages. These means still serve a sur- prisingly large portion of the earth's surface, but a very small proportion of its population. The first great commercial enter- prises of which we know were carried on by means of caravans. Such caravans as set out from Egypt in the days of Pharoah, and from Babylon in the days of Nebuchadnezzar are to-day the chief commercial dependence of a vast region reaching from the shores of the Atlantic in northwest Africa eastward to Pekin. Here and there in this vast stretch are two or three lines of railroad, but the main dependence is still the caravan, chiefly of camels, sometimes of horses, mules or donkeys, and occasionally of wagons. By such means and over such great distances, only the most valuable goods can be carried, and accordingly only the most costly goods are worth caravan freights. Nearly everything that man uses here must be OUR CHANGING ENVIRONMENT 13 produced by his immediate locality. The high cost of trans- portation almost drives man back upon his own resources in vast areas of Alaska, northern British America, north Europe, and northern Asia, where commerce depends upon the sledge drawn by dogs in the New World and sometimes by the reindeer in the old. Fig. 5. — Sod house of the new settler on the treeless prairie of North Dakota. No wooden house is so warm, and commerce has made the minimum contribution to it. Relation of Transportation to Civilized Communities. — Large parts of temperate Siberia are still remote from railways; good roads are absent and nearly all their commercial products are sent out in the winter-time when the snow makes sledging so much easier than summer hauling by wagons over bad roads. But' summer isolation makes conditions that no large community can stand. Consequently the large modern community can only arise where commerce is also modern. This condition commonly exists where the boat and the railway transport our goods with regularity. The new means of conducting com- merce have greatly widened the area over which civilization can spread. Before the coming of steam only the localities favored with many resources or easy access to the sea could 14 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY furnish the many commodities necessary to support a civilized community. But now the railway and the steamboat make it possible for a backwoods district having but one product in abundance to supply its inhabitants with all the varieties of goods in the metropolis, because it can sell its one product and buy in return a thousand different things that the people need. When crops are good, the farmers of Saskatchewan, who sell only wheat, buy American books, magazines, French gloves, English traveling bags, Chinese tea, New England clocks, Michigan automobiles, and goods from a thousand distant factories. The great and nearly empty plains of western Canada give us a chance to see how civilized communities take possession of the earth and how dependent they are upon their present freight carriers, the coal-driven locomotives. Land is being given away by the Government to new settlers. Every new railroad means new settlers along its lines. The new settler often finds, however, that the land near the railroad has been bought up by speculators, and is being held at a price which he may not be able to pay. Farther back from the railroad there is free land, but the wheat grower cannot afford to haul wheat in wagons more than 40 or 45 miles, even though he can then get good land for nothing. As a result the land 50 miles from the railroad is a wilderness, or a pasturage, though it may be a smooth, level, fertile, prairie ready for the plow, rich in the possibilities of wheat, and ready for any farmer to come and take possession. He can take possession only when a railroad, the most controlling of all factors of commerce by land, comes near enough to make possible the marketing of his products and the supplying of his wants. Such has been the history of the settlement of all that vast farm-land plain lying beyond the Mississippi Eiver and reaching from the Gulf of Mexico northward beyond Winni- peg to a place where, thus far, the bitter elements of the north have stopped the advance of the farmer. The heart of Russia and Siberia where the largest of Empires reaches eastward is just now being pierced by new lines of railway, making possible the immigration of the Russian peasants into untitled Asia, as the Americans and Canadians are going westward into empty Canada. OUR CHANGING ENVIRONMENT 15 There can be some sparse settlements more than 50 miles from the railway but they are few and small, with export products limited to articles of high value such as wool or precious metals, and to flocks and herds which can walk to the railroad. This has been the case in Australia, Argentine Republic, and the Great Plains of the United States; but the coming of the railroad almost invariably produces in an arable district a several-fold increase in population. Fig. 6. — The frame house, barn, outbuildings, silos, water tank, and fences of a modern American dairy farm require much wood, often brought long distances. (U. S. Dept. Agr.) The railway, the profound changer of man's environment, is so essential that it is now spreading into new territories more rapidly than ever. The environment of mankind is undergoing the greatest and most sudden revolution that it has ever experi- enced. It is the change from the local environment in which the local conditions dominated, to the world environment to which one export commodity admits us and which tends to make us all alike. As evidences of response to this unifying world environment, we see the white man in all lands, the American Indian, the Maori, and the Japanese putting on the clothes of Europe, and the Chinese cutting off his queue and sending his sons to the Universities of the western world. This world environment creates a world commerce and a world market which we must understand before we fully com- prehend man's relation to any community. 16 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY 4. WORLD COMMERCE AND THE WORLD MARKET The New Commercial World. — We sometimes speak of the Old World — Europe, Asia, and Africa — and of the New World which Columbus discovered more than 400 years ago. In this sense the word "new" is used with regard to mere geographic discovery, a date. If we look at things from the standpoint of the way man is being supported, it is plain that we have a newer world, the world of modern commerce which depends upon the steamboat and the railway. As real servants of mankind the steamboat is less than a century old and the railway less than seventy-five years old, yet they now support practically all the large cities of the world and have created the most of them. During this short period, we have come to depend on transportation that makes great commerce, and man's relation to his immediate environment is entirely changed. One of the greatest of geographers, Penck, has pointed out that under any condition it takes a certain space on the earth's surface to support a man, but that, since we have acquired the new means of transportation, a man's home space or the place where he lives may be far removed from his suste- nance space or the place which produces the necessaries upon which he lives. This possible separation of the sustenance space from the home space has come almost entirely within the past hundred years, chiefly through the assistance of coal and iron working together in the form of the steam engine. This separation of the home space and the sustenance space has made possible the great and rapid expansion of large cities, as New York, London, and Chicago. In all three of these cities people may and do eat bread that is made from wheat grown in Minnesota, meat from cattle raised in Texas, wear clothes from wool produced in Australia, and in a hundred ways depend upon the coal and iron and products brought from remote parts of the earth. The World Market. — We have as a result what may be called a world market. Such a market exists for any commodity that is either produced or consumed over a large part of the world, and is sufficiently portable and durable to permit people in widely separated regions to be interested in the buying or the selling of the same consignments. In the days of the sailing vessel, the OUR CHANGING ENVIRONMENT 17 THE GROWTH OF PORTS W/EDEWELD FJ6/ MSC*mFJw./90i'S'/.573 lE/*3RrJ?V/i4WlEj? 33 /907 1870 1880 Fig. 7. — The growth of world commerce. (After J. Paule Goode.) 18 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY world market was unimportant, because, with the unsatisfactory, slow, and costly means of communication, only a few valuable and unperishable commodities could be transported long dis- tances. The staple commodities of the world trade and the world Billions of Dollars 35 30 25 20 15 10 5 c L 1860 1870 1880 1890 1900 1910 Fig. 8. -The growth of world commerce, 1850-1910. Combined imports and exports of foreign commerce of leading countries. market of that day were spices, silks, tea, coffee, furs, and curios made by the peoples of the different races. The staples of a century ago are no longer the great staples of the world market. They are handled in greater quantities than OUR CHANGING ENVIRONMENT 19 ever, but cheap and bulky goods have become the staples since all continents have their railroads and all oceans their steam- Million Bushels 785 TOO 675 650 625 600 575 550 525 500 475 450 425 400 375 350 325 300 S75 250 225 200 175 150 125 100 75 50 25 4 >f <& r / *** */ <£/ V ■# \ ^y X x „ **v JO?/ jC**'\ t *y s ^i—BBSS ■^- — «s& 7ZS& s ?*- — s ^- — "*S =11 •- Fig. 9. — World export of wheat and flour in millions of bushels. ships. Spices, for which India was once so important, are now tenth in her list of exports. A century ago, tea, coffee, and spices were the chief articles of diet on the world market. To-day the important food staples 20 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY are wheat, corn, oats, rice, sugar, beef, pork, mutton, butter, potatoes, apples, oranges, and bananas. These are the great staple foods of the white race, and, in part, of the other races also. The fact that staple foods can be produced in the heart of one continent one year and sold in the heart of another continent the next year at a cheap price, means to most of us a comfort and security usually unrecognized, because we have nothing with which to contrast it. We know nothing of famine in America or western Europe, yet two centuries ago it was a nightmare that haunted all peoples. If a season happened to be too dry or too wet, or some sudden blight or disease broke out and made a local crop a failure, the people of the locality had to go hungry because there was no means of carrying bulky foods any great distance. In England the months of April and May were called the starving time, because the new spring crops were not sufficiently ripe to be eaten and the supply from the crops of the year before often ran low. Now the Englishman's breadstuffs come from Chicago, Minneapolis, Odessa, Buenos Ayres, or Bombay, and his meat from even greater distances. The starving time has dropped from his calendar because there is a world market for wheat, rice and meat, sugar, coffee, and even potatoes, and the English- man has something with which to buy them. The world market staples of clothing a hundred years ago were silk and furs — luxu- ries for the rich. To-day they are cotton, wool, hides, skins, cotton-cloth, shoes, and hats — the clothes of the masses. In almost every school-room in the United States is clothing of wool, cotton or leather from two or three continents. A century ago world commerce brought for the equipment of man in his activities little but lumber, trinkets, and curios. To-day there is a world market for iron, steel, cement, coal, ores, locomotives, machinery, jute, Manila hemp, and other fibers, so that the school building and the dwelling house usually have in them materials that have been carried thousands of miles. China and the World Market. — China is the last great country to begin to patronize the world market. There the domestic system still continues to a great extent, and railroad building has just begun. Most interior localities there are still self-support- ing; each farmer saves his own garden seeds and raises his own food; his wife spins and weaves cloth and makes the family clothes; OUR CHANGING ENVIRONMENT 21 but the railroad, commerce, and the world market are rapidly making the economic condition of China like those of Europe and the United States — a part of the world of standardized consumption, complicated industry and necessarily increased gov- ernment control. Any idea that the growth of cities and of great commerce is essentially American is not founded on fact. England leads the world in percentage of city population and the ports of Europe keep pace with those of America. CHAPTER II THE PLACE AND NATURE OF AGRICULTURE Agriculture comes first in any general study of the industries that arise from man's attempt to win support from his environ- ment. Historically, it is by agriculture that man has come up from the stage of the wandering nomad who followed the hunting savage. Industrially, agriculture precedes manufactures in all nations. It is the first and fundamental group of industries. No nation has risen into importance in manufacture and com- merce until after it had developed and lived by agriculture. Agriculture furnishes raw material for the factory and food for the worker, and the number of people engaged in farming tends to increase as countries grow in manufactures and commerce, although the proportion engaged in agriculture may decline, as it has in Great Britain and Belgium, because of heavy importa- tion of agricultural products. Another important aspect of agriculture is its permanency. The mine must be exhausted, the forest usually is, and the importing of raw materials from abroad is at best uncertain and at times temporary. Thus England will probably be unable to secure breadstuffs and meats from the United States much longer because of our own increasing consumption and declining export. In the long run the only sure dependence of a nation is its soil resource, upon which depends agriculture, the fundamental group of industries, and the soundest basis of national strength. Granted good agriculture, a nation may develop and maintain manufactures and commerce; without it, a nation is at best in unstable equilib- rium and dependent upon other nations. In the study of commercial geography one must look closely at the factors that make for the support of human life — the fitness of land to man. Fortunately this fitness of lands to support us is rapidly increasing in spite of the present destruction — often reckless and useless destruction — of resources. Our inventions, discoveries and new abilities to do new things in both manufac- 22 THE PLACE AND NATURE OF AGRICULTURE 23 ture and agriculture enable us to create new products and get our living more easily, so that the various kinds of lands that make up our world will support more people than at any previous time. At the same time that old lands have the possibility of greater productivity, new lands are coming rapidly into use. Relation of Transportation and the World Market to Agricul- ture. — Since the rise of the world market and world commerce, one important product will support more people in greater comfort to-day than could have been done in a locality with several times as many products in the older periods. Before the coming of railroads, level treeless plains in the continental in- teriors were almost useless to man and he clung to the waterway no matter how fertile and productive the treeless plains were. The problems of shelter and fuel were perplexing without trees or coal. About the only way this difficulty could be met was to follow the methods practised by the people of northern China, who have succeeded in living in the old fashioned way on such plains by building mud or unburned brick houses covered with thatch, and using, for fuel, the coarse stalks of a kind of millet which they grew as an annual crop for this purpose. Owing to the scarcity of this fuel supply they must economize severely, and therefore make no attempt to heat their rooms. They wear thick sheepskin clothing instead, and sit by day and sleep by night upon a low, hollow brick platform continually kept warm by a small fire of millet stalks smouldering beneath it.- World commerce enables western peoples to live very differ- ently on such plains. The vast treeless plains from Texas to Manitoba, and westward to the Rocky Mountains have become the home of millions of comfortable farmers and townsmen, who bring their wood and their coal hundreds of miles and pay for it with their wheat and corn and cattle, their hogs, their horses, and their hay, while they sometimes ride in automobiles and live in houses supplied with bath-rooms and gas lights. This fact, that a community can arise wherever one salable product can be produced, has multiplied the world, and makes it necessary to examine a region very closely to see its possibilities. Because of the fundamental character and enduring nature of agriculture, one of the first things to note in the examination of any region is its fitness for this group of industries. 24 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY Agriculture More Difficult to Understand than Manufacture. — Agriculture is affected by the forces of nature more than is manu- facture. It consists primarily in the growing of plants, which are more affected by the weather, especially temperature and moisture, than they are by the soil in which their roots are fixed, Fig. 10.— World rainfall, annual. (After Mark S. W. Jefferson.) Very heavy — an annual rainfall, including melted snow, of over 80 inches. Heavy — an annual fall of from 40 to 80 inches. |j:::::;:j:;:;.| Light — an annual fall of from 20 to 40 inches I I Scant — Less than 20 inches in the year. although the soil, too, has great influences. The weather is notoriously changeable and uncertain, and each crop and animal has its own nice adjustment to the environment. This depend- ence of agriculture upon the uncertainties of nature is in strong THE PLACE AND NATURE OF AGRICULTURE 25 contrast to manufacturing, which goes on in factories almost independent of the weather, and dependent upon a comparatively small number of factors, all within the control of man. Agriculture is really a group of industries. It is a mistake to contrast farming with any single branch of manufacture, merely because there are so many kinds of manufacture. There are also Fig. 10. — (Continued.) many kinds of farming. There are more farm workers than fac- tory workers in the United States; and throughout the world at large a much greater proportion of the human race is employed in fields than in factories. Through the materials and food it produces, the farm supports alike the factory and the factory worker, and enables them to render their great service to mankind. 26 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY Farming in the Domestic Epoch. — Farming, like manufacture, has been revolutionized by world commerce. In 1786 a Massa- chusetts farmer wrote a book telling just how he supported his family. 1 With the wheat and corn and buckwheat that grew in his fields he furnished the family bread. The chickens, Fig. 11. — World rainfall, June, July, and August. (After Mark S. W. Jefferson.) Heavy — more than 10 inches of rain and melted snow in the three months. Light — from 6 to 10 inches in the three months. Scant — less than 6 inches in the three months. pigs, sheep, and an occasional beef animal that he slaughtered furnished the meat. His garden furnished all the vegetables and his orchard all the fruits, many of which were dried for winter use. The farm produced the family food. For clothing, 1 See MacMaster, J. B., History of the People of the United Slates, Vol. I. THE PLACE AND NATURE OF AGRICULTURE 27 his wife spun the wool which he sheared from the sheep; and the flax that grew in the corner of a field was made into linen. The skin of the meat animals was tanned and made the family's shoes, and thus were they clothed. The trees from his wood lot furnished the boards to build his house and the logs for his fire and the rails for such fences as were not of stone. He himself, Fig. 11. — (Continued.) as most farmers of that time, was a fairly good worker in wood, and he had a little blacksmith's shop so that he made practically all. of his own tools on rainy days and in snowy winter weather. Only a few things were needed from the outside world, such as salt, pepper, and iron for his little forge. These outside products cost him $10 a year, permitting him to save $150 out of the $160 received for the wheat and cattle that he sold. This complete- 28 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY ness of support was obtained by an amount of hard work and discomfort that would not be tolerated in this age of commerce and division of labor. Farming in the Commercial Epoch. — Since the coming of the epoch of coal, steam, and machinery, the farmer, especially the Fig. 12. — World rainfall in December, January and February. (After Mark S. W. Jefferson.) R3S3SSSSS Heavy — more than 10 inches of rain and melted snow in the three months. F-- : - : - : - :;: l Light — from 6 to 10 inches in the three months. I i I Scant — less than 6 inches in the three months. American farmer, sells more and buys more, and his family usually does less work. His shoes and clothes are factory-made, the lumber for his new barn often comes from afar, as does the coal for his stove and the stove itself, as well as the tools, the wagon, and often the horse that draws the wagon. A much THE PLACE AND NATURE OF AGRICULTURE 29 greater farm product is required to support a family by the commercial than the domestic system. The increased product goes to pay for things not done on the farm. In the matter of clothing, a flock of fifteen sheep yielding 75 pounds of fleece would abundantly clothe a family with homespun. If the same 75 pounds of unwashed wool were sold at thirty cents a Fig. 12. — (Continued.) pound the resulting $22.50 would scarcely buy one-fifth as much ready-made woolen clothing. Money Crops and Supply Crops. — In the commercial system, the most important consideration in connection with farming is the money crop. Every farm or every farming community has one or more crops which are usually sold and converted 30 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY into cash, and hence usually called money crops. Among the world's great money crops are grain, sugar, animals, fruits and vegetables, cotton, wool, coffee, tea, and tobacco. The money crops do not occupy half the land in American farms, for most of Fig. 13. — World distribution of population. (After Mark S. W. Jefferson.) Grade of peopling. People to 1 square mile. Very dense H^HH 250 or more Dense E22223 125 to 250 Moderate fc^SSSSI 26 to 125 Thin l&-;:;=;-.i< 2jto26 Soanty i I less than 2 J the land is devoted to what may be called supply crops, that is, crops which are used entirely upon the farm and are sold, if at all, in some indirect form. For example, nearly half of the American farm lands are in grass. Some of it the animals eat in summer, THE PLACE AND NATURE OF AGRICULTURE 31 the rest is made into hay for winter forage, so that, while impor- tant, the pasture and hay are not sold directly, but supply the means for producing something else. On many farms there may be fields of corn, oats, hay, grass, and rye, yet these are Fig. 13. — (Continued.) all supply crops contributing to the one money crop of milk, butter, lambs, cattle, swine, or horses. The Rural Dollar and the City Dollar. — The complete self- support and the well-nigh money-free life of which the Massa- chusetts farmer wrote 125 years ago, is gone; but a strong trace of it remains in the fact that a dollar for the farmer is often as valuable as two dollars to the city man because he buys many things cheaply where they are grown, and he also produces 32 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY many things for home use. Nearly every farm has a garden, from which a complete supply of vegetables is drawn to last the family through winter and spring as well as for summer use. It also has an orchard in which peaches, apples, pears, plums, and grapes may be grown, so that no fruit need be bought, for the home supply can be stored, canned, preserved, or dried for winter use. One or two cows furnish milk and butter. A few chickens about the farmyard supply the farm with eggs and poultry, and usually leave some to sell for cash. More than half the farmers of America raise enough wheat or corn to make their own bread and have some left to sell. Mil- lions of farmers raise a few hogs or sheep or cattle which they slaughter for their own meat supply. On almost every farm there are, of necessity, horses which the owner can drive, whereas the city dweller usually pays carfares, because the keeping of a horse costs him from $100 to $250 per year. In contrast to all these products of the farm, which are had without direct cash cost, the entire food supplies of the city consumer must be bought, and at prices that are often several times higher than they were in the country, because of the great amount of work and expense necessary to get the products from the place where they are grown to the consumer's house. When the city housekeeper, for example, buys a basket of beans she pays for the beans and in addition pays for the following: one basket, the cost of packing the basket ready for shipping, cost of hauling it to the station, transportation charges from the farmer's station to the city, cartage from the railroad station to the commission house, commission to the merchant for selling it, cartage from the commission house to the grocery store, and profit to the groceryman. This profit must be large enough to include rent, clerk hire, delivery-wagon costs, and the value of the damaged goods that cannot be sold. According to a recent expert, all these costs and charges reach a total that amounts to sixty-five cents out of every dollar expended by the housekeeper in a great American city for farm products. Only the remaining thirty-five cents of the dollar is spent for the food itself, with the result that living in the city is much more expensive than living in the country — a frightful waste of effort and resource for an object that might be otherwise obtained. THE PLACE AND NATURE OF AGRICULTURE 33 In many small towns and country districts of the United States, a family can live with as great comfort and independence on $500 per year as one can live in a great city for $1,000; or, again, in the same rural regions referred to, $1,000 a year would make one relatively wealthy, while $2,500 per year in a large city leaves one relatively poor. These statements are made with reference to the real country and not the suburbs, in which the cost of living is often higher than in the great cities, because it involves one more movement of supplies — from the city center to the suburban town. Farming in the United States has been through a period of depression, between 1880 and 1900, when prices were low and dollars hard to get. Prices have recently risen. Cities have grown up so suddenly that these differences between city and country conditions have not been fully appreciated. Now, however, there is coming a rapid increase of understanding of the conditions of living in the country, where one pays for the things he gets, as contrasted with living in the great city, where he must pay, in addition, for a host of services that add no value to the goods and often detract from their value. Agriculture has also suffered from the disadvantage of isola- tion of the rural dweller, which has partly caused the great rush to the city to get the social opportunity that comes of being near large numbers of one's fellows. The telephone, the trolley and the rural delivery of mail are greatly improving the social possi- bilities of American country life. The Application of Science to Agriculture. — Farming is one of the most scientific branches of production. The factory has a few operations involving a science or two, but the farmer must deal with soil chemistry, plant nutrition, animal nutrition, and the diseases and enemies of both plants and animals. He must also be his own purchaser, salesman, and mechanic. Much experiment is required in all this wide field, but in no occupation is experiment so difficult. Experiment consists in altering one factor, the others remaining as before. This the vagaries of. temperature, humidity, rainfall, sunshine, and accident so rarely permit, that experiment in agriculture is difficult and superstition has lingered longest in the most scientific of industries. When one succeeds with experiments it often takes years, and then the 34 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY cycle of production is so slow that there may not be much of his life left in which to profit by the experiments. In a factory an ex- periment may easily affect more cycles of production in a year than farm experiments will in a lifetime. Further than this, many experiments of great value to agriculture are too difficult and costly for farmers to perform, but, at the same time, they may be of great profit to a community or state. Hence agricultural experiment has been largely taken up by the state. Nearly all progressive governments are working systematically to promote agricultural production. In the United States we have in every state a college of agriculture and the mechanic arts, with prac- tically free tuition. Every state has one or more agricultural experiment stations where men are constantly making scientific discoveries and testing the usefulness of other discoveries for their particular localities. These results are published and dis- tributed free, so that the individual farmer may be able to use the latest results of science. In addition, we have at Washington, under the national government, the Department of Agriculture, which is one of the greatest scientific institutions in the world. Along with many other lines of work, it sends its explorers into the Desert of Sahara, into subarctic Russia, into Turkestan, Mongolia, and the ends of the earth where perchance may be found some plant, or practice, of value to some part of the United States. This plant introduction work alone promises to increase the productivity of the United States more than would a new state. Germany, with eighty-seven experiment stations in 1904, leads the world in the promotion of scientific agriculture. On her area, which is smaller than Texas, are twenty-six more experiment stations than are to be found in the whole United States (not counting substations). England, France, Holland, Belgium, and all progressive countries of Europe are also in the same work. Uruguay and Argentine are going at it in earnest. Cyprus (British) is well equipped, while Japan is, in some respects, more advanced than any other nation, but the United States is now making rapid strides. This world-wide distribution of scientific research for agriculture gives to Massachusetts or California the possibility of hearing at once of discoveries that may be made in Germany, Japan, or Sweden. The result is that it THE PLACE AND NATURE OF AGRICULTURE 35 Pi Oa a> I So .-8 SI ■43 ° g-g, J3 3 a m a ■■B a a to M s ft C1C2 etc 1 ' A'" = hybrid offspring of ABcross. tt'Ttc. J = ° ffSPrine ° f a ' a " *'"'• &,&, ] etc = offspring of hybrids A'A"A'" The introduction of foreign varieties has already been very effective in increasing our harvest. The large production of the spring-wheat belt of the United States and Canada did not take place until after the introduction of the Red Fyfe, a variety well THE CEREALS 49 suited to that climate. The recent introduction to the United States and Canada of a drought-resisting variety of wheat known as Durum, from the arid lands of eastern Europe, has caused the farther extension of the wheat area into the drier lands. This variety of wheat contains much gluten and is thus very valuable for the manufacture of macaroni. More than 50 million bushels per year are now grown in the United States. The introduction of new varieties gives new materials for the plant breeders to use. Plant explorers are now scouring all possible corners of the world in search of plants particularly adapted to particular purposes and environments. These plants, specialized in one quality to the point of genius, can be used as parent plants by the plant breeders. For example, in 1910 great interest was aroused among economic botanists and wheat growers by the discovery of wild wheat (a plant supposed to be extinct) growing on the arid slopes of Mount Hermon in Palestine. This is a plant of such promise for scores of millions of now hopelessly arid western acres that the United States Department of Agri- culture at once sent an expert to study this plant in its native habitat. Effect of the Gradual Reduction Process of Milling upon Wheat Growing. — The northern extension of the wheat fields of central North America is largely due to the comparatively recent perfection of the process of milling spring-sown wheat. The Old World wheat crops and the wheat crops of Eastern United States had always been sown in the fall and harvested at the be- ginning of summer. The spring-sown wheat of central North America, chiefly the Red Fyfe, a variety of Scotch origin, is so hard and so brittle that for many years it could not be satis- factorily ground. Because it made poor flour it brought poor prices, and the lands upon which it was grown were in low esteem. The discovery of the gradual reduction process of milling made of this despised grain the best flour, and gave to the northern country a great wheat boom which, in the last quarter of the nine- teenth century, caused the movement of wheat-growing popula- tion, caused the shifting of wheat growing and the rapid growth of the states in the northern Mississippi Valley and, in the first decade of the twentieth century, caused large gains in western Canada. This northwestern movement of population 50 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY for wheat growing will doubtless continue for decades to come. After a century of westward movement, wheat growing, like the centers of human power, has started northward. Effect of Machinery In Wheat Production. — The methods of producing wheat have been made much cheaper and easier by mechanical inventions. Eighteenth century wheat was cut in the Scriptural way, by sickle held in one hand of the laborer, while he grasped a few heads of wheat in the other. Then came the cradle invented in New England in 1806. It was a kind of scythe (scythe invented at Lynn, Mass., 1655) provided with fingers to catch and throw into an even row the straw it cut. The cradle was the main dependence of the United States through the first half of the nineteenth century. In 1851 Cyrus McCor- mick of Virginia made a reaper, which cut and dropped the grain in bundles to be bound by hand. Then came the reapers which also tie the bundles, and finally the reapers that carry the bundles and drop then in piles where the shocks are to be made. One of these machines with three horses and a driver has no difficulty in performing as much work as was done fifty years ago by from five to seven men working arduously with cradles and rakes. As wheat cutting is now merely the driving of horses and the adjust- ing of levers on the reaper the work is occasionally done by women. Where wheat is grown in hundreds of acres, still more specialized machines are used, the most complicated of which is the combined harvester and thrasher. This machine can be used only when very dry summers, such as occur in the Columbia River basin and the great valley of California, permit the grain to dry out on the stalk so that shocking it up to cure it is not nec- essary. Here the combined harvester and thrasher, driven by steam or drawn by twenty-five or thirty horses, sweeps over the great fields and daily puts into sacks the thoroughly dry grain of thirty acres of waving wheat fields. Similar improvements have been made in thrashing, which is equally a part of wheat production. Men are still living in the United States who in their youth helped thrash by driving horses around and around upon the sheaves that their feet might shatter out the grains upon the thrashing floor. A method similar to this, in which the horses drag a rolling stone around the thrashing floor is still in use in Russia, Turkey, and other coun- THE CEREALS 51 tries adjacent to the Black and Mediterranean Seas. 1 In more ■progressive regions, under the influence of high wages, the steam thrasher does nearly all the work. In the United States, it is common for one of these machines to thrash a thousand bushels of wheat per day and be taken at evening to the next farm by its own traction engine. These revolutionary improvements in wheat production have cheapened its labor cost from 133 minutes of human labor per bushel in 1830 to 10 minutes in 1904. 2 Fig. 25. — Russian thrashing floor of type common in eastern Mediterranean countries. The machinery for planting, harvesting, and thrashing wheat has also been adopted, with minor changes, to do the same work* for the other small grains — rye, oats, barley, and buckwheat. The cheapening that results from the easier production permits wheat to become more universally used as food. It is now eaten by many people in the southern United States who previously made a larger use of corn; by others in Germany and Austria, who had been living on rye bread; and even by the Chinese and Japanese, who are increasing their use of it as a luxury to replace partially their cheaper foods of barley, rye, millet, and the more expensive rice. 1 These floors are often unroofed, and by Turkish law the grain cannot be moved from them until the tax gatherer comes. Meanwhile birds, beasts, and weather injure. Bribe, if sufficiently large, may induce the tax gatherer to hurry. This is typical of the many ways that the Turkish government limits industry. 2 Year-book, Department of Agriculture, 1910. 52 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY Yield and Production of Wheat in New Countries. — It is a peculiar fact that the world's greatest wheat exports are pro- duced in regions of comparatively low yield per acre, and in regions that do not have the ideal wheat climate. (See Table of Wheat Trade and Production, p. 55.) This is because wheat where it can be grown in treeless countries is a good frontiersman's crop. With the aid of modern agricultural and transportation facilities, wheat is a money crop easily grown. It has good keeping quali- ties, is easily shipped, is in universal demand. It is of more Ay f\ iNNlrfrTuT*^ ^"\ j ^T^^S t j J» j • v-L— ^ V, ff&Vh -/ \ llppls J- — Less than 1 bushel 1-10 10-20 20-30 30-40 50-100 over 100 Fig. 26. — U. S. production of wheat per capita, by states. Wheat figures, three- year average, 1909-11. Pop., 1910. value in proportion to its bulk than hay or any temperate zone grain. It grows well in a greater number of places than either corn or oats. Once it is safely sheltered near a railroad, it can be marketed many months later, thousands of miles away. These advantages of wheat as a money crop often make it the first and most profitable thing that can be grown by the new settler upon an open plain after the railroad is within reach, even though the average yield per acre be low. 1 As the last half 1 The distribution of the world's wheat crop is a fine illustration of the fact that products are often grown in places that are not best suited to them. This does not prevent the crop from being the best thing to grow on these lands. THE CEREALS 53 century has been an epoch of settlement and railroad building, the world's chief wheat exports for that period have been grown upon such newly accessible plains: in the Mississippi, Missouri, and Red River valleys of the United States; in western Canada, the Argentine Republic, Russia, and Siberia. Owing to the fact that there is no rival cultivated crop, the settler on a new plain, if not a tender of flocks, usually grows wheat year after year as long as the yield will be at all profitable. Illinois and Iowa have passed through this exploitation or continuous cropping stage, which prevails at the present time in the more i H>nj , -- - ' / Fig. 27. — Grain elevators at West Hope, N. D., a railroad station on the agricultural frontier near the Manitoba boundary, longitude 101° W. newly settled lands of central Kansas and Nebraska and Okla- homa and Texas. The Red River Valley of the North, comprising the major part of the wheat districts of Minnesota, North Dakota, and Manitoba, like the black earth districts of southern Russia, now experiences decline in yield and approaches the end of its continuous wheat production. With the possible exception of the Russian black earth belt there never was in the whole world an easier place than the Red River country for the growth of wheat. This fertile plain, the bed of a glacial lake, often for miles literally as flat as a floor, without a stone or tree, lends itself perfectly to the use of the most modern machinery and large scale production. Year after year wheat has been grown 54 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY until the declining yield has made the farmers turn to other crops — the raising of horses, the keeping of cattle, the making of butter. The total yield from these districts does not decline because of the steadily increased percentage of the land that goes into wheat in the one-crop period and the improved yields that follow the introduction of crop rotation and livestock. At the present time in western Canada, where new railroads are being built across open, empty, treeless plains, the new set- tlers are again beginning with continuous wheat growing which will last them one, two, or three decades before they too must take to other crops and cattle keeping. In the meantime these wheat crops on the virgin prairie soil of the harvest frontier are larger than those of the Red River Valley. It is possible that the Canadian region suitable for the extension of wheat growing reaches 60° north, and extends from Lake Winnipeg to the Rockies. If experience proves this to be true, the wheat-grow- ing possibilities are enormous, and the continuous cropping method will have land to support it for several decades. The Italian farmers, who are now going to the Argentine Republic at the rate of 100,000 per year, are having an identical experience upon the magnificent black soil plains that lie along the western banks of the Parana River. The Russian peasant also exploits in the same way when he emigrates to central Siberia and settles on those endless plains called steppes where now the trans-Siberian railroad has made possible the export of grain. After a time these Siberians also must rotate crops, keep cattle, and export butter and eggs to London, as do their brethren in the older and more developed lands of Russia and West Siberia. While important for the frontiersman, wheat is also impor- tant in established crop rotations and mixed farming for two reasons. It affords an easy way to start pasture and hay fields because the young grass can grow up as the wheat grows, the wheat serving as a nurse crop. Among keepers of livestock the straw is valuable for bedding for the animals. Wheat thus becomes as essential in the semi-garden agriculture of Belgium as it is on the new plains of Canada and Siberia, and the greater care and labor hold the total production at a high figure. Effect of Cbeap Wheat on Farm Value in Old Countries. — These new lands upon the plains of North America and other THE CEREALS 55 continents were opened up by railroads, and often actually- given away. This made the production of wheat a much cheaper process in these lands than in Europe, where rent and interest on land value is high. With wheat production made easy by the new machinery, it has become so cheap that, espe- cially during the later years of the 19th century, it was no longer profitable to grow it on much of the land in the eastern United States and western Europe, particularly Great Britain, where it had long been the mainstay as a money crop. Animal prod- ucts were cheapened by the same forces. Accordingly land values fell in both regions. Many farms have been aban- doned in New England and New York, while many thousands more throughout the North Atlantic slope would sell for less than before there was a mile of railroad in America. New York state produced 12 million bushels of wheat in 1839 and 6 million in 1909. WHEAT TRADE AND PRODUCTION (1910) Importing countries Exporting countries Million bushels Yield in bu. per acre, 1909 Million bushels Yield in bu. Crop, 1910 Import, ' 1910 Crop, 1910 Export, 2 1910 per acre, 1909 Belgium. . . . Denmark.. . France Germany . . . Italy Japan Netherlands Switzerland. United Kingdom... Average of importing 14.6 4.5 315.4 149.4 192.4 24.8 5.6 3.5 66.4 49 5 22 67 42 3 21 14 217 40.0 37.8 21.8 30.5 16.3 20.8 32.8 34.2 34.3 29.8 21.0 Argentina British India. Bulgaria Canada Roumania. . . . United States Average of exporting 146.0 98.1 369.6 48.0 215.8 90.9 447.0 621.3 75 64 42 11 60 32 23 61 10.4 12,3 10.9 12.4 21. 5 2 13.6 14.2 15.8 13.8 Kansas 51.4 14.4 New York 1 Including flour. 2 In 1910 the Canadian average was 16.1 bushels per acre. 56 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY COMPARISON OF CROP AND YIELD IN EUROPE AND AMERICA America is such a heavy exporter of wheat that it is some- thing of a surprise when we first learn that Europe produces much more wheat to the acre and more wheat altogether than America or even the rest of the world. In 1910 the figures for Europe were 1,800 (in 1911 1,952 million bushels), for North America 855 million (849 in 1911), and 3,516 mil- lion for the entire world. Europe and the United States do not differ greatly in size, but one has 90 million people and the other 420 million. In order to get enough to eat the Europeans must till their land thoroughly. While the wheat farmers on the cheap lands of Kansas, the Argentine, or the Red River Valley of the North are by their careless but inexpensive methods getting less than 12 or 15 bushels per acre, from land worth from |10 to $40 per acre, the careful English farmer, with a systematic crop rotation, is averaging 30 or even more per acre on land worth $200 per acre. The English tenant farmer does not make proportionally large profits because he has to pay high rent and his higher yield requires much expense for labor and fertilizer. European Wheat Growing. — The hills and the rain of northern and western England and Scotland and Wales, and the rains of Ireland cause wheat growing to be of small importance in those parts of the United Kingdom. Eastern and southern England are the chief British wheat districts. With their suitable climate, level plains, and fertile soil these districts are about equal in output to any corresponding area of the United States. England with 50 million bushels in 1908 exceeded as a wheat grower any state east of the Mississippi River and had two and one-half times as much as Missouri, a state of practically equal area. France, with only one-sixth as much tillable land as the United States, has a wheat crop double that of Germany and half that of the United States. French farms average 20 acres each and those of the United States average 150 acres. Stimulated by a high tariff the French farmers make their country more nearly independent in wheat than any other country of west Europe. There has been great increase in the wheat yields of Europe since 1840. Bel- THE CEREALS 57 gium, with great manufactures and the densest population in Europe, has an accompanying agriculture so productive that her wheat crop of 13 million bushels was greater in proportion to her area than that of the leading American wheat states of Kansas, Minnesota, or North Dakota. Holland and western and southern Germany are also important wheat growers in proportion to their area, and the crop is carefully tilled; yet the great manufacturing population of these northwestern countries of Europe consumes much more wheat than the fertile and well-tilled fields produce. The European wheat grower, who gets twice the American crop on his high-priced home lands with their high rental, usu- ally changes his methods if he emigrates to the plains of the United States or Argentina where land is cheap, and grows wheat there in the cheap land way of the industrial frontier. The same process is repeated within the United States. Old states like Maine (with an average yield of 22 bushels for 1910 and 21 bushels for 1911) have, through good care, a higher wheat yield than the rich plains states where North Dakota, a leading state, had a yield of 18.2 bushels per acre in 1910 and 8 bushels in 1911. In the Mediterranean countries of Spain, Portugal, Italy, and Greece, where the climate is ideal for wheat, it is the chief grain. But the percentage of tillable land is small owing to the rough nature of the country, the yield is lower than in north Europe largely because of inferior methods, and the amount produced is not sufficient for the very dense population. Yet Italy, with 150 million bushels of wheat per year on 110,000 square miles of area produces 50 per cent, more wheat per 1,000 square miles than any American state. European Wheat Exporters. — Southeastern Europe is the only part of that continent having a wheat surplus for<£|r>ort. The grain-growing plains in Hungary and Roumania, in the Danube Valley and the Black Sea Basin of Russia, are given over to the growing of wheat as the chief money crop. During the four years 1908-11 European Russia averaged 589 millions of bushels of wheat while the United States had 651, but the Russian export averaged 142 (1907-10) million bushels, while that of the United States was only 116 million bushels. During that period Roumania exported from one-fourth to one-half as much 58 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY wheat as the United States. Steamers by the hundred load at the ports of Galatz, Braila, and Sulina on the lower Danube and at Odessa on the Black Sea and discharge their wheat cargoes at Palermo and Naples, at Genoa to feed the people of northern Italy and Switzerland, at Marseilles for the people of France (in years of short crop in that country), at Barcelona for the Spaniards, or at Hamburg and Rotterdam for the factory workers of the lower Rhine Valley and Berlin. Britain also draws much wheat from Russia. Asiatic Wheat Growing. — While wheat is grown from Smyrna at the west of Asia to Vladivostock at the east, the small popula- tion clustered thickly upon the oases of Arabia, Persia, Turkestan and other arid interior countries grow only limited quantities for their own use. In the north of China, also, great quantities are grown and consumed by the natives, but there are no crop statistics. An American Consul reports (U. S. Con. Rep., Feb. 23, 1911) as the results of a journey through central and western China in 1910, that wheat is extensively grown there. He saw fine wheat fields in the Hoangho basin that would yield over 40 bushels to the acre. He think^he region north of the Yangtse Kiang and west of the riee-growing plains near the coast, contains more wheat eaters than the United States. He estimated the crop of the two provinces of Shansi and Shensi at 50 million bushels. New modern flour mills (owned by Chinese) are rapidly making Shanghai a center of flour export to the Chinese coasts and the import of American flour fell off heavily from 1907 to 1910. India in bad years eats her crop and in good years has an export which equalled 26 per cent, of that of the United States during the years 1907-10. The Indian wheat is chiefly grown in the dry Indus Valley and on the plateau near Bombay. Prac- tically none is grown in the Ganges Delta or on the coasts of the Peninsula. There is little doubt that the great Siberian plain reaching nearly all the way from Lake Baikal to the Urals, and closely resembling in its black flatness much of the Canadian wheat country, is the most promising future wheat exporter of the Old World. Siberia and India are the important wheat ex- porters of Asia. THE CEREALS 59 The Japanese wheat crop is equal to about one-tenth of her rice crop or the wheat crop of Ohio. There is much interest over the discovery that there is room for the extension of wheat growing in the sparsely peopled north end of the Japanese Em- pire. Sakhalien, for example, long considered hopeless, is now thought to have winter wheat possibilities. Manchuria is the only place in Asia outside of Siberia having large unused possibilities. An American agricultural expert in the employ of the Chinese Government estimates that the utilization of the now relatively empty wheat lands of Man- churia and eastern Mongolia should produce by native methods alone 300 or 400 million bushels. American flour has disap- peared from the Mukden market, but there is no reason for Europe to expect to consume much or any of the prospective Manchurian wheat. The large and increasing population of eastern Asia, now importing some wheat, will probably take it all. 1 Wheat Importing Countries. — An examination of the table on wheat trade and production will show that the chief wheat importers are the manufacturing peoples of west Europe, and that their chief supplies come from southeast Europe, central North America, Argentine, Australia, and India. International statistics do not reveal what is likewise a fact, that the entire region east of the Appalachian Mountains in the United States is also like the manufacturing countries on the other side of the Atlantic, drawing large supplies of wheat from the agricul- tural hinterland. It happens that a shipload of wheat from Duluth to Buffalo is domestic (naturally uncounted) trade, and a shipload from the Danube to the Rhine or to Barcelona is foreign trade. Europe and the United States are much alike in area and kinds of production, but differences in statistical methods tend to hide it. Situation of Wheat Exporting Regions Compared. — The wheat exporters of southern Europe, on the Black Sea, share with the exporters of the Argentine Republic the advantage of cheap ocean transportation. The wheat exporters of the United States and Canada grow their surplus for export in the heart of a continent a thousand miles or more from seaports. That 1 U. S. Con. Rep., Feb. 23, 1911. 60 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY this last region nevertheless takes its place among export regions is due solely to the excellence of the transportation conditions which have made possible the bringing of wheat to ocean harbors where it could be exported. In 1825 the Erie Canal connected the Hudson River with the Great Lakes and Russia 24.4 Argentina 15.9 United States 15.5 101.8 Canada 9.2 60.7 Netherlands 7i0 46.3 Australia 5.7 37.3 Roumania 4.7 30.7 Belgium 4.0 26.1 All others 13.6 89.6 Million Bushels 104.2 Percentage United Kingdom 33.9 Million Bushels 211.1 Germany 13.6 Belgium 11.4 Netherlands 10.7 Italy 6.6 Brazil 2.7 * All others 21.1 84.9 71.2 41.1 17.0 130.2 Total 657.2 Fig. 28. — Wheat and wheat flour exports, three-year average, 1908-10. Total 622.2 Fig. 29. — Wheat and^cheat flour im- ports, three-year average, 1908-10. made possible boat transportation from the shores of the Great Lakes to New York at a fraction of the previous cost. This made possible the extensive growing of wheat in western New York, northern Ohio, Michigan and other lake shore districts. Ohio ranked first among the wheat-growing states in 1839. Twenty-five years after the canal opened the lake shores to THE CEREALS 61 the world market railroads began to reach from these inland waterways out across the plains and from that time to this wheat has gone eastward to the sea in millions of bushels, being gathered together in the great markets, first at Chicago, and later at St. Louis, Kansas City, Milwaukee, Duluth, Port Arthur, and Winnipeg. It is probable that within a few years new railroads will be built from the Canadian wheat country to Hudson Bay, where for a short time after wheat harvest steamers can get out with the Canadian wheat crop before the ice closes this great and at present unused arm of the sea. At the present time, however, the whole movement of wheat east of the Rocky Mountains is to the Atlantic ports, most of it passing down the basin of the Great Lakes, whence, as a result of railroad agree- ments, it scatters to reach the sea at all ports between Montreal and Norfolk. From Kansas and southward, the Gulf is nearer than the Atlantic and much wheat reaches the ocean steamer at New Orleans and Galveston. The wheat of the Columbia River basin is exported from Portland and the Puget Sound ports; and that of the Great Valley of California from San Francisco Bay. Some of the California yield goes to the Orient but most of it still goes to Europe by cheap water transportation, which has always been less expensive than an overland journey to an eastern port. The Siberian wheat plains drained to the frozen Arctic and shut off by mountains from the southern sea, have the worst situation of all wheat exporters with regard to the sea. The Siberian crop must make the long rail journey to the Baltic unaided by any such gift of nature as the American Great Lakes or the Danube River. For this reason the Siberian plain has been the last of the world's great plains to be settled. The recent railroads have enabled it to become a wheat exporter but its crop combined with that of the adjacent provinces of Central Asia amounted to but 62 million bushels in 1911, while that of Minnesota was 44 million (94 in 1910), North Dakota 73 million (90 in 1910), and Kansas 51 million (87 in 1910). But Siberia has the resources of great area, fertile soil, and the population of Russia promises plenty of immigrants. Manufacture of Wheat Products. — The manufacture of wheat products has sprung up along the line of wheat shipment. The 62 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY waterfalls at Rochester and Niagara Falls, both being close to the Erie Canal, led to the early development of milling on a large scale; but these centers have long since been eclipsed by the great flour mills of Minneapolis, the greatest flour manu- facturing city in the world. Here the falls of St. Anthony on the Mississippi River give power for driving the machinery in a location very convenient for the assembling of the wheat from the northwestern fields of the United States and Canada. From these Minneapolis mills flour is sent to all the cities of the northern and eastern United States and western Europe. In various towns along the route of wheat shipment from the Mississippi Valley to the sea there have sprung up manufactures of prepared breakfast foods, an increasing form of cereal con- sumption. These, however, use other grains by themselves or in combination with wheat. The chief by-product of the American flour mills, bran, the outer covering of wheat, is used as stock food, especially for dairy cattle, in the same populous regions that buy the flour. It is interesting to note that China has so few domestic animals that the flour mills of Shanghai are handicapped in the disposi- tion of their by-products. Wheat in American Foreign Trade. — Wheat has been impor- tant in the foreign trade of the United States for two centuries and a half. As early as 1656 the traders of New York re- joiced over their shipments of flour and bread to the West Indies, where wheat could not be grown. A century ago, during the Napoleonic wars, American wheat helped to feed the European armies and wheat export was a most important part of our for- eign trade. Land values of American farms and the location of population depended greatly upon the ability to get wheat to the sea by wagon or flat boat. (See population map of 1800 and 1810, U. S. statistical atlas.) Throughout the whole of the nineteenth century wheat was the leading agricultural export of the north ; and there is to-day, in addition to our heavy trade with Europe, a widely scattered trade in flour with the West Indies and other tropical countries, where some flour is used and little or no wheat is grown. The future, however, promises to see our export of wheat decline in importance and in quantity. Our export of wheat THE CEREALS 63 declined first in favor of flour exports. But there is now in progress a conspicuous decline in the export of both wheat and flour, because our increasing population leaves a smaller and smaller surplus for other lands. California furnishes an inter- esting example of this change. That state, once a great wheat 616.7 619.3 Percen tage United States 18.1 Eastern Russia 17.4 India 9.5 Prance 8.7 Austria 6.1 Italy 5.0 Canada 5.0 Argentina 4.0 Spain 4.0 Germany 4.0 All others 17.9 309.7 178.5 177.5 141.4 143.4 143.1 Percentage " ' Million Bushels North Dakota 11.8 76.2 Kansas 9.9 64.1 Minnesota 8.5 55.0 Nebraska 6.6 42.7 Washington 6.6 42.4 Illinois 6.0 38.8 South Dakota 5.6 36.2 Indiana 5.3 34.5 Ohio 5.2 33.8 Missouri 4.7 30.6 All others 29.8 192.7 Total 355.8 Fig. 30. — World wheat production, three-year average, 1909-11. Total 646.6 Fig. 31. — Wheat production of United States, three-year average, 1909-1 1. exporter, reached her maximum wheat acreage in 1893. Since that time alfalfa fields and fruit orchards have cut in on the wheat area. The Future Wheat Supply. — As our export declines, we are likely to see, during the first third of the twentieth century, the exports from Canada and Argentine Republic increase because of the 64 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY large area of level plains of these countries, new to the plow, fertile, and sparsely populated — just the kind of place for wheat growing by the one-crop method which produces large yields for a short time. Already the Argentine wheat exports of about 100 million a year about equal our combined wheat and flour exports. The proportion of the crop exported is significant. In 1910 the United States exported 9 per cent, of the crop, Argentina 52, and Canada 28. Canada's rise is indicated by the yield of Saskatchewan — 4 million bushels in 1900, 34 mil- lion in 1908. There is as yet little reason to modify Dr. Saun- ders' reasonable prophecy of 1904 — that wheat grown on one- fourth of the land suitable to it in the Canadian North-west, with the acre yield of Manitoba for the previous decade, would bring a crop of more than 800 million bushels, which, as he shows, would feed 30,000,000 people in Canada and three times supply the import need of Great Britain. The remaining three-fourths of the land would provide room for a vast animal industry with soil enriching crop rotations. 2. RYE Rye Compared with Wheat. — Botanically, this plant is closely allied to wheat, which it resembles in physical appearance. It will grow where wheat grows. But the grain is smaller, less nutritious, and hence less valuable. It is, therefore, almost entirely absent from all of the important wheat regions of the world, and is primarily the grain of poor lands and the food of poor people. The straw is longer than wheat straw and because of its value as packing material the rye grower is sometimes able to sell it for a good price, but this advantage is relatively unimportant. That rye is grown, nevertheless, is due to the fact that a crop will mature in poorer ground, in a colder climate, and with less care than will wheat. Uses. — The chief use of rye is as a breadstuff, primarily for people with a low purchasing power and consequent low standard of life. Where the land is poor and weather cold, the people are also usually poor, and the cheap rye is the breadstuff of the masses. For example, in central, north, and northeastern Europe rye is the chief breadstuff of the poorer people, as Indian THE CEREALS 65 corn, the cheap grain of the warm land, is in parts of south Europe and Mexico. Regions of Production. — The region of the world's greatest rye production is in the low plain of north Europe reaching from the English Channel through Holland, Belgium, Germany, Denmark, and Russia to the Ural Mountains. Owing to the work of glaciers, which once covered this part of Europe, the soil is in many places sandy and poor. Here rye grows better than wheat. Russia grows more rye than wheat which ex- plains her large export of wheat, as the people eat the rye. Russia alone produces more than half of the world's rye crop, Germany more than a fourth, Austria-Hungary more than a tenth, and the United States with its 30 million bushels less than a fiftieth. Germany grows three times as much rye as wheat. The peasants and factory workers of rye-growing countries eat the most of it in the form of black bread, which, after all, is nearly as nourishing as wheat bread. But these people frequently substitute the superior and more highly esteemed wheat bread for rye bread, when they become able to buy wheat. As it grows with little care and on rough ground, rye was relatively more important in the earlier days in the United States before the settlement of the level west, than it is now. At the present time we produce in this country only about one twenty-fifth as much rye as wheat — chiefly in the mountain districts on the poorer and hillier lands, and almost never on land which will yield a good crop of wheat. The chief centers of production are the Appalachian region from the Potomac and the Ohio to Lake Champlain and the glacial districts be- tween Minneapolis and Lake Michigan. As the conditions of east Canada resemble those of the eastern United States, rye is grown to a similar extent there. From the standpoint of crop rotations and farm practice, rye, oats, and barley are similar to wheat. 3. OATS Regions of Production. — The soil requirements of the oat plant are not unlike those for wheat. In its climatic requirements it can stand nearly as much heat, but being nearly always spring 66 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY sown it has a later growing season and requires more rain and will also grow in a colder climate. Its moisture requirement bars it from the Mediterranean climates with their hot dry summers. Because of these qualities, it is grown to some extent in very nearly all the important northern wheat regions and also in rye and northern barley regions. It is of the greatest relative impor- tance in such cold, damp countries as Ireland, Scotland, Sweden, and Norway, and is grown to a great extent also by the people of the central and eastern European rye belt. It is also im- portant in the eastern half of Canada, where the climate is too cold for corn. In the colder northern parts of Corea and Japan where rice does not thrive and wheat is not at its best, the farmer resorts to oats and barley. Uses of Oats. — The Scotch, probably because of their moist climate, have most largely utilized the oat as human food. Dr. Johnson's famous English dictionary is said to have defined oats as "food for men in Scotland, horses in England," to which the Scotch replied, "And England is noted for the excellence of her horses, Scotland for the excellence of her men." The people of other countries are now, since the coming of the breakfast food habit, learning to eat more oatmeal. A little oaten bread is used in parts of north Europe, but the main use is as horse food. Grown on Same Farm as Indian Corn. — The fact that oats may be sown in spring and will stand the hot summer makes them a very important grain in the corn belt of the United States. In much of this territory the summer is not fully suited to spring-sown wheat, and the alternate freezing and thawing of the open winter often injures winter wheat. Oats, not being hurt by a little frost, fit nicely into these climatic and agricultural con- ditions by being sown very early in the spring before corn can be planted. They require no attention until harvest time, which does not occur until after the corn has been planted and received all the cultivation that is considered necessary. Then while the corn is maturing, after the hay harvest or possibly before it, the oats are harvested. The excellent way in which these crops dove- tail together makes the field of oats as well as the field of corn and the field of hay a part of the great corn belt farm system, and here is grown the greater part of the United States crop, which amounts to nearly a billion bushels. THE CEREALS 67 The United States leads in the production of oats. The Russian crop is about equal to that of the United States and nearly double that of Germany, the third oat producer. Effect of Light Weight on Export. — The oat grain has a thick, light, close-fitting husk which is not removed by thrashing. It is left upon the grain if used for animals and only removed by special machinery when the grain is prepared for human food. This husk contributes to cause a great variation in the weight of oats, ranging from 25 to 50 pounds per bushel, in great con- trast to the small variation commonly found in wheat and corn. The usual legal weight of oats is 32 pounds per bushel. The large bulk per unit of value is one of the reasons for the small export, which in the United States amounts to less than a twentieth part of the crop. Another and greater reason for the small export from America is the great importance of oats in the agri- culture of the grain-importing countries of Europe. Oatmeal makes up an important part of the American export of oats, the centers of manufacture being in a number of small towns in Iowa and other corn-belt states, from which the familiar little pasteboard boxes go out in millions, while the more eco- nomical sacks and barrels also take their share. 4. BARLEY Character, Range, and Hardiness of Barley. — This is the hardiest of the important cereals. The wheat limit in Russia is near St. Petersburg, but barley goes on to the Arctic. It is neighbor alike to the sledge-drawing reindeer and the desert- crossing camel. In the appearance of the growing plant and of the seed it bears close resemblance to wheat. Under similar cultural conditions the yield per acre is much greater than wheat, with the advantage of wider climatic range. Barley is important in northern Norway and Sweden, and in the adjacent Lapland, growing beneath the midnight sun, and ripening 150 miles beyond the Arctic Circle in 70° north latitude. It is regularly grown in Finland and north Russia to the shores of the Arctic Ocean, and its ability to resist droughts and heat causes it to be grown as far south as the Nile Valley, Abyssinia, and the east point of Africa near the equator. 68 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY Uses. — An essential element of bread-stuff for general use is gluten, which permits the making of the sticky dough necessary to light bread. But for its shortage of gluten barley would prob- ably replace wheat as our dominant breadstuff and with the new knowledge of plant-breeding such a change may yet be pos- Fercentage Eastern Russia 31.0 TJnited States 18.0 169.2 Germany 10.4 146.3 Austria 10.4 146.1 Japan 6.2 87.9 Spain 5.8 81.6 ited Kingdom 4.6 65.3 All others 19.6 277.8 Million Bushels 438.2 Percentage T Million Bushels California 23.4 Minnesota 17.6 Wisconsin 13.7 North Dakota 9.5 South Dakota 9.0 Iowa 7.5 "Washington 4.0 All others 15.3 38.4 14.7 12.3 6.4 25.5 Total 1412.0 Total 164.0 Fig. 32. — World's barley production, Fig. 33. — United States barley produc- tion, three-year average, 1909-11. three-year average, 1909-11. sible. The large yield of barley in combination with its ability to resist drought made it the chief grain food of the ancient Hebrews, Greeks, and Romans, who had rather dense popula- tion in lands with a very dry summer (Mediterranean climate). At the present time it is used as breadstuff in Scandinavia, Russia, Germany, and to a less extent in southeastern Europe, THE CEREALS 69 and is beginning to be used in the United States to a small extent in the preparation of breakfast foods. The shortage in gluten and failure to make sticky dough and light bread limit its use in the countries with high standards of living chiefly to the making of malt for beer, for which it is extensively used in Germany, England, and the United States. The large yield makes barley a substitute for corn as a food for hogs, horses, and cattle in countries that cannot grow corn, such as Canada and Europe north of the Alps and the Pacific slope of the United States. In England and Germany it occupies about as much of the farm land as wheat, and to a considerable extent takes the same place in farm economy that corn does in the American corn belt. Importance in Arid Lands. — The drought-resisting quality makes barley important in arid lands, such as those around the Mediterranean Sea, Asia Minor, central Asia, Australia, and California, where it will grow nearer to the desert than wheat. In countries having this winter rain and summer drought kind of climate, especially in such horse-loving countries as Australia and California, the barley is often made into hay by being cut before the grain is mature. At this time the entire plant makes ' good forage. In California, the barley crop is double that of wheat, which it is rapidly replacing as a market grain, probably because of superior drought-resisting quality — a factor of great impor- tance in a state with so much arid land. Most of the California barley goes to the eastern states for malt manufacture. As in summer-dry California, so it is important in Spain and Algeria. Aside from California, with 40 million bushels (25 per cent, of the national crop in 1911) the only barley district of impor- tance in the United States is in Wisconsin (Milwaukee is a brew- ing center), southern Minnesota, and the Dakotas, where half of the American crop is grown. The fact that barley ripens earlier than wheat is a factor of very great importance because the two crops, one food for man, the other food for beast, do not compete for the growers' time at harvest so that he can grow more acres of the two grains than he could of either alone. The superiority of corn as a forage plant in the United States has in the past limited the total growth of barley in this country (in 1911 160 million bushels, about one-fourth as large as the 70 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY wheat crop), but the almost cornless Europe grows a billion bushels, nearly the half being grown in Russia. Little Denmark with her many cattle grows nearly six times as much barley as wheat. Its esteem as a forage plant is increasing so rapidly in the United States that the crop has doubled within fifteen years. Its recent growth in Kansas and for hog feed suggests its sub- stitution for corn on the arid edge of the corn belt. Its heavy yield causes the Japanese to use it on lands not suited to rice and the crop is more than one-third as great as the rice crop, and three or four times as great as the wheat crop. 5. BUCKWHEAT Place of Growth and Use. — Buckwheat, an unimportant cereal, is among grains as the goat is among animals — conspicuous for its ability to nourish itself where the supply of nourishment is meager. This feeding habit of the plant, enabling it to live on the poorer and rougher lands, in combination with its very short period of growth, makes it the cereal best fitted for growth under the worst conditions. These characteristics also make it a soil exhauster. It grows so quickly that it can be sown in midsum- mer after other crops have failed, or have been harvested, and yet ripen before frost. Its qualities combine to make it a crop for farms of rough and mountainous localities, such as the upper part of the Appalachian Plateau in New York and Pennsylvania, parts of New England and Canada, the mountainous districts of France, the Alps, and Russia. The excellence of the buckwheat flour for making batter cakes makes it a favorite article of diet where buckwheat is known. Persons who keep bees for the large-scale production of honey sometimes grow buckwheat because of the large amount of honey in the flowers, thus getting a double harvest. New York and Pennsylvania produce three- fourths of the total crop of the United States, which amounts to about 3 per cent, of the wheat crop. 6. RICE Rice Characteristics and Rice Climate. — Without rice the human race would be greatly handicapped for locally grown cereal food in the torrid zone and in some parts of the warm temperate THE CEREALS 71 zone where there is a heavy summer rain, as along the Gulf coast in the United States. In such a climate all the European grains — wheat, barley, rye, oats, and buckwheat — fail miserably, and corn is far from its best, owing to the bad effects of the mois- ture. Commerce would find difficulty in filling the gap because it is so difficult to keep these northern grains in a hot moist climate. Trouble is often experienced in shipping corn down the Mississippi River and through the Gulf of Mexico to Europe, because the humidity causes the corn to heat and mold. It is indeed fortunate that these climates have rice, Asia's great gift to the world, which thrives under wet summer conditions and which, owing to the dryness of the kernels and a protecting husk, can also be kept without deterioration. This grain is to the regions with moist summers what wheat is to the regions with a dry summer. The two plants do not thrive in the same region unless, as is the case in a few districts of China and Japan, a crop of winter wheat can be harvested before the beginning of summer rains, which furnish the proper conditions for rice. Rice Region and the Monsoon. — In the summer season the Asiatic monsoon, a seasonal wind, a gigantic sea breeze, blows inland from the warm, moist Indian and Pacific oceans across all coast lands between the upper Ganges Valley and latitude 51° north in Japan. It gives to eastern and southern India, Ceylon, Burmah, Siam, and Cochin China, the Philippines, China, southern Korea, and Japan a heavy warm mid-summer rain. The Asiatic summer rain produced by the monsoon is one of the greatest factors in the relation of man to the earth. South- eastern Asia and adjoining islands, the region of monsoon climate with rice the leading cereal, is the home of more than half the human race. One of the important reasons why this small corner of the world holds so many of its people is because the monsoon climate has rain at the season of greatest heat and growth rather than in the cooler period of least growth such as results from the winter rainfalls of California, Spain, Italy, Persia, Australia, and Chile. The climate possesses first the intermittency to compel people to work for the non-productive season of drought and then rainfall enough to permit great production and thus great numbers. 72 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY Rice flourishes in the wet summer due to the moonsoon, and in these parts of southeastern Asia, where the moisture is sufficient to its satisfactory growth, rice is the mainstay of the population. It is said to be the main food supply of one-third of the human race, but the extent of its use has been somewhat exaggerated through our contact with Oriental people at sea coast points and the resultant generalizations from those observations coupled with our ignorance of inland districts, especially in China. The rice is the grain of the moist low plain, and contrary to the gen- eral opinion it is a luxury to millions of Chinese and Japanese who live on the cheaper and less desirable millet, European small grains, and other cereals not known in America. These European and other grains are raised where rice is im- possible of cultivation. Thus, in northwest India the valley of the Indus does not have much rain and is an important wheat grower, as are the central plateaus of India around Bombay and upper Bengal. In north central and northern China, also, rice does not thrive, and wheat is extensively grown. In colder or more arid localities comes barley, and in the region of Pekin and southern Manchuria, corn, while many districts of cen- tral and north China have millet as their chief cereal. South- ern Korea depends much upon rice, while in the rougher and colder north they grow barley, rye and oats, millet, and some wheat, and the same practices prevail in Japan. Wheat and barley are often grown on rice land in winter, and the two grain crops per year measure the intensity of production. The Antiquity and Uses of Rice. — The use of rice in these old lands of the East goes back into the unknown past. Centuries ago rice spread from China and India to Egypt and north Africa, then in 1468 to Pisa in Europe, and in 1694 the governor of South Carolina succeeded in cultivating it in his garden and thus started the industry in this country. A little rice is grown throughout nearly all tropical America and on both coasts of equatorial Africa, but no people depends upon it so fully as do those of southern and eastern Asia, with whom its use often replaces that of wheat, potatoes, and, to some extent, meat also. Among the people of Europe and America, rice is used as an ordinary vegetable, as well as for pudding, and as a substitute for the potato in periods of shortage of that article of THE CEREALS 73 diet. Its great keeping quality and convenience in transport enable it to be used anywhere and it is consumed throughout the western world from Iceland and Greenland to Patagonia and New Zealand. This fact in combination with its use in the Orient and the tropics probably makes it the most widely used of human foods. Rice does not make bread because it lacks the gluten which permits wheat flour to form a sticky dough and become light because of the air bubbles that yeast makes in it. The Oriental boils rice, eats it in that form, or flavors it with a bit of meat or fish if he can afford it; or uses curry, a hot seasoning preparation made in endless varieties. With peas and beans rice furnishes almost the entire nourishment for hundreds of millions of people. Peas and beans are widely grown by almost all Eastern peoples who raise rice, and they are the substitute for meat, milk, and cheese of the west, while the starch of rice is the substitute for bread, potatoes, and many puddings as well. The unpolished rice eaten by the Oriental is much more nutritious than the shiny, white grain which we of the West insist upon eating. The process of polishing it takes off the most nourishing part, and is one of the numerous cases in which appearance makes the purchaser select the really inferior article. The rice bran is a valuable cattle food and is exported as far as Europe. The straw is used for many purposes, including fodder for animals and for the manufacture of hats and shoes worn by Oriental workmen. Eice Growing in Sparsely Peopled Eastern Lands. — The thousands of varieties of rice due to the age-long cultivation are divided into two classes, known respectively as upland rice and lowland rice. Lowland rice must be grown under water, while the upland rice is grown much like wheat or oats and is grown chiefly where population is sparse and land abundant. In those parts of the East Indies such as Sumatra, Borneo, the Malay Peninsula, or some parts of Burmah and Indo-China, where the tropical jungle covers with its dense tangle every foot of the land except where man has fought it back, upland rice is grown in a shiftless manner such as commonly prevails wherever a sparse population uses abundant land. When a new rice field is wanted, the people of a valley will 74 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY begin the year by cutting down the forest. Among stumps and prostrate logs, often higher than the worker's head, the upland rice is planted in holes made with a sharp stick and filled by the bare foot. As young rice is much prized by wild animals, from the elephant down to the small rodents, the clearing must be watched until the harvest. After two crops are taken, the field is abandoned for a fresh field and the tangled jungle promptly reclaims the land. Bice Growing in Densely Peopled Lands. — Most of the coun- tries with monsoon climates are too densely peopled to grow their rice in this crude way. In such localities the land once cleared is kept in cultivation for centuries. Dense populations nearly always grow the wet variety of rice, because of its greater and more certain yield. Few crops are surer than the wet rice, and few more uncertain than upland rice. Wet rice must be grown by irrigation, and the devices used in fitting and keeping the land for this service are among the greatest monuments of human diligence in the world. They are cer- tainly the most creditable constructions produced by tropical peoples, the only rivals being the slave-built monuments of tyrants. In Ceylon, for example, the railway that goes from the seacoast to the highlands goes through an irrigated plain divided by low banks into ponds of small area, — rice fields, each of which has by great labor been leveled so that the water may be of uniform amd proper depth for rice growing. As the rail- road climbs the slopes of the hills the rice patches continue, with smaller area and higher banks, turning at last into a giant flight of gentle water steps, one of the most beautiful landscapes that the world possesses. Many mountains in Java are similarly terraced for rice far up their sides; and, in China and Japan, similar stupendous works have been constructed for the support of the populations, which, like those of Java and of Ceylon, are very dense and mainly dependent upon agriculture in which rice is the largest staple. In Japan 56 per cent, of the arable land (11,000 square miles) is in these irrigated paddy fields. 1 The common treatment of the lowland rice is alternately to flood it and draw off the water during the early periods of its growth. It is kept under water during a larger part of its 1 King: Farmers of Forty Centuries. THE CEREALS 75 development, the water being entirely drawn off as it ripens. The water must not become stagnant, and to keep it in motion it is the common practice on the hillsides to lead a stream to the top terrace, and let the water pass from terrace to terrace down the slopes. In many places, especially in China where the water supply is often inadequate, it is necessary to lift the water from the lower terrace to the higher ones by some artificial means. Sometimes where the water is abundant, Fig. 34. — Reflected light emphasizes some of the many water terraces that surround this Igarot village upon> the slope of the tropic mountains. Sagada Bontoc, Philippine Islands. (U. S. Bureau Insular Affairs.) a high water wheel is used. As it revolves, the bamboo buckets, mere joints of bamboo on its run, empty water in a trough when they reach the top of the wheel. It is an exceptional place where there is sufficient water to use this water-power method. In many parts of China and India two men may be seen strad- dling a little dyke that separates two terraces. With a bucket they dip the water from the lower to the upper, where they pour it out upon mats so that it may not injure the little rice plant beneath. 76 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY The utilization of these terraced hillsides with the accom- panying menace of an avalanche of water is as great a monument to the diligence and patient care of these peoples as is the con- struction of the terraces. Only constant vigilance prevents the breaking of the upper terraces, which, should they give way, would promptly discharge the water into the ones below, fill them to overflowing, and so, gathering force as it went down the hillside, the water would, like an avalanche, leave ruin behind it. Amount and Kind of Labor in Growing and Preparing Bice. — The labor of rice growing often involves the raising of plants in small sprouting beds and transplanting them in little bunches to the rice field itself. This work, as most of the other work in connection with terrace-grown rice, can be done only by hand. The small fields make it impossible to use such machinery as reapers and at times even the ox. But beasts of burden are often unattainable in a densely populated country like China. There is not land enough to raise food for many animals, so the spade in the hand of a man replaces the plough drawn by a beast, and the garden replaces the field of more sparsely peopled lands. Parts of China and Japan and India have reached the ultimate stage of agriculture, where man grows by his own labor the food for his support, and there is small possibility for increase of food production. This omission of animals is by no means universally true for there are millions of water buffa- loes plowing rice fields in the Philippines and the mainland of southeastern Asia; and India, peopled largely by people who eat no meat, has more cattle than the United States, but their chief purpose is to serve as beasts of burden. 1 1 We have here some of the conditions that enable us to appreciate the great differences in man's relation to the land in the east and the west, in the sparse and the densely peopled country. The American farmer grows corn and feeds it to cattle and then eats the cattle, but one ox eats as much as five men and requires five times as much land for his support, so the numerous Orientals often omit the animal-feeding stage and grow rice and vegetables and eat them rather than feeding them to animals. Great in- crease in population could result from the essentially vegetable diet and the omission of animal raising. The ox that consumes as much as five men lives at least two years and will not produce over 750 pounds of meat. It is reported that the excessive amount of 5 pounds of meat per day is allowed the Argentine cowboy. Thus an ox represents 150 days' rations for the Argentinian vs. 3,650 days' rations (ten years) for the Oriental — one of the many striking results produced by difference in density of population. THE CEREALS 77 Percentage British India 34.6 French Indo-Ohina 19-9 Slam 17.8 Singapore 7.3 All others 30.4 Million Pounds 4306.1 2418.5 When the Asiatic rice field is finally drained, the ripened grain is usually cut by hand, tied up in bundles, and allowed to dry. To accomplish this in moist places, it is often necessary to put the sheaves upon bamboo frames. It is usually threshed by hand with the aid of some very simple devices. One of these is a board with a slit in it. Drawing the rice through the slit pulls the grains from the heads and allows them to fall into a receptacle. The grain at this stage is called paddy because of a close-fitting husk not unlike that which protects the oat kernel. As with oats, these husks cause the grain to keep much better than when the husk is removed and the final husking is always deferred until the time of use approaches. Among the Ori- ental people the husking of the paddy to prepare it for food is a daily occurrence, commonly done by hand. One of the com- monest sounds throughout the East from Bombay to Manila and from the equator to Pekin, is the pounding of a heavy mallet or pestle as it falls into a vessel full of paddy in the process of pounding the grain, and loosening the husk. Export of Rice. — The enormous home consumption of rice in China, Japan, Java, the Philippines and most of India prevents these countries from having a surplus of rice for export. The chief surplus for ex- port to the world's market comes from the lower valley of the Ganges in the Province of Bengal near Calcutta, India, from the delta of the Irrawaddy River in Burmah, the Menam River in Siam, and the Mekong River in French Indo China. These stretches of fertile, river-borne soil lie favorably for cultivation by irrigation. In Burmah and Siam and Cochin China, these stretches contain the larger part of the population of these countries, but the soil is so productive that large quantities of 883.7 2491.5 12160.9 Total Fig. 35. — World's rice export, three-year aver- age, 1908-10. 78 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY rice are left as the money crop of the natives who grow it in these unwholesome swamps. This surplus they carry in their native boats down through the winding waterways to Bangkok, Rangoon, and Saigon. Here, in the mills of English, German, French, and Chinese firms, the paddy is cleaned in the wasteful fashion demanded by Caucasian consumers, by whom the part eaten is only half as nutritious as the part consigned to the animals that get the rice bran. The Spread and Extent of Rice Growing. — It has come to the west late in history and thus far the development of rice growing outside the Orient has been slow and small. The annual overflow of the Nile due to seasonal rains in central Africa, and the easy irrigation, make rice as much at home as it is in the garden farms of Japan, the lower valley of the Yangtse Kiang, or the terraces of Ceylon and Java. Some rice is grown in Egypt, but not enough for the population, probably because of the European dominance of the Egyptian agriculture. Although rice is a standard article of diet in every country of America and Europe and of every European colony, these many lands are importers, with the possible exception of Peru, where the combination of Chinese immigrants and irrigation has caused a production over one-third as great (1910) as that of the United States. Bice Growing by Asiatic Emigrants. — The spread of East Indian laborers to the Islands of Mauritius and Reunion in the Indian Ocean has introduced rice growing there, while similar people, lately taken to the British colonies of Jamaica, Trinidad, Honduras, and Guiana have carried with them the methods which their rice-growing ancestors have practised for a hundred generations. Of these tropic American rice fields British Guiana has the best. Here, although the country is mostly uninhabited forest, there are large stretches where the level, alluvial swamp along the seashore has been utilized by the building of dykes, after the manner employed in Holland. The reclaimed land greatly resembles the rice-growing deltas of the rivers of southern Asia, and, since the decline in profits of sugar growing, the East Indian workers of Guiana are growing greater and greater quantities of rice. Between 1898 and 1908 the acreage increased from 6,000 to 38,000, and the value of the output by 1 1/4 million dollars. The Guiana rice crop is, how- THE CEREALS 79 ever, only about two-fifths as great (1910) as that of Peru where the Chinese immigrants started it a generation earlier. It is easy to let the facts of export cause unsound inferences as to total production. There is no necessary connection between the two. A small population, and a production small in comparison to other countries, permits countries like Argen- tine and Canada to appear large in wheat export, as French Indo- China and Siam do in rice export, yet they produced respectively 5 and 7 billion pounds in 1909 in comparison to 16 billion in Japan and 88 in India. The rice crop of India covers four times as much ground as the wheat crop. China, almost devoid of statistics including even reliable population figures, is, with rice as with most other articles, incapable of accurate comparison, but the rice crop is estimated at 50 to 60 billion pounds. (Year-book, U. S. Department of Agriculture.) The total rice export of the world is about 13 billion pounds or 220 million bushels of 60 pounds — an amount smaller than the wheat export of Russia. The total rice production of the world, including China, seems to be less than the wheat crop of the world exclusive of China. Bice Growing in Europe. — Rice is of great value to dense populations because of the high average yield. In Japan in 1907 rice averaged 34 bushels to the acre, while wheat yielded 20 bushels. In the United States (1907-11) wheatmade 14.5 and rice 32.5 bushels per acre. Furthermore the farm price of rice is nearly double that of wheat. For these reasons the cultivation of rice has been taken up in southern Europe in most places where the water supply is sufficient for irrigation. In the Rhone Valley in France, some rice is grown. In the Po Valley of Italy a third of a million acres, equal in size to a typical American county, are carefully tilled in rice, and Italy, producing nearly as much as the United States, is the only country with Caucasian popu- lation growing enough rice for her own use. Spain grows about two-thirds as much as Italy and Greece grows a little. Rice Growing and the Use of Rice Machinery in the United States. — After the surprising success of the governor of South Carolina in raising a patch of rice in his garden in 1694, rice grow- ing became an industry in that colony and in Georgia, since swamps along the seacoast and rivers could readily be dyked off and cultivated by negro slaves in the Oriental way. This was the SO INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY chief place in the whole thirteen colonies where negro slaves were profitable in 1787, and it was due to the influence of Georgia and Carolina rice growers that slavery received its recognition in the Constitution of the United States. These two states have grown rice of excellent quality down to the present day, but they are now suffering from the competition of the newest and most interesting of all the world's rice fields, that upon plains near the Gulf coast not far from the boundary between Louisiana and Texas. Here are lands of wonderful levelness and with a very satisfactory clay subsoil to keep water from soaking through. By the building of dams, the digging of wells, and the erection of pumping plants, arrangements have been made for the mechanical supply of the irrigation water, after the ground has been ploughed and harrowed with teams and cultivators akin to those used in the preparation of large areas of wheat land. This is made possible by having the dykes of such gentle slope that teams can be driven across them. After the water has been drawn off at ripening time, the ground is firm enough and the area large enough to permit reaping machines to harvest the rice like wheat, and steam thrashers to throw off the chaff and straw into piles, and to fill the rice sacks as quickly as they fill wheat sacks. This conquest of the primeval Oriental hand-labor garden crop by American farm machinery has enabled one man to take care of eighty acres of rice in a year, and though he is paid twenty times as much as the Chinese laborer, he produces rice more cheaply because the Chinaman cares for only one or two acres by his arduous hand labor. This new rice region grows many times as much rice now as the more expensively managed swamps along the South Atlantic Coast, and it is possible that before long the United States will become a rice exporter rather than, as now, an importer. But it will take a good many years for the American rice growers to get acquainted with their new industry and acclimated (if pos- sible) in the necessarily damp climate which accompanies the irrigation of land upon the warm and moist shores of the Gulf of Mexico. According to present estimates (U. S. Department of Agricul- ture, Bulletin 47) there are about 10,000,000 acres of land along the Gulf well suited to rice. Present methods could irrigate THE CEREALS 81 3,000,000 acres of this with surface and artesian waters. The remainder could be irrigated at greater expense. With a two- year rotation one-half of the easily irrigable rice land, 1,500,000 acres, could be in rice each year and should supply 1,620 pounds per acre or approximately 2 1/2 billion pounds. This amount is nearly twice our present consumption, of which we now ordi- narily raise 85 or 90 per cent. In 1790 we exported about 25 pounds of rice per capita and ate less than half a pound. Now we eat 6 pounds per capita and export none. 7. MILLET AND SORGHUM Americans have of necessity much difficulty in appreciating the importance of millet as a cereal. It is a plant not unlike corn or sugar cane in general appearance, with its seed in a head somewhat like that of the cat tail. The grain, which is smaller than wheat grains, is boiled and used like rice, or eaten parched or made into meal and porridge. There are many varieties, some a dozen feet in height. Some are grown for forage only, some for the grain to be used as human food, some for both pur- poses; some varieties furnish fuel in their woody stalks. Millet is grown to some extent in most parts of the temperate zone and also in the tropics. It is grown occasionally in nearly all parts of the United States for forage only, but the excellence of corn in the east and south and alfalfa in the west keeps it from having any wide use in this country. It has a similar use as forage in Europe, being extensively grown in the Mediterranean region and Russia. It is used as food to a slight extent in Europe and among the natives of Mexico and Africa, but it is in Asia that millet reaches its greatest importance. It is estimated 1 that one-third of the human race use the seed as food. Japan is credited with an annual consumption of 35 million bushels. India annually cultivates 40 million acres, while her wheat crop covers but 20 to 30 million acres and that of the United States but 49 million (1911). In China also there is very general use of millet as food, and there are records of its use for about 5,000 years. The accounts of the Russo-Japanese War showed that many of the campaigns were waged in fields of millet and Indian 1 Freeman and Chandler: The World's Commercial Products, p. 59. 82 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY corn, which resemble each other very much as they stand in autumn shocked in the fields. 1 Millet seems to have been very important to the prehistoric lake dwellers of Switzerland. The sorghum family is another cereal producer little known in the United States but important in many parts of the world. To this family belongs the well-known broom corn from which brooms are made, Kaffir corn, the sugar-producing sorghum (discussed on page 287), and many others entirely unknown in this country. They are tall plants with general resemblance to millet in appear- ance, excepting a difference in the form of seed-bearing head. In uses they are substitutes for both millet and corn. In China, India, and Africa their use as forage is very great and their use as human food is also very common, while some of the many varieties are cultivated for human food in nearly all the warmer countries of the world. A member of this family is dhurra, the oft-mentioned food grain of many African tribes. 2 Recently certain drought-resisting sorghums have sprung into prominence as forage plants in the drier parts of Kansas and Oklahoma where 1 1/4 million acres are already grown. (U. S. Department of Agriculture, Farmers' Bulletin 448.) 8. CORN OR MAIZE The Value of Corn to the Settlers of America. — When the first American settlers landed in Massachusetts and Virginia, the Indians presented them with ears of this valuable grain which' the settlers called Indian corn, corn being the English word for grain. The Spanish called it maize. The colonists, to their great benefit, at once began to cultivate it, because it was so much easier for them to grow than the wheat, barley, rye, and oats with which they had been acquainted at home. These small grains, grass-like in their early growth, require for their 1 E. R. Scidmore in National Geographic Magazine, April, 1910, says that a giant millet 10 or 12 feet high, along with a short millet and sorgum, are extensively grown in Manchuria. The giant millet looks like corn shocks in Indiana and "is used for food, fuel, distilled drink, mats for the floor, and for building material, and has thousands of uses and the yield a thousand fold." 2 A Rputers dispatch from Wad Menadi, Blue Nile, discusses the effect of rain on " durra, which forms the staple food of the native population." — U. S. Con. Rep., 1912, p. 310. THE CEREALS 83 satisfactory cultivation smooth land free from stumps and stones. This the new settler in the woods did not have. But the Indian showed him how to kill the trees by cutting the bark, so that he could immediately plant corn among the standing trunks and, with a little rough cultivation, have unripe corn ears for roasting as early as August — a much quicker return for his labor than wheat could possibly bestow. By September or October the settler would have ripe grain that would stand a month or two awaiting his convenience to harvest it. In this respect it was superior to the small grains which must be harvested at once, lest storms beat them down. The corn, moreover, yielded twice as much as the small grain, was easily kept, and could be served as food in many forms — as parched corn, made by heating the whole grain in a frying pan or over an open fire; as hominy, which is the cracked corn thoroughly boiled; as mush (samp), made by boiling the meal; or, finally, as cornbread. The husk that protected the grain served in the mattress for the colonist's bed; the stalks and leaves fed the horses and cows through the winter, even after they had served for months as a thatch for the temporary shed that shielded the animals from storm. Usefulness of Corn in Bough Countries like Appalachia. — Owing to the ability of corn to grow on very rough land where the other grains will not do so well, or yield so much, it has come in many parts of the world to be the mainstay of primitive or isolated hill peoples where the climate permits. In the central Appalachian Plateau of east Kentucky, east Tennessee, and West Virginia, for example, where many counties comprising several thousand square miles are entirely devoid of railroads or good wagon roads, the primitive conditions of the Revolutionary period continue and corn, both as food and a staple of commerce, is of greatest importance. 1 1 This locality with its inferior corn crop furnishes a good example of the influence of environment on history. About the only way in which corn can be exported from these plateaus is by converting it into whisky or live stock. Owing to the fact that the United States Government taxes whisky a dollar a gallon there has been a century-long struggle between the collector of revenue and the illicit distiller, the "moonshiner" as he is called, of the Appalachian Mountains. The mountaineer feels that it is a tyranny for the Government to tax the only thing he can sell. This feeling took its strongest form in Washington's administration, when the people of western Pennsylvania, objecting to the tax, arose in insurrection against the new Republic in the so-called "Whisky Rebellion." 84 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY THE CEREALS 85 Climatic Requirements. — Corn will mature if there is a five- months growing season, and a hot midsummer with sufficient rainfall to keep up the growth of the plant, which at times amounts to several inches a day, and in a few weeks to a height of from 6 to 14 feet or even more. Accordingly, regions with a cool summer, such as England, Scotland, Ireland, in fact all north Europe, most of New England north of latitude 44°, and Canada, excepting a part of Ontario, cannot well produce a crop of ripened corn. The heat requirement of the maize plant includes warm Fig. 37. — Map of United States showing average dates of last killing frost in spring (broken lines) and first killing frost in autumn (solid lines). (After XT. S. Weather Bureau.) (From W. S. Tower.) nights as well as warm days, so that many arid regions having very hot days and cool nights, such as Nevada, are not suited to the profitable production of corn despite an apparently satis- factory average temperature. Although a lover of heat, it does not do its best in the continu- ous heat of the tropics or even in the prolonged summer at the mouth of the Mississippi River. It seems to require a climatic spur akin to the artificial spur furnished by the gardener who injures a physically prosperous tree to make it pause in its growth of wood and bear fruit. The cooler weather of approaching 86 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY autumn seems to be an essential to fully turn the energies of the plant from leaf production to seed production. For this cause apparently the yield of grain is larger in the latitude of the cen- tral temperate zone than in its warmer parts or in the tropics, under conditions otherwise much alike during the growing season. For a ten-year period the average production of Louisiana corn was 16.3 bushels per acre, while Wisconsin had 33.2 bushels per acre. 1 Fig. 38. — Average dates of the beginning of planting corn. U. S. Dept. Agr.) (U. S. Crop Reporter, The cultivation of corn is, however, widely scattered through- out the warmer parts of the world between 45° north latitude and 40° south latitude. The chief regions of production may be divided into seven zones: the upper Mississippi Valley, the United States cotton 1 Like influences work even greater effects on other plants. Some vegetables of the beet family produce nothing but leafy tops in the con- tinuously warm West Indies, although the nourishment stored in their thick roots for the next year's seed growth makes them an essential part of agriculture in Canada, Sweden, Germany, and other lands of frost and cool THE CEREALS 87 belt, Tropic America, including Mexico, the Black Sea basin, the Mediterranean countries, southeastern Asia, and the Parana Valley of South America. The American Corn Belt. — Of these the first and most impor- tant, indeed more important than all the others combined, is that of the upper Mississippi Valley. Corn is grown from the Gulf of Mexico to the Great Lakes, and from the Atlantic Ocean' to western Kansas and in scattered areas beyond, but the region of greatest production, the so-called American corn belt, reaches from central Ohio to central Kansas, and from Kentucky to Wisconsin. It includes all the state of Iowa, nearly all of the states of Missouri, Illinois and Indiana, Ohio, and about half of Kansas and Nebraska. This region is one of the finest agricul- tural sections in the entire world. Hundreds of miles of almost level prairie are rarely varied by undulations steep enough to interfere with the laying out of roads on meridians and parallels at regular intervals of one mile. This soil that lies so beautifully for tillage is naturally fertile, and so free from stones that the worker can ride the cultivator with which he tends the corn. Some of these cultivators till both sides of one row of corn, and some of them even take two rows of corn at once. Thus, an. unaided farmer can cultivate a large area of corn, sometimes more than forty acres, and produce the grain that was so wonder- fully cheap for many years. Serious droughts are infrequent in the corn belt. The abundant rainfall of summer comes in short showers which do not seriously interfere with agricultural operations, and the heat is sufficient to make a most excellent growth of corn. Relation of Corn to Other Products of Corn Belt. — Corn is not the only crop in the corn belt. On a single farm there will be, in addition to corn, fields of oats and hay which require the farmer's labor at different seasons from the corn; also there will be a field of grass upon which cattle can graze. A surprisingly small portion of the corn belt grain goes directly to the market. In the parts of the corn belt most distant from the great markets, as Iowa and Kansas, the major part of the corn is grown as a supply crop, is fed to the farm animals and goes to market in the more condensed forms of beef, pork, mutton, horses, and mules. Near the great markets where the INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY ACREAGE OF IMPROVED LAND IN 1900. 6 8 10 12 14 16 18 20 22 24 26 28 30 MILLIONS IOWA ILLINOIS KANSAS MISSOURI TEXAS OHIO MINNESOTA NEBRASKA INDIANA NEW YORK KENTUCKY PENNSYLVANIA CALIFORNIA MICHIGAN SOUTH DAKOTA WISCONSIN GEORGIA TENNESSEE VIRGINIA NORTH DAKOTA ALABAMA NORTH CAROLINA MISSISSIPPI ARKANSAS SOUTH CAROLINA OKLAHOMA WEST VIRGINIA LOUISIANA MARYLAND OREGON WASHINGTON MAINE COLORADO VERMONT NEW JERSEY MONTANA FLORIDA IDAHO MASSACHUSETTS NEW HAMPSHIRE CONNECTICUT UTAH WYOMING DELAWARE NEVADA NEW MEXICO ARIZONA RHODE ISLAND Fig. 39. — Proof of the excellence of the upper Mississippi Valley for agricul- ture. (From Report of U. S. Conservation Commission.) THE CEREALS 89 90 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY transportation is cheaper, as in Illinois, the proportion of grain sent directly to market is much greater. In 1910, 48 per cent, of the corn of Illinois was shipped out of the county where it was produced. In Kansas the corresponding figure was 22 per cent., in Texas, yet farther from markets, it was 7 per cent. The Improvement and Extension of Corn Growing. — Great improvement in corn growing takes place from year to year as the scientific agriculturalists breed new and better varieties and select the seed to take advantage of the known laws of heredity. JsiW^ 1 HfS^ brfvirtftjuf/. lllli p::«««j '/•' vsL"\ij& 3559* » %* * *• ■ /- »" i L _ p&&j=l U-V-'.i^E aJM^js* 15-20 20-25 25-30 30-35 35-40 over 40 10-15 bushels Fig. 41. — United States corn production in bushels per acre by states, three-year average, 1909-11. Pop. 1910. In a recent corn test 1 in Illinois one large field yielded 48 bushels to the acre and a similar adjacent field yielded 77 bushels to the acre, and the only element of difference was in the superior well-selected seed that produced the larger crop. The breeding of earlier ripening kinds will doubtless make possible a greater growth of corn in those parts of the northern United States and Canada, where it is not now a dependable crop. At present it is grown in Canada only near the Great Lakes and in much of the northern part of the United States is of little importance. 1 J. R. Steward: Proceedings American Breeders Association, Omaha meeting, 1909. THE CEREALS 91 Another way of extending the area and value of corn production, especially in cool climates, is offered by the silo. This device, recently introduced from France, is a barrel-like structure, 10 to 20 feet in diameter, made of wood or concrete. Its use is rapidly on the increase because the entire plant, stalk, leaf, ear and husk, when chopped into bits, may be kept moist, warm, and edible for cattle for one or two years. In this form, called silage, corn makes its greatest possible food return to ruminant animals, is much used in the feeding of dairy and beef cattle, and, since it can be put away some weeks before it is fully Mf"""^--^ ntrtMIBfaaS •C /=^&tSr^--^i, r»^ / ^ R~^~~Wt*- 'Kl^':? If \ J°~-r_j£££iiL££i '18111118 M !§§§§§/ 1 1 fs, ^^ffiaW'*ff - tiV-^- Kvy-ttaa iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii mmmm 5-10 10-20 20-40 40-75 75-125 over 125 Less than 1-5 1 bushel Fig. 42. — United States corn production per capita by states, three-year average, 1909-11. Pop. 1910. matured, can be grown much farther north than can the ripened grain, which can be kept only after fully maturing in the field. In the short summer of New England, the silo helps in a suggestive industrial combination. While corn may not ripen, it easily and surely gets ready for table use — the so-called roasting- ear stage — so that from a field of sugar corn wagon loads of ears may go to the canning factory or the vegetable market and the stalks are put into the farmer's silo to feed his dairy cattle — an important fact in systematic agriculture. Further than this, the canned corn of the north is in some markets recog- 92 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY nized as of superior quality because the cold climate delays ripening, gives a longer period in the edible milky condition, and thus gives better opportunity to harvest it in its best edible form. Corn in the Cotton Belt. — Corn is the second crop in impor- tance in the cotton lands of the South, but cotton is so over- whelmingly the main crop that the corn crop is often insufficient for local use, and import from the corn belt is necessary. Corn, but little used as human food in the northern half of the United States, is in common use in the southern states and is often the chief breadstuff of white and black alike. Its excellence for the support of human beings is unquestioned by physiologists and it was well shown by the endurance of regiments of soldiers in the Confederate armies during the American Civil War. Never- theless, corn is generally unappreciated as food outside of the southern states, except in regions where the people are poor, as in Italy, Roumania, Hungary, Mexico, etc., where it is used because cheaper than the other breadstuffs. Two shortcomings suffice to explain its small use: it has no gluten and will not make a dough, or light bread; second, the bread loses much of its palatability upon getting cold. Cornmeal gruel or mush called "Polenta" is a staple article of diet for large numbers of Italians. American Corn Exports. — America has often exported a hundred million bushels of corn annually, and sometimes double that amount to northwestern Europe where it is fed to farm animals and work horses. It is almost always sent from the region of heaviest production in our corn belt, first being assem- bled in the markets of St. Louis, Kansas City, Omaha, or Chicago. From these points it passes by lake steamers and the Erie Canal or by railroads to the Atlantic ports between Norfolk and Montreal for export by the North Atlantic steamships. A smaller amount goes to Gulf ports, but they are not desirable for corn export. At various times exporters of corn from the United States have attempted to spread the habit of corn eating among the peoples of northern Europe, but without success. This is due chiefly to the conservatism of all peoples toward changing their diet, and partly because of the above-mentioned limitations of corn as a breadstuff. THE CEREALS 93 Percentage Illinois 14.1 Iowa 12.4 Missouri 7.9 Million Bushels 375.3 The American corn export has declined of late from 195 million bushels per year in 1896-99 to 50 million bushels 1910-11. This is not due to crop failure, for the average crop in the first period was 2,040 million bushels and in the later period it was 2,719 million bushels. With an increasing popu- lation we have a per capita consumption that rose from 26 bushels in the first period to about 31 in the later period. As we have no new corn lands to turn to and some of the old ones are declining in produc- tivity, we seem to have reached the end of an era of cheap corn. When Kansas corn land was worth $10 to $25 an acre there was plenty of corn to be had; it was at times cheaper than coal and was burned by the farmer as fuel in the family stove. We have opened no corn frontiers since 1895 and the price is rising. It was about thirty-four cents on the Chicago market in 1899. Ten years later it was sixty-seven cents, and the influence upon the European buyer was shown by the decrease in our ex- ports during the decade from 213 to 38 million bushels. The lessened corn export has helped to drive up the price of other stock foods, producing world wide price disturbance and industrial adjustments. Corn in Tropical America and Mexico. — The Spanish- American highlands, reaching from the boundary of the United States to Bolivia, comprise the third corn-growing zone. No corn is exported from these coun- tries and none is raised for stock, since the animals graze the year round. In every one of them — Mex- ico, the five Central American countries, Columbia, Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia — the bulk of the population, native Indians or half-breed peoples, derive their nourishment to a surprising degree from corn and beans. Many of these Indians and half-breeds, known as peons, have a very low standard of living. The sim- 210.4 175.9 150.8 150.3 95.0 93.0 88.0 807.4 Total 2657.7 Fig. 43.— United States Corn production, three- year average, 1909-11. Indiana 7.0 Nebraska 6.6 Ohio 5.7 Kansas 5.7 Texas 3.6 Kentucky 3.5 " Tennessee 3.1 " All others 30.4' 94 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY plest shelter suffices and rather than work much, they content themselves with beans, one of the most easily grown of vege- tables, and corn, the cereal which they can most easily and cheaply grow. In Mexico and other of these countries the com- monest form of corn bread is the "tortilla" or hot corn cake which can be baked over an open fire. In these countries the population is chiefly on the plateaus, where the topography is often broken. The corn fields are usually small, and the production, which is almost always for local consumption, resembles the family garden rather than the broad fields of the American corn belt. Some of these plateau patches are of great fertility. It is said that there are certain fields in Ecuador where the soil, made of dust blown from the volcanos Chimborazo and Cotopaxi, has yielded crops of corn continuously for 200 years. There is no prospect that corn will ever be grown for export from these countries. The development of their resources will follow other lines. All Mexico north of San Luis Potosi is steadily importing more and more corn as its mineral resources and railroads give employment to workers. Among the negro population of the West Indian Islands, corn is widely used for food, but not enough is grown for home use, and here, as is sometimes the case in Yucatan, there is a relatively large import of corn and cornmeal from the United States. The Corn Segion of the Black Sea Basin. — The corn zone second in importance to the United States corn belt is that of the lower Danube Valley and adjacent districts of the Black Sea basin in southeastern Europe. The crop of this region is from 350 to 400 million bushels a year, about one-tenth of the world's supply, and about equal to the crop of Illinois, our leading corn state. Although occupied by several different nations, the lower Danube Valley is, like our corn belt, one economic region. Corn is extensively grown on the great fertile plains of Hungary, Roumania, Servia, Bulgaria, and the nearby territory of Russia on the Black Sea. Further to the eastward the climate becomes too dry and in the Volga basin near the Caspian Sea the aridity is too great for tilled crops. The greater part of Russia and the regions to the north of the Danube Valley and to the west of Hungary are too cold for corn growing. There is also some corn grown in the more hilly part of the Danube drainage basin on the THE CEREALS 95 slopes of the Balkan Mountains in Servia and Bulgaria. Austro- Hungary produces about as much corn as Indiana; Roumania somewhat less than Oklahoma, and Russia somewhat less than South Carolina. The bulk of the population in this corn region is rather poor, and they depend for breadstuff almost entirely upon corn, and they export to western Europe the wheat which they also grow. They also export some corn to western Europe. Of the cultivated land in Roumania one-third is in wheat, over one-third (or one-sixth of the total area) is in corn, as compared with a little over one-fourth of the total area of Illinois that is annually in corn. The Black Sea basin is a land where droughts come with ever-increasing frequency as one goes eastward. The inferiority of the region as a corn producer is shown by a com- parison of annual yield in bushels per acre in Roumania and Illinois for a seven-year period: 1904 1905 1906 1907 1908 1909 1910 Roumania Illinois 4 39.8 12 36.1 25 36 12.5 31.6 15 35.9 13.4 40 21.2 39.2 One of the surest spurs to labor is the certainty of reward, and the uncertainty of reward is one of the greatest deterrants to labor. The sure relation between labor and harvest in Illinois and the great uncertainty in Roumania, as shown by these figures of fluctuating corn yield, are enough to explain why one region is filled with progressive and aggressive farmers and townsmen and the other with rather backward peasants using oxen for work animals. Despite these handicaps Roumania, by exporting two-fifths of her crop, managed to send to the foreign markets during these years about one-third as much corn as the United States. The Roumanian corn belt is more accessible to water transportation and to market than is that of the United States. Hungary grows nearly twice as much corn as Roumania (187 million bushels, 1910), but consumes nearly all of it within her own boundaries. 96 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY Corn Production In Mediterranean and Adjacent Regions. — Most of the Mediterranean basin is too dry in summer for the growth of corn except under conditions of irrigation. The large yield of corn per acre, however, makes it greatly desired as crop by peoples poor enough to use it as their chief food. Italy with 100 million bushels a year (about equal to Kentucky) is the leader, producing twice as much as Spain and the south of France combined. Wherever corn can be irrigated it is grown for home use, largely as human food, in Turkey, Greece, and Egypt where it is an important crop; but the dense population consumes all of the 100 million bushels of corn and wheat pro- duced along the lower Nile, and in addition imports some of both grains. Certain plains in Portugal and western Spain near the ocean have rainfall sufficient for the satisfactory growth of corn without irrigation, and the crop of Portugal about equals that of Maryland and Delaware. The desert heart of the Old World and regions adjacent to it reaching from southern Morocco across north Africa, Arabia, Persia, the deserts of central Asia and Gobi to the great wall of China, can, as in Egypt, produce corn only where irrigation can be practised. The people of the Barbary states grow some corn, as do those of Palestine and Asia Minor. It is grown to some extent in Persia, and it is relatively important in Bokhara and other oases of Russian central Asia and Turkestan. In all of these regions it is prized as human food. The Corn Beit of Southeastern Asia. — The sixth corn zone is to be found in the moist countries of southeastern Asia. In the drier parts of the monsoon countries, especially China and India, there are districts that suit corn quite as well or better than they suit rice. There the American grain is largely grown but not for export. How much is grown in these countries it is impossible to state, but vast quantities are used by the 700 million people inhabiting these countries. It is extensively grown in the part of China adjacent to Pekin and in southern Manchuria. Some of the battles of the Japanese-Russian War were fought in fields of waving corn. The Parana Valley. — The seventh and last corn zone is the Parana Valley of South America. The lower part of this valley is similar to the lower Mississippi Valley in latitude and climate. THE CEREALS 97 In Paraguay, near the edge of the tropics, considerable corn is grown for local use. Further down the valley in the cooler latitudes are several provinces of the Argentine Republic and a small area in Uraguay where corn is of increasing importance. Its growth has recently been taken up, and, while the methods Percentage "|" Million Bushels United States 72.4 Percentage Argentina 40.9 3708.4 United States 18.0 Jloumania 13.7 abe Valley 9.2 343.5 Russia 10.6 Mexico Argentina All others 4.6 4.4 9.4 170.3 162.8 362.0 All others 16.8 Million Bushels 87.2 40.4 22.6 Total 3731.0 Fig. 44. — World's com production, three-year average, 1908-10. Total 213.0 Fig. 45. — World's corn exports, three- year average, 1908-10. are said to be exceedingly careless, the soil is exceptionally fertile, and the crop is receiving more and more attention from the large number of Italian farmers who have settled in that country. Argentina exports at the present time a larger proportion of its corn crop than any other country of the world, because the people, about as numerous as those of Illinois, do not yet use it 98 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY largely as food, and for the fattening of live stock alfalfa generally suffices. During the four-year period 1907 to 1910 the Argentine Republic exported 77 million bushels per year or almost exactly one-half her crop, while the American export of 52 million per year was a little over one-fiftieth of the total crop. The possibilities for the relative increase of corn production are probably better in the Parana Valley than in any other corn zone, because of the sparse population and large area, of which only a tenth is yet in cultivation. The present production is about equal to that of the Mediterranean countries. As compared with the United States there is, however, a disadvantage in the less regular rainfall, which will be a permanent hindrance to great production because of the uncertainties of the harvest. Thus the fine crop of 1906, 195 million bushels, and nearly 30 bushels to the acre, led to enlarged plantings the next year, but the crop fell to 72 million and the yield to 13 bushels per acre. The area planted in 1908 fell back to that of 1906. There are a few scattered places where corn is grown to some extent, as in northern New Zealand, and in the eastern margin of Australia, but here it has to battle against droughts and scanty rainfall and is unimportant. The same is true in South Africa. The grain may be grown almost anywhere through the torrid zone and is grown in many scattered places in Africa. This continent may some time have European management for its industries and become a large corn grower. It is true, neverthe- less, that corn does better in the temperate zone with its chilly nights toward the end of summer than it does in the unmitigated heat of the tropic lowland. Corn must, however, have hot nights for a part of its growth and the cool night of arid climates bars it from many irrigated districts in western United States. This fact, in common with the dry summer of the Pacific coast, causes corn to be of almost no importance west of the Rocky Mountains. The present predominance of the United States in the world's corn production (exclusive of Asia) is well shown by the fact that the crop of 1911 (2,531 million bushels) was 81 per cent, as large as the world crop of the preceding year and 63 per cent, as large as the largest world crop ever before reported, 4,026 million bushels in 1910. THE CEREALS 99 TABLE OF FOOD VALUES (Figures from U. S. Department of Agriculture) 0> to 3 63 S ■8 8 £ S3 ft .si £ 8 £ S3 ft Carbohy- drates per cent. Fuel value per pound, calories White bread 35.3 9.2 1.3 53.1 1,200 Wheat flour patent rol- ler process, high grade and medium 12.0 11.4 1.0 75.1 1,685 12.0 14.0 1.9 71.2 1,640 12.9 6.8 0.9 78.7 1,620 12.5 9.2 1.9 75.4 1,635 12.3 8.0 0.3 79.0 1,620 12.6 22.5 1.8 59.6 1,520 68.9 6.9 2.5 19.6 555 20.0 62.6 1.8 0.1 14.7 295 20.0 55.2 1.4 0.6 21.9 440 35.0 48.9 0.8 0.4 14.3 260 25.0 63.3 0.3 0.3 10.8 190 45.0 2.7 11.5 30.2 9.5 1,515 Chestnuts fresh 16.0 37.8 5.2 4.5 35.4 915 Coconuts 48.8 7.2 2.9 25.9 14.3 1,295 24.5 6.9 19.5 29.1 18.5 1,775 5.9 12.9 48.7 30.3 2,625 Date 10.0 13.8 1.9 2.5 70.6 1,275 100 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY TABLE OF FOOD VALUES.— Continued m 3 .si S 8 ■s § ^ S3 Carbohy- drates per cent- Fuel value per pound, calories 12.8 54.0 1.65 16.1 975 Neck of beef 27.6 45.9 14.5 11.9 1,165 Cod, salt 24.9 40.2 16.0 0.4 325 63.5 21.8 12.1 915 11.2 65.5 13.1 9.3 635 Whole milk 87.0 3.3 4.0 5.0 310 34.2 25.9 33.7 2.4 1,885 Butter 11.00 1.0 85.0 3,410 9.5 1.2 83.0 3,525 4.8 2.2 94.0 4,010 Pure olive oil Pure coconut oil Pure peanut oil Pure cottonseed oil j 100.00 4,040 REFERENCES See General References Dondlingbr, Peter Tracy. Booh of Wheat. New York, Judd, 1908. Bicknell, Frank W. Wheat Production and Farm Life in Argentine. U. S. Department of Agriculture. Ball, Carleton R. The Koolings, a New Group of Grain Sorghums in the United States. Bulletin of U. S. Department of Agriculture. Mtrick, Herbert. Book of Corn. New York, Judd, 1904. Brigham, Albert Perrt. The Development of Wheat Culture in North America. The Geographical Journal, Jan., 1910. Chilcott, E. C. Dry Land Farming in the Great Plains Area. Yearbook of the Department of Agriculture, 1907. Frequent reports on this subject may be expected from the Department. THE CEREALS 101 Carlton, Mark Alfred. The Future Wheat Supply of the United States. Yearbook of the Department of Agriculture, 1909. Hartley, G. P. Progress in Methods of Producing Higher Yielding Strains of Corn. Yearbook of the Department of Agriculture, 1909. Collins, G. N. Increased Yields from Hybrid Seed. Yearbook of the Department of Agriculture, 1910. CHAPTER IV STARCH FOODS Two Chief Food Elements. — Starch, one of the two most universal food elements of all mankind, is classed as a carbo- hydrate — an energy food. It helps to make fat and heat to keep the body warm and gives energy for work. Starch is really the surplus nutrition which the plants store within themselves for future needs or for their offspring. Sometimes it is packed in the seeds, as in the grains; or the roots, as in sweet potatoes; or in the peculiar underground stem, as in the white potatoes; or even in the trunks of some of the trees, as in the sago palm. The other great food element is proteid, furnished by milk, meat, cheese, eggs, most of the nuts, and the leguminous plants, of which peas and beans are the best and commonest examples. Proteid, the tissue or muscle-maker, is contained to some extent in all the grains from wheat, the richest in proteid, to rice the poorest, so that the grains, by containing both the great food principles, are almost perfect food. As rice is the richest in starch, there is less need for the production of other starch- producing plants by rice-using peoples. i. POTATO Distribution and Use. — The potato is probably exceeded only by bread in the number of times per year it is eaten by the average European or American. The plant is a native of America, grow- ing wild on Mexican and Chilean plateaus, whence it was taken to Spain, to Italy and to Vienna. From Vienna (1598) it spread rapidly through Germany. Introduced into Ireland in 1586 by Sir Walter Raleigh, it soon became important. By 1760 potato growing was general in Scotland, and its growth to some extent is common in all Caucasian lands. It appears occasionally even in Africa, but was not introduced into China till about 1875. In the rice-growing parts of this empire the potato is held in 102 STARCH FOODS 103 contempt, but in the mountainous and northern parts it is dili- gently grown and with much pride. The potato has certainly established itself as the great cool climate starch food. It is probably the plant most commonly grown in the vegetable gardens of Europe and America; but its growth as a money crop is quite restricted, offering in this respect a marked contrast to wheat. The potato and rice are rivals in the supplying of starch upon the tables of Europe and America, but the two plants are rarely rival claimants for the same farmer's attention. The recently discovered art of making potato flour has given the other- wise perishable tuber a new means of competing with rice, but thus far the flour has not met with very wide use outside of Germany where it was first manufactured. Qualifications of a Potato Country. — The potato is a crop of wide climatic range. A few hundred bushels are annually grown at Dawson City in the Klondike on the Upper Yukon, and it is cultivated down to the sub-tropic, as in Florida and Egypt. It also tolerates a variety of soils. It grows well on land that does well in wheat or corn, but tends to become important as a main starch food for people and a money crop for farmers in regions where it is too cool for corn to grow to the best advantage, or where the soil is too sandy and light for the large yields of small grains. It does not do well on heavy clay. The regions that meet the potato conditions are northern and northeastern United States, Canada and north Europe. North of the Alps the potato is exceedingly important, as the region combines coolness with much sandy soil. South of the Alps the dry summer of the Mediterranean climate checks its cultivation. Thus Sweden, with 5 1/2 million people, grows as many potatoes as Italy, with 35 million people. In southeastern Europe, as in America, it does not compete much with corn, Hungary with its hot summer being a great corn grower, while Austria, its sister state in the dual empire of Austria-Hun- gary, is a great potato grower. Austria alone, with its summer too cool for a good corn crop, produces from 30 to 70 per cent, more potatoes than the United States. The table of crop comparisons for 1909 shows many interesting things about man's relation to the earth which supports him — among them the great per capita growth of potatoes, barley and rye in north Europe where corn is not grown; and the small 104 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY H-= o 13 1 i> o o oc CC » CC c T— OS T-H l> T— IN IN OS CC IN t- T-l CO TO (—j 8 8 « i-H o (N_ CO CO o CO ©~ T-H o T-T CN o 1> T-H o o CO CD OS T-T OS CD in" o o IN T-T d u o O — — ' CO IN IN T-H CO IN tH CD T-H 00 T-H CD CO OS OS 00 CO •_ T-T o T-H CD (N IN T-H in 00 t-H CO 00 »n U3 •* ft" p. • . OS 3 5 S-5 IN CO cd 00 OS ■* IN IN IN IN 00 lO T(l T-T a o o\ H 0) a> o h O 4H" CO o CN os ■* T-H lO t-H o OS os~ CO CO © co- CO CD 00 CO CO 00 OS OS CO T-H 00 (N o o CO ft o fa 1 « & • . o a 3 5 si o i-H d CD T-H 1> CO ■tf co ■* t-H t-H 1> lO OS CO T-H OS 1> OS OS o (N 113 T-T O w i— i Pi < £8_ t-H 00 CD O CO o o CO- IN ■tf T-H 00__ T-T IN 00_ 00 oo OS S8 CO IN co" IN us o tH os OS IN to T-H CD 00_ T-T CO IN IN IN 00 OS OS oo IN m CO CO__ t-h" T-H tn OS o -p cj ■+J O Pi - 3 - 1— J °1 CO CO CO T-H »•_ T-T CO T-H T-T CO T-H CO IN CO oo IN CO OS . CO 00 T-H o CO CO IN lO i«r 03 £8 IN lO CO T-H O T-H oo OS lO of • IN CO T-H T-T CO CO o -* CO 00 co- o 00 T-T ft ft t* os >o CO IN t-H w a> -^ C3 -p W ■8 "3 & > c ec £ C ■> '!/ 1/ ft a c c ce t- ft a o T3 a 3 £ 'E ft 1 c c & 'u -p < 1 c > > 'a -t- T— 1 c c c. 1 15 u STARCH FOODS 105 growth of these three northern crops in southeastern Europe, southern Europe and the United States where corn is more at home. The figures for Austria (in the Baltic basin) and Hungary (in the Black Sea basin) offer strong contrast of northern and southern influences. The table of United States potato pro- duction for 1911 shows these same facts quite as sharply in the different regions of this country. The bulky tuber yields five times as many bushels per acre as does wheat, and therefore it is of great value in enabling land to support dense populations, although a bushel of potatoes is not so nutritious as a bushel of grain. (See table of food values, p. 99.) A ten-year average yield per acre in the United States is for wheat, 14.3 bushels; corn, 26 bushels; potatoes, 92 bushels. Owing to the laborious method of preparing the seed, the expensive fertilizers necessary, the continuous cultivation, and protection from insects, the potato crop requires more labor than any of the grains. Hence potato fields are smaller than grain fields, and the crop is well fitted to intensive agriculture where a small area must, by much labor, be made to yield a large product, such as is necessary in countries of dense populations. The potato harvest,toward the end of summer, leaves the ground in excellent condition for a fine crop of winter grain which usually follows it. The potato also responds well to intensive cultivation, the average yield of Germany being 200 bushels per acre for the ten years 1900-10, more than double the yield in America. Where the Potato is Most Grown. — Ireland, a country of few resources and cool moist climate, probably has a greater depend- ence upon the potato as a crop for the farm and food for people than any other country in Europe. So great was this dependence that in 1846 a failure of the potato crop, due to a blight, was followed by famine from which thousands of people died. Scot- land, with agricultural resources like those of Ireland, but much more meager, also has potatoes as an important crop. The plain of north Europe, reaching from the northwest point of France, through Holland and Belgium and Russia to the Ural Mountains, has in many places a sandy soil, and is the seat of the greatest potato-growing region in the world. The potato is important to the French, their crop of 600 million bushels (1908-09) being nearly twice that of the United States. 106 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY The uncertainty of potato yield is well shown by the French crop of 1910, 313 bushels, less than that of the United States. The Dutch and Belgians make their small countries produce a surprising amount of potatoes. The production in Belgium is about sixty times as great per square mile as it is in the United States, the population being about twenty times as great per square mile. North Germany with her cool sandy plains finds the potato one of the best crops she can grow; accordingly the German Empire is the greatest potato-producing country in the world. 1 Along with Holland, Belgium and the north of France, Germany has some potatoes to export to England, where the home supply is insufficient, although 2,000 square miles are annually devoted to this crop and the area is increas- ing, although her potato area is already over one-third as great as that of the United States and her output per capita is greater. Russia and the three Scandinavian countries with their cold climate and areas of sandy soils are relatively heavy growers and consumers of the potato. Even Switzerland grows nearly 50 million bushels a year and usually supplies her own needs, despite the fact that her 16,000 square miles of area are encum- bered by the stupendous Alps and she has 3,600,000 people to feed — another evidence of the value of the potato in intensive agriculture. Switzerland even suffers at times from over- production of potatoes. In Germany, with her lack of oil and her high chemical skill, a particularly large flavorless potato unsuitable for food but yielding very abundantly, is grown to the extent of about 60 million bushels a year, for the sole purpose of being distilled into alcohol for fuel or drinking purposes. The same practice also prevails, but to a lesser extent, in Holland and Belgium. After making allowance for distillation and export, Germany has 20 bushels of potatoes per capita per year; Belgium, 11; Sweden, 12; Austria, 17, in comparison to 4 in the United States; and 2 in Italy and Chile (a South American country with the 1 The stupendous potato output of Germany which, after all, covers but little more ground than Maryland, gives cause for the interesting statement of Professor S. N. Patten that it was the potato that enabled Germany in the nineteenth century to overthrow France, long her superior, in the days when wheat was a more exclusive basis of man's support than it was after the potato had become so important to the Germans. STARCH FOODS 107 Mediterranean climate that is ill suited to the potato). The abundance of the potato in a country with potato climate may, to some extent, be taken as a sign of land scarcity. The Potato in the United States. — Owing to the average American's ability to raise corn and to buy higher priced foods, Percentage Germany 31.3 Russian Empire 33.5 Austria-Hungary 12.6 France 9.7 United States 6.3 United Kingdom 4.7 All others 13.9 Million Bushels 1672.0 1199.9 670.8 517.1 335.7 258.2 Total 5340.9 Fig. 46. — World's potato production, two-year average, 1910-11. Percentage ~ Million Bushels New York 11.1 36.4 Michigan 10.5 33.1 Wisconsin 9.1 28.6 Maine 7.8 24.6 Pennsylvania 6.7 21.1 Minnesota 5.7 18.0 Ohio 4.4 13.6 Iowa 4.0 12.6 Illinois 3.1 " 9.8 California 3.8 ~ 8.9 All others 34.8 109.2 Totol 315.7 Fig. 47. — United States potato pro- duction, two-year average, 1910-1 1. the potato is less sought as food in America than it is in Europe. The chief centers of its growth lie north and east of the corn belt. The table showing the production in the ten leading states shows how distinctly the potato separates itself from the corn crop, only one corn state being in the list. Michigan has a good 108 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY corn belt in the southern end of the lower peninsula and an important potato production in the rest of the state. It is grown to a great extent as a money crop in certain sandy areas in Wisconsin, Michigan, and also in parts of Pennsylvania, New York, and New England. In the adjacent and similar parts of Canada it is of even greater relative importance. U. S. POTATO CROP, 191 1 Wisconsin 32 . 5 million bushels Michigan 31.0 million bushels New York 27 . 8 million bushels Minnesota 25.9 million bushels Maine 21 .2 million bushels Penn 15.1 million bushels Iowa 12 . 9 million bushels Ohio 12.4 million bushels Cal 9.7 million bushels Wash 9.4 million bushels Total for U. S 292 . 7 million bushels The growing of potatoes as a money crop tends to become very much concentrated in certain districts. In Aroostook County, in the St. Johns River Valley in northern Maine, agriculture, which had greatly declined, has suddenly revived through the rapid rise of potatoes as an export money crop for that district. Similarly, Monmouth County, New Jersey, between New York and Philadelphia, has become a potato center, shipping to the two great cities as much as 600,000 barrels in a single season. The sandy soil of the Atlantic Plain from the east end of Long Island to Florida is much of it better suited to potatoes than to grain crops; and on eastern Long Island, as in the only two counties of Virginia that lie east of the Chesapeake, the shipments of potatoes have within a decade made the farmers very prosperous. The Supply of Early Potatoes. — The supply of early potatoes for northern markets from southern lands gives rise to an impor- tant industry in many parts of the world. Thus, Algeria derives a large ineome from potatoes which reach Paris in thirty-five to forty hours. Egypt sends the first potatoes of the season across the Mediterranean to northwest Europe. In American STARCH FOODS 109 cities the earliest supply of new potatoes comes into the market before Christmas from the islands of Bermuda, situated 600 miles from New York, in the latitude of South Carolina, in the Fig. 48. — The corn was planted after a 200 bushels to the acre crop of potatoes. Cow-peas were sown among the corn— three crops in one year. Eastern North Carolina. Possible over large areas. (Photo Manufacturers Record.) frost-free climate furnished by the Gulf Stream. This greater evenness of temperature of the oceanic as compared to the continental climate thus becomes the basis of Bermuda's chief 110 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY export. The next potatoes for the northern cities of the United States are from Florida, where there is but little frost and potatoes • can grow most of the winter. Then, as the spring advances northward, other accessible points in the Atlantic Plain, such as Savannah, Ga., Charleston, S. C, New Berne, N. C, southeastern Virginia near Norfolk, the peninsula east of the Chesapeake Bay, southern New Jersey and Long Island, in turn send their carloads and trainloads or shiploads of new potatoes to the northern and western states. Throughout the winter and early spring the price of new potatoes in northern cities steadily declines as spring moves up the coast from Florida to Long Island and each locality holds the market but a short time. Yet this warm, coastal plain is not the ideal place for the potato; and the whole plain from end to end does not pro- duce as many potatoes as the state of Maine. To keep the potato plant from degenerating, the Coastal Plain crop is regularly grown from seed potatoes produced in Maine where the species maintains the desired vigor and rapidity of growth. The main supply of the country for the winter months comes from the northern potato districts between Maine and Minnesota. The potato is also important in the irrigated lands of the Rocky Mountains and Pacific states where the cool nights forbid the growth of corn and the expense of irrigation demands a heavy yielding crop. The Potato in Foreign Trade. — On account of the great bulk and weight of potatoes in proportion to value, and because of their perishable nature, they are much less important in inter- national trade than in home production. As a whole, they have a tendency to become a national supply crop, with com- merce limited to emergencies and early supplies. When, as occasionally happens, we have a shortage in this country, they come to us by the hundreds of thousands and even millions of bushels from Canada, Ireland, Scotland, Germany, and Egypt. We have normally a small export of potatoes to Mexico, Central America, Cuba and the other West Indian Islands, where the warm climate makes their growth unsatisfactory, 1 1 The potato varieties now in cultivation are from the wild potato of cool Elateaus in South America. Those in low-lying tropic lands have thus far een neglected. STARCH FOODS 111 and where a part of the population has a taste for this northern form of starch supply. In normal years our export is larger than our import. Considered in relation to the total value of the crop, the figures of our foreign trade in potatoes are conspicuous for their smallness and for the irregularity of the amounts. United States Potato exports, Potato imports, million bushels million bushels 1907 1.53 0.17 1908 1.20 0.40 1909 0.76 8.38 1910 1.00 0.35 1911 2.48 0.22 These figures show that the potato production is limited by the home market and not at all by the land possibilities. Our 5,700 square miles in potato fields are an insignificant patch. A large crop gluts the market, and actual overproduction or the fear of overproduction and the consequent low price is the limiting factor in potato production. The price to the grower fluctuates between ten cents and a dollar a bushel, between absolute loss and large profits. The existing farms and men and equipment of America could, if assured a price of a cent a pound, easily double the potato crop without producing any corresponding lessening of other crops, and there is abundant room to grow ten or twenty times as many potatoes without interfering with other crops. If we had the facilities for making a surplus of 40 million or 400 million bushels of potatoes into starch, it would be a boon to American agriculture. Agricultural overproduction is a fact of unappreciated importance in con- trolling the production of perishable commodities. 2. THE SWEET POTATO The torrid zone is often said to have great possibilities for the support of human life. One evidence of this is the great abundance of starch-producing plants. One of these is the sweet potato, which causes the tropic denizen to have small 112 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY regret over the fact that the white potato will not grow there. The sweet potato supplies the same need in human diet, and differs from the white potato only in the greater amount of sugar and nourishment that it contains (see table of food values). The sweet potato is a perennial where there is no frost, yet it will grow a crop in the warm summer as far north as Iowa or New York, and is a crop of considerable importance in American agriculture. Fortunately the sweet potato requires even lighter and sandier soil than the white potato and is, therefore, much grown on the sandy lands of the coastal plain in New Jersey, Maryland, and Virginia, where it is largely produced for shipment to the northern states. Similar sandy spots in Iowa, Illinois and the North-central States render similar service for the inte- rior of the United States and western Canada. This crop is also very widely grown throughout the Southern States as a local food supply, where the people have the alternative of rice or sweet potatoes as their chief starch food in addition to corn bread. Importance of the Sweet Potato in the Tropics. — In the torrid zone, its original home, the growth of the sweet potato is almost universal, whether it be in the Spanish-speaking settlements of South America, the English-speaking Honduras, the West Indian Islands, the coasts of Africa or the Malay Peninsula. Some varieties called yams grow large enough to weigh 40 or 50 pounds, but they have almost no commercial importance in the tropics because of their many rivals, the universal ease of their production, and the fact that there are few tropic cities large enough to require large movement of agricultural products. 3. CASSAVA Cassava is one of these tropic rivals 1 of the sweet potato that helps to fill the local need and furnishes tapioca for the peoples of the temperate zone. The United States imported 60 million pounds of cassava and tapioca in 1911 at an invoice cost of 2.3 cents per pound — a low figure which indicates the great 1 In Jamaica, one of the few tropic territories with statistics, cassava ranks third among the ground provisions which are the principal articles of food among the natives, yams coming first and potatoes second. U. S. Con. Rep., June 2, 1912. STARCH FOODS 113 value of the plant to man. Like the sweet potato, cassava is grown for its starch-producing roots. The plant reaches a height of 8 or 10 feet, and develops roots about 2 inches thick and sometimes as much as 6 feet long (usually much less). It is a native of America; but it is distributed throughout the tropics and is extensively used for food in many districts, espe- cially in Brazil, Guiana, the West Indies, West Africa, the East Indian Islands and the Malay Peninsula. In all these lands cassava cakes are a standard article of diet for the natives and replace to a considerable extent the corn bread of the Ameri- can negro and the boiled potatoes and rye bread of the European peasant, and all other breadstuffs of the temperate zone. Experiments along the Gulf coast seem to indicate the possi- bility of extensive cassava growth in the United States. 1 In addition to its nutritious starch, the cassava root also contains the virulent poison known as prussic acid. Fortunately this substance may be removed by washing the grated root in water, or by gentle cooking. 4. THE BANANA The banana is another great starch food, a rival of the potato, the sweet potato, rice and cassava. It has been cultivated so long it has ceased to produce seed. Wherever the climate is always warm and the rainfall suffices to support a dense tropic forest, the banana is at home. The banana belt goes round the world and reaches slightly into the north temperate zone. With its great bunches of fruit it stands almost without a peer among nature's gifts to man. Wheat, corn, rice, and the potato we get by arduous labor and tillage, but one may stick a root of a banana tree in the favorable tropical earth, give to nearby rival plants a few blows with the machete (a sword-like knife common in the tropics) to keep the young banana plant from being overgrown; and, in a few months, it gives its great gift of fruit. For years thereafter the shoots which the original plant sends up continue to furnish food throughout most of the 1 The dasheen, of which the common ornamental Caladium or elephant's ears is a species, has a starch-yielding root, a potato substitute, and is culti- vated in the tropics to the extent of 100 species. It also grows in southern United States. 114 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY year. The amount of food per acre is greater than from any grain but far less than is often reported. Three hundred bunches per acre (U. S. Con. Rep., 1911) is considered a good crop in Jamaica, and the drain upon the soil is less than that made by a small crop of wheat. The common absence of plowing reduces to a minimum the soil waste from erosion which has so nearly destroyed the ancient world. This ease of banana production should be emphasized in its effect on tropical life. More than any other one plant, it helps to make life easy in the tropics. In the Congo Basin and other humid parts of central Africa, where the climate is so bad for the white man, the nutritious banana is said to be the main article of diet for many, probably scores of millions, of the negro race. It merely replaces the potato of the north European peasant, and the rice of the southern Chinese. Scores of varieties are grown throughout the East Indies, south China, much of India, many of the West Indian Islands, the Philippines and other tropic lands from Mexico and Hongkong to Argentina and Queensland. Banana In Commerce. — Owing to the perishable nature of the fruit and consequent necessity of quick transportation, it has not been long known to many people in the temperate zone. It is a gift of the tropics delivered to the temperate zone by the coal driven steamship which is destined to bring us many other valuable gifts of a like perishable nature. For thirty years prior to 1899 the consumption of this fruit in the United States had doubled every five years. Since that date its use has steadily increased, because it is in many places the cheapest food that can be bought in America to-day. It competes with the cereals, to a limited extent with our home-grown fruits, and with the potato, of which it is almost a duplicate in nutritive content. (See .table of food values.) Because of the difficulty of transportation, only certain favored locations in the tropics are near enough to the markets to export the banana. The supply in Europe is inferior to that in the United States because that part of the tropics lying nearest Europe is the Desert of Sahara, where the banana cannot grow. The European supply has for a long time come from Maderia, the Cape Verde and the Canary Islands off the west coast of Africa; but within recent years fast steamers have begun to carry the STARCH FOODS 115 product of the West Indies and Central America to England. As an example of the influence of nearness to market on banana production it may be pointed out that an acre of banana land in the Canaries, well situated and with water for irrigation purposes, is worth $1000, although more productive land not needing irrigation lies unused in the West Indies, Central America, and the coasts of Africa below Sahara. Importance in Caribbean Countries. — The nearness of the United States to the steaming hot plains that border the Carib- bean Sea and the Gulf of Mexico has given us a favorable place from which to draw our supply of bananas. Owing to the unwholesome climate along the Central American coasts, nearly all the people live on the more healthful interior plateaus and the best banana lands have long lain idle. The comparatively new banana commerce, however, has caused recent rapid increase of settlements, mostly West Indian negroes, and commerce along the low eastern coasts. American enterprise has built railroads and established plantations near many of the ports and sent ships to carry the product. When the shiploads of bananas reach our ports, they are hurried on express trains to the in- terior. From New Orleans, latitude 30°, whole trainloads are sent northward and northwestward into the lands of cotton, corn, and wheat, latitude 40°-42°, and across the continent to the Pacific coast where they come into competition with the bananas that come to San Francisco and Seattle from Hawaii. As a result of this highly organized international trade a hungry man on the streets of many American cities can be better fed on three cents' worth of bananas (usually two or three bananas) than he can on three cents' worth of bread. This comparatively new trade has been little short of revolu- tionary in the effects it has had in making new industry in the vicinity of Boca Del Toro, Panama; Limon, Costa Rico; Puerto Barrios, Guatemalo; Port Antonio, Jamaica; Santa Marta, Colombia, and other Caribbean ports. The 4 1/2 million bunches exported from Boca Del Toro in 1910 made up prac- tically all of the exports from the large territories of Panama. There is plenty of room on the Caribbean for more plantations as demand arises. The drying of bananas which has been begun in Jamaica gives 116 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY possibility of producing the fruit in indefinite quantities because the ease of transporting the dried product will permit remote localities to send them to market. Difficulties of Banana Growing in the Hurrican Belt. — The people who live upon the shores of the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico have a double dependence upon the banana. It is to them a great supply crop because it is a standard article of food, and to many of them it is also a very important money crop. Jamaica shows its importance as a money crop. Fruit exports of that island, chiefly bananas, have risen from $15,000 in 1869 to $350,000 in 1879, $1,500,000 in 1889, $4,000,000 in 1899, and $7,500,000 in 1909; and increases are still expected and the banana area is extending. But the banana is a vulnerable crop. Thus, in February, 1899, when a fearful hurricane swept across the West Indies the farmers could do nothing for their banana trees which, with their heavy burdens, and weak stems, were an easy prey to the furious thrashings of this storm. Consequently, the million inhabitants of Porto Rico who were supporting themselves almost entirely by agriculture, on a hilly territory less than half as large as New Jersey, found, when sunshine returned after the storm, that their bananas were beaten to the ground. As a consequence the island was upon the verge of famine for nearly a year until another banana crop could spring up from the roots of the old plants. Yet the Porto Ricans then as now did not export the banana largely. It was a supply crop for their own food while they produced coffee, sugar and tobacco for the foreign market. More recently a similar storm destroyed the bananas in Jamaica and the lines of steamers that had been carrying the fruit to the United States had to discontinue for some months pending the growing of another crop. In Bermuda, which often comes under the influence of several tropical hurricanes each year, the wind is so strong that the bananas can grow only in a few lime- stone sink holes which, like little craters, shelter the banana on all sides. 5. MANUFACTURED STARCH Starch in the Form of a Dry Powder. — Manufactured starch serves many uses among civilized man and is produced from a large number of starch plants by methods which, in nearly all STARCH FOODS 117 cases, are similar. As starch can be easily washed out of the finely divided pieces of a starch-producing substance, a plant is simply torn to bits, the starch washed out in water, and allowed to settle. After a few washings the starch is ready for market. By this means the starch is separated from cassava; and then is collected into lumps by being slightly heated, after which it is sold as tapioca. This industry might be carried on almost any- where in the moist parts of the zone where the labor supply is sufficient to do the work. The chief supplies come from the straits settlements of the Malay Peninsula, being chiefly pro- duced by Chinese workmen living under the British rule. Brazil, with a large population of negroes and Portuguese in and near the coast cities, is another important tapioca producer. Starches from different plants have a different shaped grain and serve different uses. In some of the New England States, New York, and Wisconsin, much starch is manufactured from potatoes simply by washing the potatoes, grating them into small bits with rapidly revolving machinery, and soaking out the starch. This variety is of value chiefly in sizing, that is, to hold together the fiber ends in the manufacture of textile goods. Laundry starch is made from rice. A small amount of starch is made from wheat for use in dyeing textiles. The form of manufactured starch most commonly made in the United States is derived from corn, there being starch factories in many towns in the corn-belt states. This corn starch is used in American cookery and more especially as the raw material for the manu- facture of glucose, one of the sugars discussed in another chapter. Sago Palm. — In the Far Eastern Tropics a form of starch is produced from the sago palm tree and extensively used as local food supply in Java, Borneo, Celebes, and adjacent islands. When a sago palm tree is about fifteen years old it blossoms profusely and produces a large amount of fruit. Before blossom- ing all the material for the production of this fruit is stored in the trunk of the tree in the form of starch. To get this accumula- tion of years the Malays, just before the tree blossoms, chop it into pieces 2 or 3 feet long, soak out the starch, dry it, make it into flour for cakes, or the "pearled" rounded masses which are to be bought in grocery stores as sago. 118 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY Future Supply of Starch. — Considering the wide variety of plants and climates and soils yielding starch, and the fact that the tropic sources have scarcely been touched by modern scien- tific enterprise, it is plain that there is no scarcity of starch foods in sight. REFERENCES See General References Eraser, Samuel. The Potato. Judd. The Potato Crops of the U. S., 1866-1906. Bulletin, U. S. Department of Agriculture. Cassava, Bulletin, U. S. Department of Agriculture, Division of For- eign Plant and Seed Introduction. CHAPTER V THE ANIMAL INDUSTRIES i. MEAT AND THE MEAT SUPPLY Among most peoples of the world, meat is something of a luxury and is becoming more so. That it is not a necessity is shown by the fact that millions of people rarely eat it and many never do. Some are even forbidden by their religion to eat flesh. An examination of the table of food values shows the sufficiency of vegetable foods, a fortunate fact, for many millions of the human race in Asia and Europe can rarely afford to eat meat because of their poverty. It is a luxury possessed chiefly by the people of lands of sparse population, where for that reason meat is cheap. Man always has the choice of eating plant products directly or, if land is cheap and plant products abundant, he can feed them to animals and then eat the animals. The latter is much the more expensive form, for the making of a pound of meat requires the grass from much land or 5 to 10 pounds of grain, the equivalent of eight to fifteen 1-lb. loaves of bread. In densely peopled regions where there is not food enough for both man and beast, man eats the food and does without the beasts. Relation of Meat Animals to the Density of Population. — Japan probably presents the most extreme example of a people who maintain a high civilization with few animals. With the exception of the northern Island of Hokkaido, the whole country has a population of from 400 to 500 people per square mile; and the rough and steep country permits but a sixth of the land to be cultivated. The apparent room for pasture does not exist because of a "dense growth of bamboo grass wholly unfit for food and impossible to eradicate." The effect of this absence of pasture and pressure of population in limiting the production of domestic animals is most marked. The Empire has nearly 50 millions of people, and of horses and cattle combined but 5 1/2 per cent, as many, while the number of sheep and hogs is 119 120 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY but 1/8 of 1 per cent, of the number of people. Both of these figures are utterly insignificant in comparison to those for the United States (113 and 130 per cent, respectively), or even to those of Europe. Denmark is an agricultural country where some meat is eaten and animal products are an important factor in commerce. This country (74 per cent, fields and pastures), has four or five times as much of its area suitable for farms as Japan, and has passed the limit in the number of animals it can support on native food, Iowa United States battle per Square Mile. ■ 16 Cattle per 1000 Population. ^^nc; United Kingdom MMMaoo .264 Germany mmmmm98 ^322 Fiance ■■■M69 ■■372 British India MHBO Austria- Hungary Argentina H159 ^330 4157 European Russia .19 M303 Brazil 18 ■■■^■IIW Australia Asiatic .Russia 14 12 ■■:«.-. Fio. 49. — The chart of ratios of cattle to land and to population shows how the frontier leads in one respect and the old lands in another. since cattle foods such as wheat bran, cottonseed meal, linseed oil cake, and other grain products are being imported in large and increasing quantities from the United States, Argentine Republic, and Russia. The Danish population is 167 to the square mile and horses and cattle are 90 per cent, as numerous, while the sheep and swine reach about the same percentage. The state of Iowa, practically all arable, a strictly agricultural state in the midst of the corn belt, is far better fitted than Denmark to support livestock; but it has less of them per square mile than Denmark, having but forty persons to the square mile with a horse and cattle ratio of 300 per cent, and a sheep and swine ratio of 330 per cent, of this population. THE ANIMAL INDUSTRIES 121 Holland and Great Britain are examples of countries where the density of population has carried them beyond the position of Denmark over toward the condition of Japan. The population is 550 to the square mile in England and Wales, 150 in Scotland, and 136 in Ireland. There are 31 per cent, as many cattle and horses as people and 74 per cent, as many sheep and hogs. Ireland, with a relatively sparse population for west Europe, has a considerable export of meat to England, and main- tained horse and cattle ratio of 155 per cent, and sheep and swine ratio of 116 per cent, of the population, thereby also far exceeding Iowa in actual numbers per square mile. Yet the people of the United Kingdom are the greatest meat-importing nation of the world. On each square mile of the fertile and well-tilled Holland are 454 people, with cattle and horses 33 per cent, as numerous, and the sheep and swine but 25 per cent. Meat is imported into Holland, although the Dutchman eats less meat on the average than does the Englishman. Intensify agriculture as we may, dense populations inevitably find meat scarcer than do sparse populations. Meat Animals in Sparsely Peopled Lands. — By turning to a country with sparse population, the reverse of the above con- ditions is met — cheap and abundant supplies of meat for home use and a large surplus for export. In the United States the average population is about thirty to the square mile; the num- bers of the cattle and horses are 113 per cent, of the population, the numbers of sheep and hogs 130 per cent. The high ratio of animals to men makes the United States a great exporter of meat products, but the countries to which we send meat exceed us in the number of animals that they produce per square mile. In the United States there are on the average about thirty-five cattle and horses per square mile. In Great Britain and Ireland there are 110 and in Denmark and Holland 150 per square mile. The inevitable decline in the ratio of meat animals to man as shown by this table is rapidly raising the price of meat in the United States and has, according to some estimates, cut in half the per capita meat consumption in the United States since 1840. Most of the increase in prices has occurred since 1901. In eleven years we have lost nearly one-third of our per capita 122 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY supply of cattle, two-fifths of our per capita supply of sheep, and one-fourteenth of our per capita supply of swine. The figures do not entirely show the facts because the average size of the slaugh- tered hog has declined and there has been absolute increase in the number of milch cows at the expense of beef cattle. POPULATION AND ANIMALS IN THE UNITED STATES, 1870-1912 Popu- Cattle of all Per cent, of popu- Hogs Per cent, of popu- Horses and Per cent, of popu- Sheep Per cent, of popu- lation, million kinds lation of United lation of United mules lation of United lation of United 1,000 States 1,000 States 1,000 States States 1870 38.6 25,483 66 26,751 69 9,427 25 40,853 106 1880 50.2 33,258 66 34,034 68 12,930 25 40,765 80 1890 62.9 52,801 83 51,602 82 16,544 26 44,336 67 1901 77 62,333 80 56,982 75 19,648 25 59,756 77 1912 93 57,959 62 65,410 70 24,871 27 52,362 56 The southern hemisphere with its newer and sparser settle- ments gives us the most striking examples of animal abundance. The Argentine Republic is half as large as the United States, but the population, less than in some single states of the American Union, is but 5.7 people per square mile on the average, and only 16 per square mile in their best agricultural province. The wealth of animals is astonishing in comparison with Japan, Europe, or even the United States. The percentage of cattle and horses to population is 550 per cent. (1910) and of sheep and swine, 1,000 per cent. In Australia, similar conditions prevail. The continent has nearly 3 million square miles, and while much of it is a desert, there are large areas suitable for keeping animals. The sparse population of about 1 1/2 per square mile has for each 100 people 280 horses and cattle and 2,100 sheep and hogs — chiefly sheep. These figures show why meat and other animal products make up such a large proportion of the exports of these sparsely peopled south temperate zone countries. 2. SWINE Qualities and Distribution of the Hog. — Swine are meat ani- mals of grain-growing lands, as the sheep is of grass-growing THE ANIMAL INDUSTRIES 123 Germany 14.0 Austria 7.9 France 4.4 All others 24.7 Million Swine lands. Thus pastoral Australia has 100 sheep to one hog, and Iowa, a great corn state, has seven hogs to one sheep. The hog was originally an animal of forest countries living upon acorns, nuts, roots, grubs, and other highly nutritious foods. Consequently, in domes- Percentage tication he must have somewhat similar foods, since his small stomach is not adapted to a complete diet of bulky grasses. In his original forest home he converted the abundance of autumn nuts ™ ,ed statcs 4S - 1 into a layer of fat which covered his body and carried him through the hungry time of winter. Therefore, the rich grains of the farm suit him exactly. He is still fond of the nuts and acorns of his original forest home, but is able to eat anything from a piece of meat or garbage to the weeds which his owner pulls from the garden. Tame, harmless, hardy, and fecund 1 , the hog is an admirable door-yard scavenger and meat producer for the cottagers of many lands, and has attained an almost world-wide distribution, being of great local importance as a food supply in many countries where he is of no commercial value. He is the friend of the Irish and Russian peasant, and of the new settler in British Columbia. He lives around the shack of the half-breed Indian of Mexico and South America, and is as friendly to the Spanish and Italian immigrant in the Argentine as he was around the stone house in the old countries of Europe. He is as much at home beneath the shack of the negro in the West Indies as by the palm leaf hut on the banks of the Congo or the coast of Guinea. In the 22.1 12.5 11.0 Total 158.4 Fig. 50. — World distri- bution of swine, 1911. 1 It is a rare flock of sheep that increases 100 per cent, per year, while ten to fifteen fold increase of swine is common. The United States slaughters each year 77.5 per cent, of its hogs, 39.8 per cent, of its sheep, 26.8 per cent, of its cattle. There thus appear good reasons why pork is the cheapest meat to produce. 124 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY eastern world he is common in China, Malaysia, Australasia, and the mid-Pacific, where, in at least one group of coral islands, the price of a dusky bride is from ten to twenty pigs. Hogs that Range in Forests. — In many parts of the United States it is customary to let the hogs run in the forest where the fallen mast provides a large part of their food. This occurs in the Appalachian Highlands, in the Ozarks of Missouri and Arkan- sas, and in many parts of the South Atlantic and Gulf States. Great injury to the southern pine forests often results from the up-rooting of the young pine tree which the hog kills by eating the succulent tap root. In the southern states, salt pork, easily kept in a warm climate, is the staple meat food of the working man, white and black alike. Swine per Square Mile. Swine per 1000 Population. Iowa United States 173 4350 ■ 18 ■■■■■734 Germany ^^^^■105 ^345 Austria- Hungary ■■41 ■ 243 United Kingdom ■■35 ■ 93 Trance ■ 33 ■ 181 Fig. 51. — The ratios of swine to land and to people show that meat exports are products of sparse populations. Hogs fatten in many south European forests. An important hog-raising district is located in southwestern Germany, where the animals can roam the beech forests and live on the beech nuts. In Servia, hogs, largely mast fed, rise to the important place of chief export. The fertile valleys of this mountainous country are carefully farmed chiefly for grain, but in the oak and beech forests of the mountains there is excellent feeding ground for hogs, which are sent to Budapest and Vienna and to Germany. But the mast-fed hog is of relatively small impor- tance in comparison to the grain-fed hog. Relation of the Hog Industry to Grain Growing. — Since the hog must have some kind of concentrated food such as acorns, nuts or grain, he is a natural product of the regions producing cheap grains. The chief regions producing hogs for export, THE ANIMAL INDUSTRIES 125 therefore, are those in which corn or barley abound. Since corn has long been the cheapest and also the most fattening of the grains, and since corn is much more important than barley for hog feed, the corn belt of the United States is the leading hog-exporting region of the whole world. Chiefly because of this corn belt, twice as many hogs are found in the United States as in any other two countries of the world. The farmer in Iowa, Kansas or Nebraska nearly always grows one or two fields of corn, and often keeps from 20 to 100 hogs, which he feeds almost entirely upon the corn. Fully one-third of the American corn crop goes to the market in the form of pork. Owing to the great ability of this grain to produce fat, the American hog is often called the "lard hog," because of the large amount of lard (melted fat) he makes. He is quite different from the so-called "bacon hog" of the barley-growing dis- tricts of Canada and Europe. Owing to the fact that barley yields less grain and there- fore costs more to produce than corn, the pork raisers of Canada and Europe feed their pigs as much as possible on grass, especially clover. This food, rich in protein, produces more lean meat in the pig's body than does the corn diet and for this cause the famed English breakfast bacon has the streaks of lean with the fat. Because of this desired leanness, some English bacon is imported into the United States, although we have many millions more hogs than any other country, and send vast quantities of cheaper pork to England and Ireland. At the same time that Ireland imports American pork, it produces bacon of high quality, which is exported to the English market. The most important center of European hog production, however, is the barley region adjacent the Baltic Sea in Germany and Russia, Germany being second only to Percei itage " Million Swine Iowa 14.8 9.7 Illinois 7.0 4.6 Missouri 6.9 4.5 Nebraska 6.6 4.3 Indiana 6.1 4.0 Ohio 5.5 3.6 Kansas 4.3 2.8 Texas 3.8 _ 2.5 Georgia 3.2 _ 2.1 Wisconsin 3.1 " " 2.0 All others 38.7 25.3 Total 65.4 Fig. 52.— U n i t e d States distribution of swine, Jan. 1, 1912. 126 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY the United States in the number of hogs, and Russia third. Hungary with its corn crop is also an exporter of pork to Austria and Germany. 3. DISTRIBUTION OF CATTLE Wherever there are wide spaces of untilled grass lands we are likely to find cattle. They were pioneers during the nine- teenth century upon the vast plains that the white man won from the wild animals and savages in North America, South America, Australia, and central Asia. On account of their size, strength, and speed, they can combat dangers, or, if necessary, flee from them. Their ability to withstand heat and moisture has en- abled them to go into lower latitudes than sheep. With the exception of the humid plains of the Amazon and central Africa and a few places in the Oriental tropics, they are to be found from the Straits of Magellan to Hudson Bay in the Ameri- cas, and from Tasmania to Kamchatka and North Cape in the Old World. In the first stage of the occupation of new plains, before transportation has been well developed, the only export products cattle can furnish are the non-perishable hides and tallow. Fifty years ago the half-breed Indians on the plains of the Argentine were producing these commodities at the same time that the American Indian and frontiersmen were skinning buffalo for their hides upon the great American Plains reaching from southern Texas to Lake Winnipeg and beyond. This vast plain was a splendid pasture and had been occupied by the buffalo, a close relative of the ox, for an unknown period of time. They wintered in the warm lands from Oklahoma to Mexico and each spring went north across what is now northern Texas, western Kansas, Nebraska, Dakota and on into Canada. With the approach of winter they migrated south, the herds often covering the plains for miles in such great numbers that they actually stopped the progress of trains when the first railroad was built across the plains from Omaha in 1868. In the next four years, many millions of buffalo were slain for sport or for their skins, and now this great animal is practically extinct, except for a few herds in National Parks, private reserves, and THE ANIMAL INDUSTRIES 127 Less than 10-20 20-30 30-40 over 40 10 cattle Fig. 53. — Cattle in United States per square mile, by states, Jan. 1, 1912. (Hfe^w ^r^-AV-'-^msBB^'SSMBBBBa^wi nnyiy.M .,.,. j/\S • — * x Im A Nf>^r"hrl**r- > ' wwf * ~"l * > r J ■^5t&'*' *\ / js-'Vir V- A . " fliifilHHir-^ / ~ > W^S^J^i^^s^C / 3swL^^\ /|| A | ^ l=w£w&^ V^v^rt/"^/^-^ 11 ~ k JSj?&-~*\ l'i ilM IkVa Srjvwgi3>v t ■ :i r.v'-V^ y^p-— ^>I OS*! ^Wmli^^^Kf^M^^^^B ■ ^':Ky^:S'; : '.'J 'lit*?! "J***^*?^ M'0§£ M II III ^^■V.t'-fVf' t *-rTi -■ "1 ■* .- ^ --EJ^*^y-tf IHWf 3^*J 1 11 H 1 1 1 1 J lin'w ,~ * * ' ^t.* « * - j-?^*^"^^* » 1 ^f- •*« *, AJJ fito^=* # fl H8n ^^-^ri&e^e^l-V:-." ■:•«::';:: 1 f^^BB^^^^r 1 V §1 '.MfeSl^-v '^»v*vX't*/!''****-'*7 I^^SjSi'. ' : ; feA* ..'■ £ffiS5"j^i"V vtS^ J * r1 "" 1 *'' r Xi't'*^V % *H 1 1 1 1 LW&fel llllllllllllll 19 H 1 ■wyy^ii^jl BESS ^ ■■■ Less than 100-300 300-600 600-1000 1000-1500 1500-2000 2000-3000 over 3000 100 cattle Fig. 54. — Cattle in United States per 1000 inhabitants, by states, Jan. 1, 1912. (U. S. Dept. Agr.) Pop. 1910. 128 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY zoological gardens. His place was promptly taken by the '. horned Texas cattle which had run wild with him for three centuries since their ancestors had got away from the early Spanish settlers. In living with the buffalo on the plains they had become quite well adjusted to the conditions of the life. Their long horns were admirable defense against wolves and bears, their long legs and muscular bodies were efficient in flight. But the animal himself was not very good for beef and so he has been improved by crossing with better breeds brought from England. The earlier part of this chapter showed, however, that cattle reach their greatest density in districts of comparatively dense population. Cattle on the Great Plains of North America. — The great open plain west of the one hundredth meridian was too dry for good farming; therefore the pioneer farmer could not take it, as he had taken up all Iowa and the eastern parts of Kansas and Ne- braska. The United States Government, to which the land belonged, would not sell it, for fear of great estates and land monopolies. Although it was excellent pasture for a few cattle per square mile, no one could afford to take it even as a gift, under the homestead law which gave 160 acres to each settler, but limited his acquisitions to that amount. In a land fit only for scanty pasture, a man needs hundreds of acres. So this vast area of the plains, larger than any European country except Russia, remained every man's land, as the Government would not sell it and people could not take it as a farm homestead. People' branded their cattle, turned them out upon the plain in great numbers, and then, after an annual round-up when all the cattle in a large area were brought together, each man took the cattle that had his brand and sold them. This was a very cheap way to raise cattle and very profitable for the cattle companies. It made cheap beef for market and along with the settlement of new cowlands west of the Missouri River, it led to the high figures for animals as shown in the table of animals and popu- lation. The freedom of the range naturally led to an over- stocking. The grass, especially in periods of drought, was eaten so close that it could not produce seed, and in many places it died out so that the plains do not now support so many cattle THE ANIMAL INDUSTRIES 129 Percentage * r Million Cattle Texas 10.3 6.2 Iowa 6.9 4.2 ■Wisconsin 4.4 2.7 Nebraska 4.3 2.6 Kansas 4.3 2.6 New York 4.0 2.4 Missouri 3.9 2.3 Illinois 3.8 " 2.3 Minnesota 3.8 " 2.3 California 3.4 " 2.0 as they once did and are being greatly injured by both wind and water erosion and by the advance of inedible weeds. The Migration of Beef Cattle.— The range cattle spend one or two years upon their native plain, living on grass, and are then shipped into the Corn Belt where the farmers keep them for a few months, fat- tening them on corn before sending them off to the great markets for slaughter. To some extent, these cattle are fattened in the farms of Pennsylvania and other eastern states, as many as 60,000 a year being dis- tributed at the city of Lancaster, Pa., among the fertile and well-cared-for farms of that district. To a smaller extent this same emigration is repeated in the Southern Highlands. In the hilly country of south- western Virginia, northeastern Tennessee and West Virginia, there is a section of good grass country where young cattle are raised and sent to the farm lands of the great valley and the Piedmont sections of Virginia and Maryland for fattening. Importance of Cattle on Arid Lands with Some Irrigation. — Irrigation in the West is important to the cattle industry. Indeed, beef is the chief commodity shipped from most of the irrigated districts of the United States. Alfalfa leads all other irri- gated crops in the area under cultivation. This plant is the richest of all the clovers. It sends its roots to great depths in the ground and when the moisture supply is abundant it yields heavy crops of hay, in from three to six cuttings a year according to climate. Fortunately, the irrigable valleys are widely scat- tered throughout the cattle range from Canada to Mexico, from western Kansas to western Oregon, so that these favorable alfalfa fields are really scattered oases in the scanty and semi- arid pastures. During winter and the seasons of drought, All others 51.0 Total 60.2 Fig. 55. — Cattle, in- cluding milch cows, in United States, Jan. 1, 1912. 130 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY alfalfa hay supplies the cattle from the ranges with abundant food and fattens them for market. Cattle In Southern States. — The southern states have great but unappreciated cattle-producing possibilities. The Minnesota farmer must build large barns to protect his animals and their food from the cold and storms of winter. He must feed his animals full half the year from the results of his summer's toil. In Alabama there is so little winter that a barn is scarcely necessary and the growing season is so much longer that more forage can be produced on a given piece of land than in the Northern States. The cattle can also pasture nearly all the year, thus making the industry require less capital and labor than in the North. The great advantages of the South for stock raising have not up to the present time been used, because of the great and almost exclusive dependence of the farmers on cotton, a money crop of unusual excellence. The Shipment of Live Animals. — During the past thirty-five years there have been great improvements in the handling and marketing of meat. Formerly live cattle were carried in trains from Kansas to Chicago, and on to New York and Boston for slaughtering to supply the eastern market. About 1874 we began to ship live cattle to Europe. This long-distance move- ment of animals still continues, owing to the preference of the British for beef slaughtered in their own country. Steamers from Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Mon- treal annually convey thousands of live cattle to Great Britain. They are at times even taken alive from Argentina to. England. It is, however, much more expensive to transport live animals than slaughtered ones, because the live animals occupy more space than dead ones, some die on the way, all must be fed, and they always lose weight. The dangers and hardships result in such losses that hogs are not exported alive at all and sheep to but a limited extent. The Effect of Improved Methods of Shipping and Preserving Meat. — The invention of artificial refrigeration has done much to make possible the slaughtering of animals nearer the place where they are raised. About 1875 the refrigerator car made it possible to send dressed beef from Chicago to Boston more cheaply than the live animals could be sent. In 1879 came a THE ANIMAL INDUSTRIES 131 sure method of hermetically sealing meat in cans so that it would keep for a long period, thus giving another force to locate the slaughtering industry at the great cattle markets. Attempts, however, to operate packing plants upon the great plains where the cattle themselves are produced have resulted in failure. This is due to the lack of a market for many of the by-products 1 ~i 'OJ 1 ^,-.— > *A£^F' / / ' TS^W i . . ! mSmi^JA i. tfP ; .■:-::■ ■* - iftfflfr 1 ' 3 " ' H -' ; " ja*^ -1 I PII ¥ -' - ;J 1 EHll^,'U V4L R\* : ./JS W'-l ftiJsi "Ip ■ ■ Or v ';vl Jm ?o«% ^ i; ■ ■ ~*f . ■.■ : Fig. 56.- -Quarters of beef on trolleys in cold storage rooms. Co., Camden, N. J.) (Joseph Campbell and less desirable kinds of meat which the varied market of a large city will consume. Consequently, packing plants are located in the great city nearest to the places where the cattle are fattened. Cincinnati and Chicago were the first packing- house centers, but Omaha, Kansas City, and, to a lesser extent, Minneapolis, have now become great centers. Plants are 132 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY being established also at Fort Worth and Waco in northern Texas, but Chicago is yet, as it has long been, the greatest meat- packing center in the world. The modern meat-packing plant handles cattle, hogs or sheep, according to the demands of the market, and is one of the most wonderful examples existing of speed, mechan- ical perfection, and the use of by-products. A procession of Fig. 57. — Cans of food filled by machinery and automatically carried past inspectors, finishers, and solderers who complete the closing of the cans. (Joseph Campbell Co., Camden, N. J.) live animals goes through a gate and in a few seconds their lifeless bodies are hanging on a little trolley on which they travel past a long row of men, each of whom has his perfectly definite work to do. In a surprisingly short time every particle of the animals has been taken for its particular use and the chief part of the carcass rolls into the cold storage room. So perfect is the utilization of the refuse that absolutely nothing is wasted. Bones are made into knife handles, buttons and small pieces and THE ANIMAL INDUSTRIES 133 Percentage "|" Million Dollars United Kingdom 58.4 57.0 chippings are ground for fertilizer; the hair goes for mattresses and plastering; the intestines for sausage casings; the hoofs are made into gelatine and glue. Even the blood is used for buttons and other industrial purposes, the total number of inedible products being over 100. Grease, not fit for culinary use, is made into soap. All other parts, not otherwise used, go for fertilizer. The meat product of the packing house goes out as fresh, salt, smoked, canned, or pickled meat. Owing to the development of cold storage and refrigerator cars, an ever increasing proportion of fresh meat is now distributed from the great packing centers to cities and small towns, chiefly in the northeastern part of the United States. It is also put into the chilled chambers of the ocean steamers at the Atlantic ports, and sent to Liverpool, London, Antwerp, and Hamburg to feed the dense populations of Europe. There is a considerable export of pork to the West Indian Islands and other tropical countries. For this trade it has the advantage of being cheap and keeping well. The European Cattle Industry. — While the export of meat and by-products to western Europe is an important part of our trade, the production of meat in Europe is much more extensive. The Germany 15.7 Cuba 5.6 Netherlands 4.2 Belgium 3.1 Canada 2.8 Mexico 1.1 - " 1.05 Ml others 9.1 15.3 4.1 3.0 2.75 9.0 hogs and pork, three-year average, 1909-11. Total 97.7 Fig. 58. — Distribution of total number of cattle in the United United states exports of States, Canada, and Mexico is 83 million; Europe has 129 million. In many sec- tions of Europe cattle are an important money crop, and the out- lying districts send them to the more populous regions. Thus, Hungary and Galicia send stall fattened cattle to Switzerland. Owing to the heavy rainfall and great grass growth, west Eng- land and Ireland are very important cattle-raising districts. 134 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY The moist climate and low-lying lands along the Baltic Sea and English Channel are admirably located for the production of grass and the keeping of cattle, and a previous discussion has pointed out the great development of the industry there. The north of France is well tilled and possesses many cattle. Den- mark is a model cattle country which long exported beef to Great Britain. The upland pastures of southwestern Germany and the mountain pastures of the Alps are also famed for their cattle. Most of the cattle of western Europe live in barns and have their food brought to them because by this means the ground can be kept in the cultivated crops which are more pro- ductive than pastures. In a day's journey across Germany one will see no cattle at pasture unless it be a field unsuited to the plow. This carrying of food to the cattle is the explanation of the large number of cattle per square mile. Russia, the greatest cattle-keeping country of Europe, and second of the world, has her vast plains, a part of which, like those of our western states, is too arid for any use but pasture. In eastern Russia there are districts so remote from good trans- portation that cattle are kept largely for their hides and tallow, as they were years ago in the Argentine Republic, but railroad building is fast bringing this epoch to a close. Cattle in Old World Arid Belt. — The dry summers of the Mediterranean climate do not produce good pasture, so that in those countries cattle are not so important as in north Europe. Thus, Italy, Spain and Portugal have less cattle than Austria, and Italy's percentage of cattle to people is but 7. Cattle are, nevertheless, widely distributed in the arid region and are to be found in limited numbers from Spain to Palestine, Persia, Turkestan, and Mongolia. In the last province the scanty pastures furnish some of the exports of the Chinese Empire. In this land of little rain, which finds its closest counterpart in the American ranges between the Sierras and the Rockies, the methods and the difficulties of the industry are shown by the following excerpts from a U. S. Consular Report from Harput, Asia Minor (June 17, 1911). "A great portion of the cattle, sheep, and goats are owned by nomad tribes of Kurds that wander about this whole country with their flocks and herds. This last winter, however, was the most severe ever known in THE ANIMAL INDUSTRIES 135 this country, the snow extended south even down into the sub- tropics, and over this winter-grazing land the snow was several feet deep and lasted throughout the entire winter. The people were helpless to provide against such conditions. There was no food procurable for the livestock and little for the inhabitants, 20 per cent, of whom and 70 to 80 per cent, of the live stock starved to death." The Cattle Industry of the South Temperate Zone. — The refrigerator ship, refrigerator car, and the cold-storage plant have made possible the carriage of meat to market halfway around the world, so that the ranchers of the south temperate zone need no longer keep cattle for their hides and tallow alone. Prosperity has resulted for the Argentine Republic, New Zealand, and Australia — countries so admirably adapted to pastoral industries. Packing plants like those of Chicago and Omaha now stand at Wellington, New Zealand; at Sidney, Brisbane, and other places in Australia; at Buenos Ayres and Rosario, in the Argentine Republic; and at Paysandu, across the La Plata River in Uruguay. From these plants, the frozen carcasses of cattle and sheep are wheeled by the thousands into the freezing chambers of the ships which carry them across the entire torrid zone to deliver them, still frozen, at the cold storage warehouses of Antwerp, Southampton, Liverpool, London, and Glasgow. Here they are distributed to the butchers' carts of a hundred English and Continental towns. This means cheaper food to the European and better prices to the farmer of the south temperate zone, but it has not sufficed to keep down the price of meat. The high price for meat makes marked industrial changes. The Argentinians now pay tremendous prices (at times over $5,000 per animal) for prize-winning breeding stock of the English cattle shows and turn them out to increase on the fine level estancias (ranches) and fatten on the alfalfa which is becoming so important a crop in that country. The possi- bilities of the extension of meat production in the Parana Valley appear to be very great. Alfalfa has proved to be especially adapted to large areas and its use is spreading rapidly. It in- creases from three to six fold the number of cattle that the land will support. A few years ago an American, writing from his 60,000-acre alfalfa ranch in the southern part of the province of 136 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY Percentage India 25.3 United States 13.5 Eastern Russia 8.0 Argentina 6.5 Brazil 5.6 Germany 4.6 Austria 3.9 Asiatic Russia 3.4 France 3.2 United ( „ _ Kingdom t *•' Australia 2.6 113.1 Cordoba 1 said, "You can buy a league (6,672 acres) for #11,000 ($1.65 per acre) and, by spending as much more in putting it into alfalfa, have a ranch that will carry 3,000 cattle and keep them practically fat all the year round with very little risk from drought or severe winters. These provinces cattle that grow alfalfa so easily (Cordoba, Santa Fe, San Luis, and western Buenos Ayres) are the future grazing lands of the Repub- lic. It is astonishing what large areas are taken up every year and turned into alfalfa." The four provinces mentioned have an area larger than Kansas, Nebraska, Iowa, and Ohio combined and those states cannot keep an ox on 2 1/3 acres of land. The open winter of Argentina, as of Texas, makes cattle ranching easy because barn building is unnecessary. Before the invention of- refrigeration the cattle industry of the Parana (River Platte) countries had advanced beyond the ship- ments of hides, tallow, and bones, by the manufacture and export of Tasajo and Beef Extract. Tasajo is a peculiarly well- preserved kind of dried beef cured in the sunshine of the great pasture plains (Pam- pas). It has the quality of keeping indefi- nitely in such hot humid climates as Cuba and Brazil, so that transportation becomes easy and for many years it has had a wide distribution over tropic America. Beef extract is a convenient means of putting a big roast in a small bottle, the manufacture of it therefore being an in- dustry that could go to the farthest corner of the globe to find cheap beef. Almost every drug store in the world keeps a well- known brand of beef extract that has for some decades been manufactured on the banks of the lower Parana from the cheap beef of Uruguay and Argentina. 1 U. S. Department of Agriculture, Report No. 77. Alfalfa Production in Argentine, 1904. All others 20.7 60.2 35.8 29.1 25.0 20.6 17.6 15.1 14.5 11.9 11.8 92.9 Total 447.6 Fio. 59.— World cattle distribution, 1911. THE ANIMAL INDUSTRIES 137 American meat-packing firms from Chicago have opened branches in Argentina and Uruguay and now compete with the meat extract manufacturers in the purchase of fat cattle and sell the meat in Europe in competition with the product of American farms. Argentine meat shipments have even been made to New York. Cattle in Tropic America. — The cattle of American countries north of Argentine Republic and south of the United States have little to do with international trade, but they are important locally. The people in the highlands of Mexico and Central America and the Andean countries of Columbia, Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia have not the facilities to export meat even if they had a surplus of cattle, which they do not now possess. Cattle in large numbers are produced in small herds and con- sumed in all of these countries. Their hides, however, are a general and important export, since they keep indefinitely and can stand nearly all conceivable abuses in transportation. In Paraguay, hides are the export second in importance. Tropic America has important unused resources for cattle production. For example, the grassy plains of the Orinoco with their alternating periods of rainfall and sunshine. Other lands, as in Colombia and Central America, produce grass the year round and are well suited to cattle. Transportation difficulties are a barrier to a start. It costs more to get a bullock from Guatemala City to Puerto Barrios, 196 miles, than it does to take him from west Kansas to Chicago. If he continues his journey to New Orleans, the total cost is double the freight from western Kansas to New York or Boston (U. S. Con. Rep., 1911). If they existed in great numbers, they could doubtless be moved more cheaply. A recent beginning of the shipment of dressed beef to England from Puerto Cabello, Venezuela, is exceed- ingly suggestive in a much smaller way of the revolution wrought in Argentina and Uruguay. In Africa, cattle are relatively unimportant as yet, the number reported from the whole continent being less than that for Uruguay and Paraguay combined (about 12 million in 1910) and the most important part of the continent, British South Africa, has about as many (4 million) as Iowa. African climate opposes cattle. Aridity makes both north and south Africa 138 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY resemble the less favorable parts of our arid West. It is too wet and hot in much of central Africa for cattle to live at all, and the interior plateaus have not yet been settled. South Africa a few years ago was reduced to the brink of financial ruin because a fatal disease called the rinderpest swept from the Zambezi River to Cape Town, killing almost all the cattle as it went. The Boer who was dependent upon his ox cart was deprived of means of transportation, and the farmer who had been keeping cattle had to turn to some other resource. Science has now conquered the disease and the industry is returning. In Matabeleland, Rhodesia, north of the Transvaal border, a large grant of land has recently been made to a London company which is now building dipping tanks (for disinfecting live animals and removing vermin), digging wells, and stocking its ranch with cattle. Later it is planned to build a meat- extract plant. The location, as far from the Southern Sea as is Chicago from the Atlantic, and with no home market, is a natural one for the manufacture of so concentrated a product. Cattle in Southeastern Asia. — India leads the world in cattle. She has 50 per cent, more than the United States and three times as many as Russia, the third cattle country in the world. They are used for work animals as well as meat animals and, excepting hides, there is no export of importance. In the Philippines, a somewhat similar dependence upon cattle was disturbed by rinderpest with great loss of cattle "to such an extent that the entire economic situation of the islands was endangered" (U. S. Con. Rep., Jan. 23, 1911). The same diseases are now ravaging Siam, while south China is having a lively trade in restocking the Philippines with live cattle. 4. THE FUTURE SUPPLY AND PRICE OF MEAT The nineteenth century was a period of industrial discovery and commercial expansion by means of railways, steamboats refrigerator cars and ships. This permitted the western world to have for a few decades the cheapest meat supply we are ever likely to have. There are no more great plains to discover, and the population is increasing much faster than the numbers of THE ANIMAL INDUSTRIES 139 meat animals; and as a result meat is to-day rising in price, in practically all parts of the world. For this there is no remedy in sight, and it may not be an entirely fanciful prediction that fifty years hence a juicy beef steak will be the center piece at the banquet table. Paris complains that between 1902 and 1910 the wholesale price of meat increased 45 per cent, at her abattoirs. Similar conditions in Germany have recently caused an absolute decline in the number of animals slaughtered, and that empire is now importing $120,000,000 worth of forage per year. Far- fetched supplies from new producing regions may be expected to afford some relief, but the great lands on the agricultural frontier are already producing. The recently established ex- port of pork from Hankow, 600 miles inland in China, to Liver- pool is interesting, but not indicative of an important new source of supply. It is chiefly promoted by the very low level of prices now prevailing in China and the fact that her people are too poor to eat meat. 5- HAY Relation of Hay to the Animal Industries. — Grass is the nat- ural food of most of our domesticated quadrupeds. Pastures or grass fields where animals can feed in summer are the commonest feature of American farms. Hay, the dry grass or pasture product, kept over in barns or stacks for winter use, is almost equally common. In the harvesting of this crop we see one of the direct results of intermittent climate which stops growth. It is not necessary to make hay in lands where grass will grow the year round, as it does in many parts of the torrid zone. Hay is usually a supply crop, to be eaten by the animals of the farm and become saleable in the form of work, meat, butter, cheese, milk, wool, and hides. Practically all of the pasturing animals except the reindeer can get along well on hay. It is relished at the zoo alike by the elephant whose native food is the fresh green of the tropical jungle, and by the camel who at home contents himself with the bushes, the harsh grasses, and the thorns of the desert. The deer and the moose also like it, although in their native homes they nourish themselves in 140 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY winter almost entirely upon the twigs and branches of bushes which project above the snow, and such forage as they can get by digging in the snow. Hay and City Dwellers. — It may seem that this supply crop of the farm is of little value to the city dwellers, but nearly all of them are indirectly dependent upon hay. Every time one eats beef, mutton, butter, milk or cheese, he uses a com- modity that could not have been produced in usable quantities but for hay, and when there is a shortage in hay, dairy products and meat are high in price. Even bread itself is usually the product of the labor of hay-fed beasts of burden, and the delivery of goods in the city itself has depended largely upon horses that could not stay a week but for their bales of hay. "All flesh is grass," says the Old Testament. Natural Hay. — In the semi-arid regions, like the Great Plains of the central part of America, nature herself makes good hay. Here the rain comes in the early summer making the grass grow rapidly. With the increasing dryness of late summer, the grass dries and stands for months rich and nutritious. The best kind of American grass for natural hay is the so-called "buffalo grass" which for centuries has been an important part of the food of the vast herds of buffalo, antelopes, and other wild animals of the Trans-Mississippi. This natural hay, being the product of a typical climate, is to be found in the other semi- arid regions. Human life depends on this wild hay when tribes live through the long dry season as do some of the Arabs by moving with their flocks from place to place in search of pasture. 1 Distribution of Hay Production. — The cultivated hay crop is general in the north temperate zone and also in parts of the south temperate zone, except on the pasture plains above 1 This great dependence upon wild hay is said to have crystallized itself into law. In the dry part of the year a fire once started in the hay will destroy it for miles. The fire itself may overtake flocks or camps and also destroy them. As there can be no more pasture until months later when the rains come again, the person who starts the fire may thus bring starva- tion to herds of animals and loss of human life to the people who depend upon them. As every people punishes most severely those offenses that tend to destroy society, death therefore is the penalty upon the Arab who starts a grass fire. No matter how accidentally it occurred, no matter how well meaning he may have been, no matter if it be the son of the chieftain him- self, he has committed the unpardonable offense of imperiling the life of the community, and like the traitor, he must make the supreme payment — an excellent illustration of the influence of environment upon social phenomena. THE ANIMAL INDUSTRIES 141 mentioned and there it is rapidly increasing in irrigated sections. In the United States, Canada, and Europe it is a very important crop. In the United States it exceeds the wheat crop in value, and about equals it in area. In value, corn of course far exceeds it and cotton sometimes does. In Manchuria, Japan, and China it is much less important because of the small number of animals to be supported. Relation of Hay to Otber American Crops. — Cultivated hay is usually made of the grasses known as clover and timothy (the only one of a thousand native American grasses 1 yet domesti- cated.) Throughout large parts of the United States, and to some extent in Europe also, the common practice is to sow the grass seed in the fields of wheat, oats, rye, or barley when these small grains are sown, or in the early spring when the freezing, thawing, and drying of the ground open little cracks to receive the seed. The grass starts in the grain and fully establishes itself after grain harvest. In America it is a common practice to sow both clover and timothy. The clover being a quick and vigorous grower comes first, making a clover hay crop the year after the wheat crop. In the next year or two the timothy takes possession of the ground so that altogether several hay crops may be gathered if the farmer so desires, before the grasses die out and the field is plowed for grain. The Distribution of the Hay Crop. — In the United States the corn belt is the great hay center also, a fact which shows very clearly that zones producing one farm crop only are not common. The corn-belt farms are frequently the original 160 acres or one- quarter of a square mile which the Government gave away to settlers from forty to seventy years ago. They are often divided into four fields of about 40 acres each, and it is not uncommon for one field to be in corn, one to be in oats, wheat or barley, one to be in pasture for the cattle in summer, and one to be in hay for the cattle in winter. The cattle and hogs are fattened, it is true, largely upon corn, but the horses, cattle, and sheep are by nature grass eaters, and can no more live entirely upon corn than we can live entirely upon meat; they must also eat the more bulky foods as hay, which is an essential part of the 'A striking evidence of the possibilities yet awaiting American agriculture in an age of scientific industry. 142 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY system of mixed farming (cattle and grain) that so commonly prevails. Methods of Making Hay. — Methods of making hay have greatly improved through the recent invention of machinery. The mowing machine to-day cuts a swath 5, 6, or 7 feet in width as fast as the horses can walk. To let it dry out more rapidly, a horse-drawn tedder stirs it up with many kicking feet. Big rakes drawn by one or two horses pull it into heaps, or a kind Fiq. 60. — By the use of these devices alfalfa hay is gathered and thrown upon the rick without wagon or pitchfork. (U. S. Reclamation Service.) of elevator called a hay-loader, is often attached to the wagon, to pick up the hay and put it on the top of the load. Upon reaching the barn or stack, it is lifted off, hundreds of pounds at a time, by a hay fork or sling operated by the horses. So great is the saving of labor that, in some of the alfalfa fields of the West, it is said that hay can be made at a labor cost of $1.00 per ton, making it the cheapest of animal foods, and enabling the productive alfalfa lands to bring a very high price for Ameri- can farm lands. THE ANIMAL INDUSTRIES 143 Hay in Commerce. — The bulkiness of hay in proportion to value makes it comparatively unknown in foreign commerce. A small quantity, 50-70,000 tons per year, about 0.1 per cent, of the American crop, is compressed into bales of small bulk and shipped from the American corn belt to west Europe, where the large number of animals required by the meat- and milk- consuming and horse-using populations of manufacturing dis- tricts makes it necessary that they shall import animal food. Alfalfa hay is at times sent from Chili to England, but European forage imports are closely restricted to the more easily trans- ported grains or concentrates. 1 Our domestic hay movement is much larger than the foreign. It is regularly sent from the corn belt to the cotton belt, where in a region that might produce all its own forage and produce for export, the people are devoting themselves so exclusively to cotton growing that they frequently buy food for their work animals. Hay is also of considerable importance in local com- merce in various parts of America where horses work in moun- tainous regions or forest regions, at lumbering and mining. To the city horse also it is evident hay must be sent, so that, in the aggregate, there is a large internal commerce in hay in this country. The many cities of New England and the North- eastern States make this region the greatest American hay market and therefore the farmers of New York and New England find the selling of hay more important to them than do the farmers of other states. In many districts of New England it is almost the only crop grown and sold on many half-abandoned farms. The soil is so rocky that it is difficult to plow, but once the ground is sown with grass and the surface stones are picked up, hay can be cut year after year, with the result that, in the New England states, hay is by far the most important crop grown, occupying more land in some states than all other crops together. The total hay crop of New England is, however, much smaller than that of an equal area of the corn belt, because of the much smaller proportion of the land that is in cultivation, and the low yield of old fields. 1 To offset this the Europeans grow root crops for stock feed — mangel, wurzels, turnips, and Rutabagas, in quantities entirely unknown in the United States. 144 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY Hay in Irrigated Countries. — The best of all hay plants is the alfalfa, a clover which lives for many years, can slumber through months of drought, can spring into rapid growth the very day that water is applied, and can produce 5 or 6 tons of hay per season in three or four cuttings on rich irrigated land. To crown its virtues, alfalfa hay is rich, richer in protein than wheat flour. Hay, therefore, reaches its greatest importance on the irrigated districts interspersed among the arid and semi-arid lands of the West, where alfalfa alone makes satisfactory stock raising pos- sible. The same combination is common in other arid regions, such as Chili, Argentine Republic, and many parts of the Old World, alfalfa being a plant of world-wide distribution. New varieties of alfalfa recently introduced from Turkestan and Siberia are expected to be of great benefit to the Mississippi Valley. The European Hay Crop. — As a whole, hay is more important to European animal husbandry than to the American. Europe has more cattle to the square mile than we have, and since cattle are rarely pastured, a larger proportion of European land is in hay. Swedish hay is so vastly important that the poor peasant must in those unfavorable climates actually spread the grass out under sheds to protect it from the rain until it dries, and then shelter it for winter use. To get it to the barn it is at times brought down from heights on trolleys, travelling on wire cables. Such laborious conditions of agriculture as this explain the emigration of Scandinavians to America, and we see why people who had been able to live in such a country quickly prosper in roomy America, with its more favorable climate and many opportunities. To the Icelanders, hay is a necessary link in a hard existence. Wool is one of their chief money crops and to feed the sheep through their arctic winters, they literally shave their hummocky hay fields with scythes. As east Europe resembles western America, it is Russia with its great plains and millions of cattle that furnishes the region of greatest hay production, and part of the crop finds its way to the London market in the form of ever-increasing quantities of butter which is being shipped now even from places as remote as central Siberia. THE ANIMAL INDUSTRIES 145 Upon the plains of the Po in northern Italy where the irriga- tion water, sometimes rich with the mud ground by glaciers from the Alpine cliffs, is turned upon the fields, it is said that as many as nine crops of hay per year are gathered, thus enabling the district to export butter to less favored sections. 6. DAIRY PRODUCTS The Dairy Products and Their Uses. — Milk, intended only for the offspring of the particular species producing it, has been taken Fig. 61. — Swiss Toggenburg goat, Fanette, weight 135 lbs., product 2440 lbs. milk in 10 mos. One of the most efficient milk producers in the world. (Photo. Howland & Hurd, Redlands, Cal.) by man at various times and places from camels, mares, sheep, goats, cows, and even the Indian water buffalo. As a result of long selection and improvement, the goat and the cow have become especially adapted for this service and give quantities of milk which would have astonished our primeval ancestors who first domesticated the animals. The breeds of cattle are 146 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY of two classes — the beef animals that get fat if well fed, and the dairy or milk breeds that give much milk if well fed. The dairy products are first raw milk and then a number of manufactures of milk, chiefly cheese, butter, and condensed milk. Milk is a per- fect food, in that it completely sustains life, but very dangerous because of the ease of contamination in its collection, and the further fact that it is a perfect germ culture. 1 Cheese, a con- | 1880 to 1884 g 1885 to 1889 § 1890 to 1894 g 1895 to 1899 § 1900 to 1904 §1905 to 1909 220 210 SOO 190 g 180 g"iro feMO j 150 £ 140 ■n , 1 s 1 1 =9 \ ) r-* i \ v ■■ 3 1 J. J 4 V ,; V /• ) ^ 1 / \ / s \, \ 1 § / \ f \ ' •/ \" ... \ \ 110 100 90 80 70 ... —•* V" ... --. I k" \ i Fig. 62. — Decrease in death rate of children in District of Columbia following the enactment of the milk law of 1895. Dotted line shows average for five-year periods (four years from 1905-09). (From Brigham.) Commerce in milk has increased our dangers. densed form of milk, is a substitute for meat (see table of food analyses); and butter is a fat, supplying well the deficiency of the albuminous and starchy foods. For this reason it is so well liked with bread. All three of these major dairy products, especially milk and butter, are valuable in the preparation of many other articles of food. The nomads, such as the Kirghiz, who follow their flocks across the steppes and mountains of the southern part of Asiatic Russia, probably depend more upon milk and its products than any other people. Aside from these roving herds, milk production 1 The relationship between the condition of the milk supply and a high infant death rate is often astonishing. . THE ANIMAL INDUSTRIES 147 is at a low ebb in lands of little rainfall, or of summer drought, such as we find in California and the Mediterranean countries, because of the scarcity of grass. During the months of summer drought, the cost of supplying milk animals with green and suc- culent food is so great as to make milk relatively expensive and something of a luxury. The Butter Substitute of the Dry Sub-tropic Climate. — For- tunately, the Mediterranean climate furnishes a partial substitute in the fat of olive oil which is chemically almost exactly like the fat of butter and replaces it in the diet of the people of southern France, Italy, Asia Minor, and north Africa. It is said that every Spaniard eats from 20 to 25 pounds of olive oil per year, although the tree will grow on only half the area of the Kingdom. The Portugese produced about 14 pounds per capita in 1910 and the British imported about 10 pounds of butter per capita. In 1911, a year of unusual yield, this Greek oil output of 25 to 30 million gallons amounted to 80 or 90 pounds per capita. Many restaurants in American cities, run by people from the Mediter- ranean basin, serve good meals, satisfactory to the American taste, using olive oil entirely in place of butter. The small quantity of milk that is used, chiefly by children, in the olive-growing countries of Europe is largely supplied by goats which can live on a poorer and drier diet than is possible for the cow. Some varieties of milk goats in Mediterranean countries give a greater amount of milk in proportion to their weight and food consumed than does any other animal in the world. Furthermore, goat's milk is richer than cow's milk in both fat and solids. One of the characteristic street scenes in these countries is the milkman driving herds of goats through the street and milking them at the door of the customer, being able thus to guarantee the absolute freshness and purity of the milk. America has a territory where the olive tree and the cow com- pete. People from the eastern part of the United States, accustomed to an abundant supply of milk, have moved to southern California where the Mediterranean climate makes butter production more costly than in the moderate rainfall of the old home. The milk is expensive to produce and much butter is brought from the Mississippi Valley. Readjustment of consumption to geographic conditions is coming through 148 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY the discovery that the olive will grow there, and the growth and use of olive oil, the natural product of that climate, is increasing. Characteristics and Location of the Dairy Industry. — Dairying as an important industry depends entirely upon cow's milk. It has arisen in lands of moderate coolness where the rainfall is suffi- cient to make the succulent grass and other forage required by cows giving profitable quantities of milk. Owing to the bulk weight Less than 100-200 200-300 400-500 500-600 over 600 100 cows Fig. 63. — Milch cows in United States per 1000 inhabitants, by states, Jan. 1, 1912. (U. S. Dept. Agr.) Pop., 1910. and perishable nature of milk, it must be produced near to the market if it is to be consumed while fresh. The great demand for fresh milk in the vicinity of New York City has caused milk to be brought nearly 400 miles in special express trains, such as those running from Wayne Co., Pa., and from the banks of the St. Lawrence to New York City. This, however, is ex- ceptional, and it may be said that cows and dense population go together in United States and Northwest Europe. Thus New York, our empire state, leads all other states in its number of milch cows; and Pennsylvania, second in population, ranks high in milch cows. Fortunately for the supplying of distant localities there are methods of condensation and preservation of dairy prod- THE ANIMAL INDUSTRIES 149 iicts. That part of the milk which separates as cream can be condensed into butter and kept for weeks, or, in cold storage, for months; the milk can be converted into white fleecy curds and the "curds into cheese which keeps for months; and, by the processes called condensation and evaporation, along with hermetic sealing, milk can be reduced in bulk and canned so that it will keep for years. Thus, many parts of the world hitherto unaccustomed to dairy products have, since the development of world commerce, adopted their use. The West Indian planter opens tins of Danish butter in Jamaica or Porto Rico, while condensed milk is to be found in the uttermost ends of the world where it is too hot to produce and keep milk, as in Guiana, or too dry, as in Cape Colony, or too cold, as in Alaska, or too mountainous as in Rocky Mountain mining towns, or wherever camper, prospector, or lumberman pitches his tent or builds his shack. Recent Improvements in Manufacture. — Within a few decades great improvements have been made in the process of manu- facture of dairy products. Milk formerly required much labor and care in cooling. It had to be set away in shallow pans for a day or two before the cream could be skimmed off. Now a centrifugal separator takes the fresh milk as it comes from the cow, and by centrifugal force separates the cream into one vessel and the milk into another. The little hand churn of the kitchen is being used less and less as big, "steam-driven churns in the butter factory (creamery) make more and more of the butter of the world. Most of the cheese is now also made in factories rather than upon the farms of the people who keep the cows — another example in the long series of victories of the factory over home industry. Dairying and Intensification of Agriculture. — Dairying marks an important stage in the intensification of agriculture, which means increasing the income from a given piece of land. There are two ways by which a farmer may get more product. One is to take more land, the other to put more care and labor on the land he has. Where the population is sparse, little land is needed to produce the food, the price of land is low and the farmer can pay interest on its small value by cultivating a small part of it, and with a minimum amount of labor. Such 150 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY is the characteristic of new countries which are rarely dairy countries. The Great Plains of United States are an excellent illustration. There are millions of cows, but the available butter, milk, and cheese are inadequate for the use of the people. The cow with little care from her owner runs upon the great range, and the calf which drinks all of her milk may never be seen by the owner until the day he is branded or sold. The Red River Valley in Minnesota, Dakota, and Manitoba affords another example of extensive agriculture; this time in wheat. Wheat lands of low price make adequate returns with similar small labor, small expense, and low yield. In New York and other eastern states, on the other hand, the land is hilly, the farms are small, and the farmer cannot grow grain so cheaply as does his brother upon the flat lands of Dakota. His farm is so small and high priced that he cannot raise enough cattle to support him if he uses the method of the beef producer of the Plains. (See table of cattle in 1912.) But a few cows CATTLE, JANUARY i, 1912 Milch cows, thousands Other cattle, thousands Populous East: New Jersey 150 1,495 943 806 1,504 1,393 698 822 1,034 32 35 68 New York 894 Pennsylvania 627 North Central Dairy Belt: Michigan Wisconsin Iowa Cattle Fattening States: Kansas . 701 1,146 2,773 1,872 2,773 5,177 741 568 Missouri Texas Range States: Arizona Wyoming THE ANIMAL INDUSTRIES 151 eating his pasture grass, his hay, his corn fodder, and much of his grain will day by day produce enough milk to make him a comfortable income. Therefore, it comes about that New York having a market within reach leads all the other states in the CREANERIES.CIIEESE FACTORIES. SKIMMING SUfflONS&CONDENSERIES WISCONSIN. JANUARY 1910 ISSUED BY WISCONSIN AGRICULTURAL EXPERIMENT STATION ANDTHEWISCONSINDAIRYAND FOOD COMMISSION. tflC* SUPPLEMENTTOBULI.ETINNo.2IO. Fig. 64. — The distribution of an industry in a state with great variation of geographical conditions. Union in the number of cows and besides furnishing vast quan- tities of market milk, also ranks high in the manufacture of butter and condensed milk. These latter products concen- trated and easy to transport tend to come from locations some- 152 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY what remote from the large cities, and their production is moving westward and replacing the less intensive meat industry. Wisconsin, next to New York, is the leading dairy state, while Iowa, Illinois, and Dakota are steadily growing. This gain of the dairy over the meat industry is a result of high land value. The values of farm lands in the North Central States have in many districts doubled in the first ten years of the century. This is partly due to the high price of corn and partly due to speculation and a land boom. The farmer there now buys an expensive farm. If he keeps cattle and sells beef, he has diffi- culty in earning the interest on his investment. If he sends milk to the creamery or cheese factory, the cow will each year give an equal or greater value in milk than does the bullock in meat at the end of his two or three years of life, and the meat producer eats as much as the milk producer. Thus, the greater intensity of milk production causes it to displace meat produc- tion and the table of cattle in 1912 shows an interesting and suggestive change in ratio of dairy to other cattle as we go west. In dairying the farm becomes a kind of factory, using its own raw materials. A thousand dollars, worth of hay, corn, and bran may with little labor be turned into $1,400 worth of beef or into $2,500 worth of milk by the much greater amount of labor re- quired in the care and daily milking of a herd of 20 or 30 cows. This often doubles or trebles the number of families living on the same farm and enables dairy districts to support a larger population than meat- or grain-selling districts. Farmers in some parts of North Dakota have been driven into the dairy business because the Canada thistle choked out the wheat crop and broke up bonanza wheat growing or one-crop farming. This proved to be an economic blessing in disguise. The farmers were compelled to rotate crops (which killed out the thistle) and, instead of wheat, to raise forage crops and then keep cows to dispose of the product. This intensification of production in- creased the farm income and raised land value from $15 per acre as wheat farms to $25 per acre as dairy farms. Wisconsin and the lower peninsula of Michigan developed a dependence upon dairy products earlier and to a greater degree than the states of the corn belt proper because their land is not quite so well situated for corn, and therefore the people have been THE ANIMAL INDUSTRIES 153 compelled to turn earlier from grain growing and make their land profitable by other means, such as potato growing and dairying. In Wisconsin, the State University has, through its school of agriculture, given a conspicuous aid to the dairy in- dustry by investigations, lectures, bulletins, and class-room I Denmark 30.1 Russia 18.6 Netherlands 11.0 Australia 10.0 France 7.7 Sweden 6.7 New Zealand 5.2 Finland 3.9 All others C.8 Million Pounds 196.0 120.6 71.4 64.9 49.9 43.4 33.0 25.5 44.2 Total 649.8 Fig. 65. — World export of butter, three-year average, 1908-10. Percentage "|* Million Pounds Canada 34.8 Netherlands 23.8 Switzerland 13.4 Italy 9.4 New Zealand 8.2 France 5.2 All others 5.3 48.4 42.3 27.0 Total 513.7 Fig. 66. — World export of cheese, three-year average, 1908-10. work. It has thus spread among farmers knowledge of the most scientific and profitable methods of dairying, and it has been an important force in bringing the state toward leadership in this industry. In 1909 there were 2,969 creameries and cheese factories. 154 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY Canadian Dairying. — That part of Canada lying between Lake Huron, the city of Quebec and the American boundary, comprising the populous parts of Ontario and Quebec, is like Wisconsin and New York in its inability to compete with the. level West as a grower of either corn or small grain. Conse- quently the people have long since turned to dairying and have reached a high degree of success. The provinces of Ontario and Quebec have more than 4,000 factories where butter and cheese, especially cheese, are manufactured. Great care is taken to maintain the high quality of the product, and it is con- sequently much esteemed in Great Britain, whither four-fifths of the cheese goes, making up half of the British import of that article. Canadian competition, together with inferior quality and bad repute of American cheese, has greatly lessened the export of the American product. INTERNATIONAL TRADE IN DAIRY PRODUCTS (1910) Exports Imports Country Butter, million pounds Cheese, million pounds Country Butter, million pounds Cheese, million pounds Argentina 6 88 73 4 195 25 124 54 73 8 48 51 181 5 30 122 57 69 3 9 13 5 4 11 93 31 New Zealand. . . . Canada Austria Hungary Brazil 13 3 Denmark Finland Russia France British S. Africa. France Germany Italy 5 49 46 15 Holland Italy United Kingdom United States. . . . 11 477 6 268 44. Switzerland United States. . . . 3 The fact that dairying is an industry of intensive agriculture to which America has not largely attained is shown by the in- THE ANIMAL INDUSTRIES 155 significance (the net absence) of our exports in comparison to such countries as Sweden, Holland, and Denmark. Dairying in Northwestern Europe. — Northwestern Europe with its fertile soil, cool humid climate, and dense population, has every requirement for a great dairy region and the scarcity of meat causes cheese to be used far more than in meat-eating America. Two hundred and forty-two kinds of cheese, most of them European, are recorded in a U. S. Department of Agri- culture Bulletin. The European demand for cheese and butter is so great that Canada and other parts of the world must supplement the enormous home production. England and Wales — an area smaller than Missouri, but with a population about a third that of the United States — consume in fresh form a large part of the milk that can be produced at home. Ireland, on the other hand, with a sparser population and a better grass supply, because of the moister climate, is too far away to send milk to England, but sends large quantities of butter to help supply the huge demands of the English people with whom bread and butter is an important article of diet. Consequently the British import more butter and cheese than any other half dozen nations (see table of international trade in dairy products). An important source of supply is the great continental dairy belt which stretches along the northern plain of Europe from western France to Denmark, Sweden, and Russia. Through- out this whole belt the farms are small, and the rural popula- tion is dense, and while grain-growing is practised on most of the farms, the keeping of dairy cows is also exceedingly common. The north of France makes much excellent butter that goes to the great capitals of London and Paris. The Channel Islands between England and France, with daily steamers to London, have so long been important dairy centers that each of them, Alderney, Jersey, and Guernsey, has given its name to a breed of dairy cattle now widely scattered throughout the world. The town of Camembert in Normandy has given its name to a well-known brand of cheese and in the south of France is the town of Roquefort, where for generations the peasants have handed down from father to son the art of making from sheep's milk their famous cheese which is ripened in stone caverns deep under the ground. 156 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY Holland has been famed for its cattle since the days of Julius Caesar. Meadows, which the Dutchman has won from the sea by pumping out the water, are made of the rich mud that the Rhine has brought down from the fertile highlands of central Europe. These moist, rich lands, too wet for tillage, make pastures of great richness. Here drainage ditches separate from each other the little green fields, dotted with feed boxes from which the black and white cows eat bran and grains imported from America. By this means farmers increase the number of cows they can keep. In damp and cloudy weather the cows are blanketed in the pastures (U. S. Con. Rep., Jan. 16, 1911). These richly fed and carefully tended herds of the well-known Frisian or Holstein breed give vast quantities of milk which makes dairy products the chief of all the farm products of well- tilled little Holland. The Dutch make 24 pounds of butter per capita per year. This is several pounds more than we make in the United States, but the Dutch being poorer eat less of it per capita than we do. Their cheese output exceeds that of butter. The town of Edam, west of the Zuyder Zee, has given its name to a kind of cheese produced largely in that part of Holland, and, along with other Dutch brands, it goes to England, to the United States, and even to South Africa and many other countries where the fame of Dutch cheeses has spread. Sweet butter also goes in large quantities to England, but in the production of this commodity Denmark is the teacher of the world. That little country, about half the size of Maine, is visited by the agricultural scientists of all the world who would learn in its best form the art of dairying. Forty years ago she was a meat exporter to Great Britain, but the demand for more products has turned this democratic kingdom into a vast dairy farm. The Danish peasant owns a farm of from five to twenty- five. acres. The land is usually sandy and was originally infertile but has become rich by good care and imported fertility in the form of cow foods. More than half of the surface of the land tilled is in oats, hay, grass, and root crops to feed the cows. The increase of land used for forage has encroached upon the grain fields until there is not wheat land enough for bread. The harvest of 1910 was valued at 147 million dollars; of this 44 mil- lion was root crops (largely cattle food) and 62 million grain (largely THE ANIMAL INDUSTRIES 157 oats and barley for cattle). There is in addition considerable import of grain and grain products from America and Argentine Republic to feed their cows. As a result, Denmark with a poorer soil rivals Holland in having more farm animals for its area than any other country of the world; there are more than a thousand factories for making butter; the cows are inspected once a month to insure healthy stock; and the dread disease of tuberculosis, so common among housed cattle of the entire world, has been entirely stamped out of the kingdom of Denmark. Over $50,000,000 worth of butter is sent each year to Great Britain alone. The price received for his product by the Danish dairy farmer is less than that received by the British farmer, who sends milk to the city populations near at hand. This difference in price for milk for the two purposes is common in most dairy districts. Through careful catering to the demands of the market, Danish butter preserved in tin cans has become the standard article for consumption in the tropics and in all the remote corners of the globe where there is no local supply. The southern parts of Sweden, which are not far from Denmark, have also recently learned the art of making good butter; and the country, which in 1870 was a butter importer, is rapidly increasing its butter exports to Great Britain, over $6,000,000 worth being shipped there annually. i The Intensity of European Dairy Farming. — Dairying is also carried on to a very large extent in northern and western Ger- many, but the large population consumes the entire product despite the fact that dairying here, as in France and other north- ern European countries, is carried on in its most intensive form with the cows kept in barns and food brought to them. In such a dairy district near Cologne, farm lands are worth $400 to $680 per acre (U. S. Con. Rep., May 12, 1911). Switzerland has an interesting and unique dairy industry. Relatively large areas of land upon the high mountains, habit- able only in summer, produce an abundance of rich grass as the melting snow recedes and lets sunshine upon the satu- rated earth. The villagers of the valleys take their herds of cows to the higher pastures in summer and, because of the distance, stay with them through the whole season, spending the nights in little huts that have been built for the purpose. At intervals 158 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY members of their families bring up the necessary supplies and take away the accumulations of cheese and butter which the herders have produced. On the lower slopes of the Alps the water from snow field and glacier is often conducted out over the fields to fertilize and irrigate the grass for winter hay. As a result of this careful industry, Switzerland is an exporter of Fig. 67. — Italian woman carrying fresh grass from field to farm animals — a common scene in densely peopled lands. good cheese, Neufchatel being one of the best-known brands. She also sells nearly $2 per capita per year of condensed milk, some of it going to Canada, England, and India. Milk is also an important factor in the manufacture of milk-chocolate, in which Switzerland (like Holland) is important, sending abroad annually about three-fourths of the total product, valued at $10,000,000. THE ANIMAL INDUSTRIES 159 In Italy we come to the land of summer drought where com- mercial dairying is in the main limited to the irrigated lands of the Po Valley. The Alpine streams furnish water for the succulent pastures and hay crops which are responsible for the few brands of Italian cheeses that are well known in many countries of the world. One of these, the Parmesan cheese, is made of goat's milk. Cheaper cheeses are imported into Italy to feed her own people just as the Dutch and Danes import oleomargarine from Chicago for their own use and sell the butter that they make. Oleomargarine, a butter substitute, has virtually the same chemical analysis as butter. Being made chiefly from suet (body fat of beef) the possibilities of cleanliness of manufacture are ahead of those in butter. The opposition to its sale arises from the fact that it is sold at a fictitious value under a false name. The comparison of dairy exports (see table) from the United States — vast, rich, and agricultural — and from mountainous and populous little Switzerland, with half her used land in hay, is striking even in absolute quantities (U. S. Con. Rep., July 8, 1911). On the per capita basis, Swiss cheese and milk exports exceed the entire exports of the United States in grain and grain products, animals and animal products. Thus the Schweit- zer, like the Dane, makes the most of his limited opportunities and the American, with more resources, does not have to refine them so closely. It is evident that commercial dairying depends more on the distribution of laborers (density of agricultural population) than on resources — another example of production in a place not best fitted for it. In dairy possibilities America greatly exceeds Europe. America's greatest superiority over Europe as a place for the production of dairy products is the priceless boon of corn, the king of forage crops for which the people of all European dairy regions must substitute the laboriously produced beets and other root crops and the less productive barley. The American cotton belt has even better dairy possibilities than the corn belt, but it imports from glaciated Wisconsin. Australasia and Refrigeration. — The refrigerator ship which has revolutionized the meat supply has made possible the importation of butter and cheese from the most remote countries. 160 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY Thus New Zealand, which is almost exactly on the opposite side of the world from Great Britain, has become an important source of supply. That country, nearly as large as Italy, has a splendid rainfall owing to the prevalence of the constant west winds, from off the great southern seas. The Government has taken great pains to inspect and guarantee the quality of exports with the result that New Zealand butter and cheese stand well in European markets. In 1910, 85 million dollars of exports out of a total of 1 10 million were animal products, chiefly wool, meat, butter, cheese and skins, while other agricultural products were but 3 per cent, as valuable. Australia, being further north, and out of the latitude of steady rains, has her produc- tion of dairy products sadly interfered with by the droughts. Consequently the industry, less important than in New Zealand, is chiefly limited to Victoria, the most southerly, the coolest, and rainiest part of a warm dry continent. The Argentine Republic. — The Argentine Republic shows by its enormous exports of cattle and beef that it might also pro- duce milk and other dairy products, but thus far the industry has made but a small beginning. There are several reasons for this condition. One is that it takes great care to make good butter and cheese in a warm climate. The sparse popula- tion of this new country does not furnish the labor which such intensity of agriculture as dairying demands, and the labor supply in Argentina has not yet developed a propensity for that class of work. Dairying of all the great agricultural industries is the most exacting in its labor requirements. The cow must be milked morning and evening the year around; she must be treated gently; the product and utensils must be kept clean. These qualities have been developed chiefly in connection with the keeping of cattle by the Teutonic peoples from north Europe. The Spanish and Italians who make up the bulk of the popula- tion of the Argentine Republic have not had the ancestral training at keeping cattle, but doubtless they can create a new source of dairy products in the southern hemisphere, because the steadily rising price indicates that new sources of supply are needed and Argentina has the resources. Possible Extension of Dairy Areas. — The keeping of milk prod- THE ANIMAL INDUSTRIES 161 ucts without ice or cold spring water is so difficult that people in most warm climates were virtually unable to make good butter or cheese before the recent improvements in dairy ma- chinery and artificial cooling. Now that the steam engine can make ice and a cold room anywhere, the tropics or the cotton belt of the United States can, so fai as climate is concerned, compete on an equal footing with Wisconsin or Switzerland. It requires a large number of cows, 200 to 500, to support a creamery with cold storage attachment. This number is, however, merely the normal number for a modern creamery and the way is now open for the geographic extension of dairying. At the present time it is an industry unnecessarily restricted to the cooler parts of the world. It may become common for the warm lands rather than exceptional, as is the present export of goat butter from the green island of Sokotra across the straits to the arid mainland of Arabia (U. S. Con. Rep., July 16, 1911). In many parts of China and Japan dairying is almost unknown- for reasons made evident in the section on meat and cattle. 7. DAIRY SUBSTITUTES The tropic development in the direction of dairy foods has been almost nil because of the heat. For foods of similar sort it is, however, a land of great promise if we content ourselves with substitutes, for the production of which it is after all prob- ably better fitted than for the production of dairy products themselves. Butter and cheese are but digestible fat and pro- tein (see table of food analysis). Many vegetable oils furnish very similar fat and there are many cheaper proteins than that in cheese. The oil of the olive has been an age-long peer of butter. Cotton-seed oil is now used as a substitute for olive oil, for butter and for pork fat, and its use has spread so rapidly that in fifteen years its price increased fourfold despite a doubled output. 1 Even more promising rivals for dairy prod- ucts are found in the oily cocoanut and the nutritious peanut. These two little-used plant products have recently made a 1 The United States consul at Stavanger, Norway, says that nine-tenths of the population eat oleomargarine instead of butter. The butter price is thirty-five cents per pound and the cotton-seed oil for the margarine costs seyen anc} pne-half cents with a rapidly increasing import. 162 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY late start on a career of usefulness that is exceedingly suggestive and carries the possibility of a partial revolution in food supply and production. Nearly half of the meat of the coconut is fat or oil, and the nut has the quality unusual among oily vegetables of keeping for many months without becoming rancid. The recent rise in the price of animals has caused the price of lard to nearly double, made its substitute, cotton-seed oil, advance in price, and caused increased attention to be given to the coconut as a source of food fat. A firm in Mannheim, Germany (U. S. Con. Rep., Feb. 15, 1909;' Jan. 14, 1910), has put upon the market "Pal- mira," a hard snow-white vegetable cooking fat made from coprah (dried coconut meats) and practically 100 per cent, pure fat. None of the rival animal fats (margarine, butter, lard, goose grease, etc.) contains less than 7 to 10 per cent, of water. "The product has found such favor that the product can scarcely keep up with the demand" and the output of the factory increased in a few years from 700,000 to over 21 million pounds per year. To make it spread like table butter, small quantities of egg-yolk and water are worked in, this product being called "Palmona." In Austria, Holland, and England the same substitution is taking place. Coconuts are imported through Hamburg and taken in boatloads up the Elbe to Bohemia, where the oil is pressed out and mixed with a small proportion of egg-yolk and cream and sold for fourteen cents per pound in competition with butter at from thirty-one cents to forty-one cents per pound. It is difficult to estimate the importance of such a food supply to a population whose adult laborers get from forty to seventy-five cents per day. The output of European mar- garine factories using coconut oil as a base is put at 16 mil- lion pounds per week, an amount that already exceeds the total European import of butter (U. S. Con. Rep., May 4, 1912). Owing to these facts "the market price of coconut oil has increased enormously and the world is being searched for addi- tional supplies of coconuts" (U. S. Con. Rep., Sept. 25, 1910; Jan. 14, 1911). The world will have little difficulty in finding the coconuts. It can find them much more easily than it can find more butter because of the great extent of THE ANIMAL INDUSTRIES 163 unused land on nearly all tropic continents and islands suited to the coconut palm and the ease of producing a product that falls from the tree and lies for weeks embedded in its thick cushion of husk waiting to be picked up. In some places, ten nuts is the annual average per tree; 4,000 to 7,000 nuts make a ton of coprah, now worth $120 per ton and yielding 100 gallons of oil. During the four years, 1906-09, the Philippine Islands produced 800,000 tons of coprah; the rapidly increasing output is an important element in the economic life of the islands, and gives promise of becoming more important there and else- where. A single Liverpool firm is investing $5,000,000 in west African coconut plantations. The peanut may be considered as a partner of the coconut in this vegetable onslaught on the animal industries. While the coconut is a substitute for butter and other fats, the peanut (see its content in table of food values) is a substitute for butter, cheese, and meat. Taken together, these two nuts form an admirable example of the shift from animals to plants as source of food supply (a step toward easy support of larger popula- tions) and also a shift of support from cool to warmer lands. The peanut, so little appreciated in the past, is really one of the most excellent of foods, when judged by its nutrition value. It is nearly as nutritious as cheese, contains per pound more protein than a pound of sirloin steak, plus more carbohydrate than a pound of potatoes, plus one-third as much fat as a pound of butter. Excluding shells it has more nourishment than a pound of sirloin steak and a pound of white bread combined. This unusual food now costs five or six cents per pound by the sack, keeps without deterioration for years — in strong contrast to dairy products and meat. Now that we are in a period when rising prices force us to look about for new supplies it is not surprising to find the peanut entering into our diet in many ways. In Europe its chief use is in the form of edible oil wholesaling at eight cents per pound — a substitute for lard, butter and olive oil, for which it is now the most prized substitute. The nut also is coming into dietary use in various forms. The fact that the plant is at home from latitude 37° north, clear into the south temperate zone shows its wide range of soil and climate and great possibilities 164 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY of production when compared to any of the staples thus far discussed. It has long been an important money crop in that part of the sandy Atlantic plain lying near the Virginia-North Carolina boundary. It is grown in Argentina, Brazil and Costa Rica. It is the chief export of the French and English colonies of Senegal and Gambia in west Africa, and is also exported from Madagascar, east Africa, India, Japan, and China, both north and south, It is one of the few products that is produced and exported by the white, black, yellow, and brown races. 1 The total product of the United States reaches 12 million bushels; the import, despite duty against it, is one-fifth of a pound per person (1911), and the American growers have been complaining bitterly of the competition of their Indian rivals. The export of peanuts ($6,500,000) from Madras in 1910 was more valuable than the wheat exports during the same year from any port in United States except New York. As population, land values, and cost of living steadily rise in the cool temperate zone, the pressure comes most keenly on the animal products because of the large amounts of land required by the animals. It is a decidedly comforting thought to recog- nize such satisfactory substitutes in the palm and peanut which so nearly furnish diet equivalents and are so well suited to the vast areas of the fruitful tropics and to growth by the native populations already inhabiting those lands. These two plants are merely members of a class. The soy bean, so promising in American agriculture, has 18 per cent, oil, which has long been an important fat food for the Japanese. At $1.50 per bushel, the American price (1912), the 10 pounds of oil is far cheaper than butter. The sunflower seed has 30 per cent, of oil, also edible, and from Nigeria some reports of vast amounts of oily nuts of the shea tree which promptly begin to be exported by thousands of tons as soon as the railways open up new districts. This is prized as a butter material by the people of the interior, as is the palm nut of the coasts, and like it promises quickly to enter commerce. In Sierra Leone, palm-nut ship- 1 Being able to wait Ion g for rain and grow when it comes the peanut has sprung into sudden usefulness in the semi-arid districts of the Mississippi Valley. The fact that it can be harvested by the pigs adds to its importance. THE ANIMAL INDUSTRIES 165 ments have doubled in five years and furnish two-thirds of the total export of $5,000,000. The fact that we get all these pro- ducts without the care of the intervening beast as in butter and cheese is of great importance in considering the food possibilities. 8. SHEEP AND OTHER WOOL BEARERS It is generally thought that our ancestors found the sheep upon the mountains of central Asia, a mottled animal of black, white, and brown, whose pelt has made us the best of all protections against the cold and aided our advance into the land of frost and snow. To this day millions of Asiatics in the interior of that continent protect themselves from the bitterness of winter with sheepskin coats and caps, and history contains no record of the origin of cloth making, so remote was its beginning. For many ages before the coming of cheap cotton (about 1800) (see chapter on textiles), woolen cloth was the chief clothing material in the temperate zone, and sheep were much more universally kept than they now are. In the springtime their winter coats were shorn to serve their masters the next year, and lamb flesh had been prized long before it was prescribed in Hebrew Law as an offering to Diety. The Old Testament shows that sheep were of great importance to the peoples at the eastern end of the Mediterranean Sea and they were but little less important to the early Greeks, Romans, and the barbarians who overwhelmed the Roman Empire. Sheep Breeding in Britain. — For several centuries both before and after the discovery of America the export of wool from England was the great basis of foreign trade in that country. The island location gave it security from foreign invasions, and peace led to the internal order which is necessary for the satis- factory development of sheep flocks. People may return from war and find their cattle, but sheep, weak, defenseless, stupid, subject to disease, the easy prey to accident, dogs, and thieves, need constant care. Thus it came about that England, the most peaceful country of Europe, had a relative monopoly in wool and it has developed most of the important breeds of sheep. English pastures are among the best in Europe. 166 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY The names of the breeds show their British origin — as Lincoln, Dorset, Southdowns, Hampshiredowns, Oxforddowns, Leicester- shire, and Highland sheep. The judges of the highest English court have for centuries sat upon a wool sack — symbol of the commercial importance of that commodity. The best breed of sheep for wool production, however, is the merino, a breed Fig. 68. — By artificial selection for one quality some strains of Merino sheep have become racks for wrinkly skins, and every wrinkle covered with fine wool until the sheep is almost blinded by it. developed on the high plateau of Spain from sheep whose ances- tors originally came from Africa. This sheep, famed for its wool, was jealously guarded by the Spanish and for centuries they would not let any of them leave their country, but during the eighteenth century they spread to Germany, France, Eng- land, and America. Factors Affecting the Distribution of Sheep Industry. — Before the beginning of the railway epoch, sheep were distributed upon THE ANIMAL INDUSTRIES 167 the farms of Europe and America, and most countries were nearly self-supporting with regard to supplies of wool and mutton. But the period of world settlement and world commerce following the railway and steamship about 1850 led to an entire revolution in the sheep and wool situation of the world. A sheep industry on the largest scale that has ever been or is ever likely to be seen, resulted from the throwing open of large areas of land in North and South America, Africa, Australia, and central Asia which could.be best used as sheep ranges. Probably because of mountain ancestry, the sheep is a good climber for rough pastures, and a good traveller. He can go far for his food and water or to market. His sharp nose enables him to reach into the crannies of rocks for scanty herbage. Al- together he is well fitted for the utilization of land not fit for the plow, and regions with greatest dependence upon sheep are those parts of the earth's surface which for some reason are not thus available for cultivation. It may be that the land is too rough and too wet, as in the Scotch Highlands with their heavy rains. These hills would naturally be covered with luxuriant forests, but are entirely barren of trees because for centuries sheep ranged the forests and ate every young tree that came up until finally when the old trees died, the land was left for grass and heather upon which the sheep flocks have in some cases subsisted for several centuries. Similarly, certain hills in the south of England bear to this day the names of forests, although for many generations they have been treeless pasture lands devoted to sheep flocks. Thus, Cotswold (meaning wood) Hills long ago gave their name to a breed of sheep. Semi-aridity, however, is the greatest reason why land is devoted to pasturage of sheep rather than to cultivation in grain and other crops. Thus, the plateaus of dry Spain have been famous for sheep since the times of Hannibal and of Caesar, and, although the fine-wooled merino breed originated there, most of the Spanish flocks are those yielding coarse wool. The greatest flocks in the world are upon such semi-arid plains in Australia, Argentina, and western United States, yet the fact that some of these lands are hot, and do not naturally suit the sheep, is another illustration of an industry in a place that is not best 168 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY suited to it. The sheep with his warm coat is equipped for cold climates; the fleece degenerates in hot lands, the wool entirely- disappearing in Cuba and Brazil, leaving only the hair coat of which all sheep possess a little. In Australia, the tendency to degeneration because of heat has been overcome by the constant importation of fresh breeding stock from England, Vermont and other localities where the sheep is at his best. NUMBERS OF SHEEP (191 1) (From Year-booh of Agriculture, 1911). Semi-arid countries: Millions Australia 92.4 Brit. South Africa 30.7 Algeria 9 . Spain 15.1 Italy 11.2 Greece 4.6 Turkey ,6.9 Asiatic Turkey 45 . Asiatic Russia 38 . Chile 3.6 Mexico 3.4 Countries partly semi-arid: United States 52.8 Argentina 67 . 2 Russia 47 . Countries of scanty population, good rainfall and remote from markets: Uruguay 26.3 New Zealand 24. Countries with highly developed agriculture: France 17 . 1 Germany 7.7 United Kingdom 30 . 5 Belgium .2 Denmark .7 Switzerland .- .2 Total of the World 615.2 Value of Sheep to Regions Remote from Markets. — A third reason why land may be devoted only to sheep is its inacces- sibility for the marketing of the heavy and less valuable prod- ucts of agriculture in which transportation costs must be THE ANIMAL INDUSTRIES 169 relatively high. Grain requires a railroad close at hand. Cattle, unless their meat can be marketed, have nothing to yield but the hide and tallow which is relatively of less value than the fleeces, skins, and tallow of sheep. Consequently, sheep flocks give the people of remote plains the greatest possible cash in- come, and the opening of new lands between 1850 and 1890 caused an enormous increase in the number of sheep throughout the whole world. The Falkland Islands afford an excellent illustration of the service of sheep to the people of a remote land. This group of islands, more than half as large as Maryland, is located in the South Atlantic Ocean opposite Cape Horn in a latitude corre- sponding to southern Alaska and Scotland. The rainfall of the islands is good, but the climate is cool and there is no tillage be- cause the prevailing westerly winds of that latitude blow so hard that even trees cannot live because they are blown out of the ground. Yet these windy plains and hills produce good grass and each of the 2,200 inhabitants who give Falkland a population of one-third of a person per square mile, owns, on the average, one horse, two cattle, and 300 sheep. The non-perishable wool, skins and tallow, of the sheep, comprising practically the entire exports of the islands, enable the people to command the goods of all the world, to become well educated, and to receive a heavier mail than the people of any other land. It requires a very small population to utilize the land in this way and as a result, the people are so scattered upon their large sheep ranches that the public school masters must travel from ranch to ranch to teach the children in their homes. The Islands of Faroe and Iceland in similar but northern latitudes also have a similar dependence upon the export of sheep products. Importance of Sheep in South Temperate Zone. — The south temperate zone with its large plains in South America, South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand, is the part of the world having the greatest dependence upon sheep. This zone, with less than 11/2 per cent, of the world's people, has about 40 per cent, of its sheep. Taking the world over, there is about one sheep to two and two-thirds persons, but in the south temperate zone which combines the qualities of remoteness, semi-aridity, and sparse population, there are ten sheep per person. 170 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY Upon the plains of these countries as upon other great sheep- growing plains, there is a special method of caring for the sheep. Owing to the defenseless character of these stupid animals they require constant care and may not be allowed to shift for them- selves as do cattle. In all regions of large sheep production the method of caring for them is much the same. The herder with a couple of dogs takes a flock of two or three thousand sheep and follows them for days and weeks, being met at appointed places by supply wagons sent out by his employer. The sheep dogs, with the inherited qualities of many generations, are much more skillful helpers in driving them than men could be, and the herder's rifle protects from wolves, foxes, and dogs, while the flocks are commonly put into corrals or fenced enclosures at night. Australia has long been known as the greatest of sheep countries and the leader of wool exporters. That continent, which is about as large as the United States, has a mountain barrier par- allel to the eastern coast which shuts off from the interior most of the rain brought by the southeast trade winds. The narrow plain along the coast is good for corn and other agricultural crops requiring moisture, but west of the mountains the wide expanses of plain that slope gently away from the sea have too little rain- fall for the cultivation of crops but enough to produce good grass. Some of the finest sheep ranges in the world lie between these mountains and the grassless desert which occupies the central and western part of the continent. The railroads that connect the ranches with the eastern ports reach almost to the desert and all the land that has any value has for some decades been occupied by the sheep flocks. Australia is unfortunate in the arid nature of much of her territory and also in the irregular character of the rainfall. Droughts sometimes last for long periods, cutting off both grass and water so that the sheep starve by millions, as in the period 1894 to 1898 when continued drought reduced the sheep flocks from 110 million to 84 million. The great depend- ence of the flocks upon rainfall and rainfall fluctuations is shown by the observations of a scientist 1 who says that with 10 inches of rainfall per year, an Australian plain will support ten sheep per square mile; with 13 inches of rain, twenty sheep; and with 1 See Hann: Hand-book of Climatology, translated by Ward. THE ANIMAL INDUSTRIES 171 20 inches of rain, seventy sheep. With less than 10 inches of rainfall, the land is of no value even for pasturage. New South Wales possesses more than half the sheep of Aus- tralia, while Queensland, further north (nearer the torrid zone) has more rain and heat and better forage, and, therefore, a pre- dominance of cattle over sheep, since they can stand heat and moisture better than sheep, and require better pasture. South of New South Wales is Victoria which lies far enough from the equator to be in the region of prevailing westerly winds and gets more rain than New South Wales, and has better pastures but only one-quarter as many sheep. Because of the superiority of the Victorian pasture in a cool climate the farmers have enough grass to keep cows and make butter, of which much more is exported than is exported from the United States (see table of dairy products). The market for the butter, as for the frozen beef of Queensland and frozen mutton of New South Wales, is almost entirely in the mother country, Great Britain. The wool is more widely distributed, but a large part of it also goes to the United Kingdom. New Zealand. — New Zealand, further south than Australia, with the good rainfall of the prevailing westerlies, is an excellent sheep country, and is largely given over to that industry. Some of the mountain pastures upon the western coast of New Zealand, very wet from exposure to the sea winds, have such splendid grass that they will support five sheep per acre through- out the year. These mountains make the eastern side of that island drier, and thus cause the Canterbury plain on the east, the best stretch of arable land on the islands, to be largely used for wheat growing; but owing to the sparse population, less than a million people in a good grazing territory as large as New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania, agriculture cannot be very much developed and the 23 million sheep and 2 million cattle are the chief wealth of the country. There are 5,000 ranches of over 1,000 acres each and the newness of the country is shown by the fact that between the years 1891 and 1901 the occupied land increased from 20 to 27 million acres, and the latter figure is less than half the total area., The good pasture and regular food supply of New Zealand causes the frozen mutton of that country to be considered the best that is imported into England. The 172 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY sheep are often fattened by being turned into large fields of tur- nips from which they first eat the tops and then the entire root, and it is said that mutton can be produced at a cost of three cents a pound. Argentina and Uruguay. — The sheep district that most closely resembles Australia in character and rivals it in importance is the La Plata (the English call it Plate) or Parana Valley of South America comprising the most of the Argentine Republic and the little country of Uruguay. Here, as in interior Australia and in western United States, is a level plain of vast extent. For hundreds of miles it seems as level as the sea. One railroad runs westward on a perfectly straight line for 278 miles, a distance greater than from New York to Washington. Near the Parana River, the rainfall is sufficient for the growth of corn, wheat and flax, but as the distance from the river increases, the rainfall decreases, and, as in the region beyond the Missouri River, a corn belt is followed by a wheat belt and the zone of farm lands is succeeded by a zone of ranch lands in which the industrial future must, like the present and the past, be devoted to roving flocks. Forty or fifty years ago, when there was a great demand for haircloth, herds of horses valued at $2.50 each were driven into pens twice a year by their owners to have their manes and tails clipped to furnish horse hair for the crinoline looms in Eng- land and France. Then came the merino sheep, whose wool and tallow, skin and bone also went to Europe, while his meat was thrown away because there was no possible market for it. Then came the refrigerator ship and the export of mutton. The pastures of the Parana Valley are so fine that the sheep fatten entirely on grass, which is uncommon. It is interesting that the present vast sheep flocks of Argentina are very largely owned and cared for by English and Scotch people, who for many generations in their own countries have been thoroughly acquainted with sheep and know their ills, their wants and their ways. The cattle, requiring less care, are usually owned by the people of Spanish descent and cared for by the Guacho or half-breed Indian-Spanish cowboy of that country. In northern Argentina, the greater heat and rainfall make cattle more important than sheep, and toward the cold south the plains of Patagonia, a little known region, are being rapidly THE ANIMAL INDUSTRIES 173 taken up as sheep ranges, often by young men of British stock from the Falkland Islands who are accustomed to sheep herding and to life on the cold plains. Sheep farms have been established on the far away island of Terra del Fuego, at the extreme end of South America, the sheep being better able to live in this country than cattle since their wool protects them from the severity of the winter; they will scratch away the snow to get at the grass that lies beneath it, and, if necessary, they can fast for several days when the. snow lies too deep. Sheep per Square Mile. Ohio ■i au United States ■ 14 Uruguay United 365 Kingdom France ■ 81 ■ 79 Asiatic 64 Argentina 61 Union of South Africa —■ 61 Australia ■131 European Russia ■ 25 British India ■ 15 - Asiatic Russia 4 Sheep per 1000 Population. ■ 770 Fig. 69. — Ratio of sheep to land and to population, in leading countries. Uruguay, across the Parana River, from the best part of the Argentine Republic, is from end to end an undulating grassy plain. There are a few grain growers near Montevideo, the capital, but twenty-five times as much land is devoted to sheep and cattle pastures. The number of sheep doubled between 1880 and 1900 and their products make up the great bulk of the exports of the country. ' South Africa.— South Africa is the third among wool-exporting regions. Like Australia, this region has mountains near the ocean which shut off the southeast trade winds from the interior, leaving a moist plain near the sea for agriculture and cattle 174 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY raising. Back of the mountains is a wide expanse of interior, too dry for the plow, and where the climate and the pasture con- ditions are suited to sheep where not too dry for pasturage, as in the Kalahari desert, which corresponds to the central desert of Australia. Western United States. — The plains of the United States have not been at any time so exclusively devoted to sheep raising as have similar parts of Australia and the Argentine Republic, because the vigorous and hostile Indians held the American plains against the advance of the white man until the railroads came. Then cattle could be sent to market, and the sheep- growing and wool-exporting stage so common in the Southern Hemisphere was less necessary. The first industry of our West was the rounding up of cattle on the plains by the cowboy. Sheep herding came later and has had large development, es- pecially in Montana, New Mexico, Utah, and Oregon. The sheep usually roams on Government land, an open, unfenced range where the grass belongs to any beast that eats it. The sheep eat it more closely than cattle do, leaving nothing behind them for the cattle, and often destroy the grass itself by pulling it up by the roots. A bitter animosity between the sheep owners and cattle owners has resulted, sometimes leading to fights involving loss of human life and the destruction of herds of sheep and cattle. Wool Sheep, Mutton Sheep, and Refrigeration. — In the newer quarters of the world, the earliest object of sheep keeping was the production and sale of fine wool, for which the merino is the best breed of sheep. By careful breeding and selection through many centuries it has been developed into a little bony animal, with a wrinkly skin, thereby furnishing for a minimum of food a maximum amount of surface covered with a long, fine fleece which has at times been known to comprise with the grease 36 per cent, of the weight of the entire animal and have 48,000 strands per square inch of skin. In the decade between 1880 and 1890, the perfection of cold storage and refrigeration suddenly caused a demand for mutton at Buenos Ayres, at Wellington, New Zealand, at Melbourne and Sidney, Australia, as well as at Chicago, Kansas City, and Omaha. The rising price of meat since 1900 has emphasized THE ANIMAL INDUSTRIES 175 that demand and made the carcass, more valuable by far than the fleece. The merino sheep, with his excellent fleece, had no plump fat carcass, while the mutton-loving English had carefully- bred and selected the Lincolnshire and the Southdown and other breeds for the ability to grow large and fat and make fine mutton, regardless of their coarse and meagre wool. The refrigerator ship suddenly made the big, fat sheep more valuable in the Argen- tine Republic, Montana, and Australia than was the little merino with its fine fleece. As a result, the sheep breeders at once began cross breeding their flocks for mutton rather than wool, 100-500 500-1000 Less than 100 sheep Fig 70 — Sheep in United States per 1000 population, by states, Jan. 1, 1912. Pop., 1910. and in a little while the sheep were half Lincolnshire, then three- quarters, and often seven-eighths. As a result, the people of Europe can now eat antipodean mutton, but the wool market has been disturbed by the great increase of coarse wool and the decrease of fine wool. New Zealand and the Argentine Republic have changed the sheep more rapidly than Australia, because in the latter country the great droughts often make it impossible to fatten sheep for market, so they have clung longer to the wool sheep. Sheep upon the Farms of Eastern United States. — The older sheep regions, namely, the farms of eastern United States and 176 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY Europe, which were the sole dependence for sheep before 1850, still keep sheep but they are in small flocks grazing in fenced fields. When the remote regions took to producing so much fine wool there was an added reason for the farmers to devote their attention to the mutton breeds. In the United States these sheep are, like the cattle, usually migrants. The full-grown ewe is brought from some place in the West to Kansas City, Omaha, or Chicago, and then sent to the farms of Wisconsin, Minnesota, and eastern states where the farmers keep them for several years. Each year a crop of lambs is sold and finally the fat old ewes are sent to market and another supply purchased from the distant regions where the young sheep, like the young cattle, can be raised to maturity more cheaply than upon the small farms. These small flocks that can receive the personal care of their owners fare much better and produce a larger proportion of lambs than can be raised in the large flocks upon the range, where less attention is given them. Many of the eastern sheep owners make a specialty of rearing their lambs in the winter season and sending them to market early in the year when they command a very high price. There is a considerable area in the southern Appalachian highlands of Tennessee, Virginia, and West Virginia where ewes are grown and sold to the farmers of the Great Valley and the Piedmont sections of Virginia, Maryland, and also lower Penn- sylvania. New England, with its rocky and little used farms, offers one of the best places in the United States for the extension of sheep growing. The rocky lands produce grass and there might be worked out a combination of hill pasture and valley-grown winter forage such as exists in the arid West with its irrigated valleys. At the present time rather more than a third of the sheep in the United States are east of the Mississippi River. It is a common practice of some corn-belt farmers from southern Michigan to central Nebraska to buy carloads of lean lambs from the western range in the autumn, and fatten them on corn and hay for the winter market. Sheep in Western Europe. — The great increase of sheep in the Southern Hemisphere has helped local causes to produce a general and heavy decline of sheep keeping in Europe, specially in the THE ANIMAL INDUSTRIES 177 densely peopled parts of it. Throughout western Europe the sheep industry resembles that of the eastern United States and lambs and mutton are of more value than wool. The German flocks have greatly declined as population and the demand for grain have increased. The field in grain will produce more food than in sheep pasture, so that the grain field, the garden, the dairy farm and the sugar field, have taken the place of the sheep pasture in Germany as the valuable wool can be imported more easily than the cheaper food products. In France also the grain fields have replaced some of the sheep pastures. Some fine mutton sheep, however, continue to be kept in the most intensely culti- vated parts of Europe, as in Belgium, Holland and Germany, but they are usually in the poorer, more scantily populated parts of these countries. The European sheep are fed much on barley and rape, a succulent cabbage-like plant that grows in sandy soil. There has been less change in the sheep industry of Great Britain than in any other country of western Europe. The English had an early start at sheep keeping; they prize mutton and especially British mutton; their moist climate gives abundant grass, their policy of free trade makes easy the importation of grain, which is cultivated much less than in France or Germany, and in its place are sheep and cattle pastures. Since the recent enactment of heavier land taxes, there has been a distinct change toward more agriculture and less pasture, which will tend to reduce flocks and increase grain. The chief British sheep dis- tricts are the highlands of north England and of Scotland and the eastern plain, where the Lincolnshire sheep has developed an unusual ability to survive on moist level land. Great Britain, with three-fourths as many sheep as people, has more sheep per 1,000 people than the United States, and in actual number about a third as many as Australia, twice as many as France, four times as many as Germany, two and one-half times as many as Spain, but only two-thirds as many as Russia, which on account of great size and somewhat arid eastern part, is the leading sheep and cattle country of Europe. But sheep have declined in Russia as in all western Europe, although a recent report to the Russian Department of Agriculture states that the country is capable of maintaining 300 million. If so, it would probably be at the expense of other production. 178 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY Sheep in the Mediterranean Basin and Central Eurasia. — The California climate, with its winter rain and dry summer, is very wholesome for sheep, especially if they can have mountain pastures. The similar climate of the Mediterranean countries of north Africa and west Asia produces another region where sheep do well if the food be present. In this belt is Spain, with as many sheep as Germany, and Bulgaria, mountainous and dry like Spain, also equals Germany in sheep. In the dry region of southeastern Russia the conditions of the American and Argentine ranch are nearly duplicated, with similar conditions of sheep production. Much of Siberia and central Asia with its thousands of miles of plains or steppes is too dry for anything but pasturage, and some estimates credit Asiatic Russia with a much higher number of sheep than that given in the table. Sheep are very common and very important in Turkey, as in semi-arid Asia Minor, Persia, Afghanistan, the mountainous parts of India, Thibet, Manchuria, and the interior dependencies of China. From all these countries there is an export to the western world of the coarse wool yielded by the hardy native sheep belonging to those careless Asiatic peoples who have never possessed themselves of the better breeds of western Europe. Throughout this whole region from the Bosphorous to the Amur Valley the sheep live almost entirely by pasture, which is subject to the cruel uncertainties of climate; and despite the shifting of flocks from place to place, as described in the book of Genesis, disasters occasionally occur. "Unlooked for heavy snow storms occurred in January, 1911, in Asia Minor. In the autumn months of 1910 almost 300,000 head of sheep, one and two years old, were being driven from Suleimania, Kerkook and Mosul toward Aleppo and Alexandria to be shipped to Alexandria, Egypt, for mutton; 90 per cent, perished en route." Sheep in Tropic Highlands. — There is some sheep husbandry for local use throughout the mountainous regions of Mexico, Central America, and the Andean regions of South America. In Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia, the Andean plateaus spread out in greater expanse and, with their rough surface, cool and semi-arid climate, are a good place for sheep and there is an THE ANIMAL INDUSTRIES 179 export of wool. It is true these countries are in the tropics, but the natives of the Bolivian plateau wear woolen masks to protect their faces from the biting blasts of the winds that sweep across the landscape 2 1/2 to 3 miles above sea-level. Such a climate is the natural home of fleece-bearing animals and it has produced three in the llama, the vicuna, and the alpaca. Two of these animals, the llama and alpaca, furnish for export some very fine, long, soft wool, but the animals themselves have never appealed to the people of other countries as suitable for propagation. With decline of sheep flocks in the old countries and the stationary conditions in the important new countries it is inter- esting to note the appearance of a possible new region in high- lands of east Africa. Five million sheep are now reported in British East Africa, but most of them of the native woolless variety. Experiments at breeding up from these hardy sheep are succeeding. The sheep of the first cross shears 1 1/2 lb. wool worth 5 1/2 per lb. The sheep of the second cross shears 3 lb. wool worth 150 per lb. The sheep of the third cross shears 4-5 lb. wool worth 160 per lb. The Goat. — The goat, a producer of wool, zoologically a cousin of the sheep, is associated with him throughout the world; the chief factor of separation between the two being the goat's ability to survive a less hospitable environment and food supply. The goat's ability to eat almost anything indicates that it is one of the hardiest of animals, capable of living under the most severe conditions. Accordingly, where land is good and pastures are fat, goats are few; but where sheep can scarce subsist, the goat thrives on the browse of desert and mountain shrubbery. He fights enemies that kill the sheep or else scrambles to an inaccessible rocky pinnacle for safety. The semi-arid countries therefore greatly predominate in the possession of the world's 100 million goats. Thus Mexico is credited with 4 million, more than the United States or any country of Europe; Algeria has 4 million; Asiatic Turkey, 9 million; British South Africa, 12 million, and British India an enormous preponderance with 34 million. The result is that goat skins, which with sheep skins are so important in the leather supply of the world, come 180 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY from the poorest countries of the world. Many are exported from China, whence they are brought by caravan from Mongolia and the central deserts of Asia. They come from the arid parts of India, from Persia, from Italy, and from the edge of the Sahara. Most goats are of commercial value only through their skins, but in the district of Angora, Asia Minor, near Anatolia, has been developed the Angora goat whose long, silken fleece, called mohair, competes with wool in making the finer fabrics. Mohair. — The demand for mohair for making cloth has caused a great increase in the keeping of angora goats. They are now especially important in South Africa, where the dry pastures bordering the Kalahari desert produce a large quantity of the world's mohair; and its quality is said to exceed that of the parent Asia Minor district, which exports about 120 million pounds a year, largely to England and United States. Recently these animals have received favorable attention in the United States and are quite widely scattered over the country, especially in New Mexico and Texas. They eat leaves of trees as readily as grass and they are utilized to some extent to destroy bushes and underbrush where it is desired to convert forests and thickets into cleared lands and pastures. This same browsing ability of the goat and camel has made them effective agents in the denudation and destruction of Mediterranean lands. The Future Supply of Wool and Mutton. — Unless we change our habits with regard to wool and mutton, the future supplies of these articles must be more extensive than that of the present time to keep up with increasing demand. Yet it is true that during the last quarter of the nineteenth century the world's sheep reached their maximum number under present conditions of production. As most of the new great plains have been fully occupied, increases of wool and mutton can only be made by improvements in the wool-yielding quality of the sheep themselves and by the greater intensity of agriculture which must cause a greater and greater portion of the world's sheep to be kept on farms in small flocks as they are in western Europe and eastern United States. As this method, with costly land, its building of barns and storing of winter food, is more expensive than that by which a single herder drives 2,000 or 3,000 sheep THE ANIMAL INDUSTRIES 181 over a fenceless, barnless plain, costing little or nothing, rising prices for mutton and wool seem probable. 9. DRAFT ANIMALS Our Dependence upon Beasts of Burden. — Although man dominates the earth, he is physically weak in comparison to the brute animals and has been able to possess the earth only by bringing their greater strength to his aid. The European discoverers found no draft animal whatever in the United States, a fact which goes far to explain the Indian's lack of civilization. Without animals, he could not make the start from barbarism. Lacking animals to do his work and give him food, he was always so poor that he had to live from hand to mouth and did not have the necessary surplus to give him the leisure to learn, educate, and advance. Had there been less room for roaming, and more natural protection for settlements and property in the United States, the bison would probably have been domesticated here as were rein- deer and the yak of Asia. Some draft animal seems necessary in the ascent of a people toward civilization, although in parts of Japan and China it has been shown that they can ultimately be reduced to a minimum. Fortunately, while strong enough to work and intelligent enough to be trained, the animals are stupid enough to be ignorant of their powers and thus obey us (see McClure's Magazine, June, 1909). Most of man's work has been done by ten animals — five of them of almost world-wide distribution, the horse, ox, ass, mule and dog — and five of very special location — the camel, elephant, reindeer, yak, and llama. Our methods of using them vary according to the nature of the work, climate and roads, but our dependence upon them is so absolute that if they should suddenly disappear from the earth, western civilization would be shaken to its foundations and millions of men would probably starve. Despite all our improvements in machinery it is upon the muscles of trained animals that we depend for the production of nearly all the food we use in Europe and America. GROUP i. DRAFT ANIMALS OF GENERAL DISTRIBUTION 1. The Horse. — The horse, the aristocrat of draft animals, probably does as much work as all the other draft animals put 182 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY together. He lives throughout the temperate zones except in the most extreme deserts, is only barred by the tropic forests and the snow-covered north and even there he is of value, as shown by the surprising efficiency of Manchurian ponies in an English Antarctic expedition of 1908-09. Chiefly because of the attacks of insects, the horse does not do so well in the more humid parts of the tropic and sub-tropic regions as in dry climates where there is sufficient food. He is largely limited to the peoples of the Caucasian race. Thus the United States (24 million), Canada (2.3), Europe (44 million), and Asiatic Russia (10 million) have about 80 million out of the 99 million horses reported in Year-book of United States Department of Agriculture. By contrast, India had 1.6 million horses, 78 million cattle other than dairy cows, and 17 million buffaloes — convincing proof of the superiority of the bovine over the equine genus as tropic denizens. For many centuries the Arabian horses, fed partly upon the barley of the oases, were supposed to be the best of all horses, but several importations of the best Arabian steeds throughout the nineteenth century have shown them to be inferior in speed, strength and endurance to the breeds of western Europe. Partly Arabic in their .origin, they have for several hundred years been bred with greater care in the selection of only the best parents for each new generation, with the result that the horse of the West now surpasses his distant cousins in the old home in Asia. The English especially are great lovers of the horse, and for several hundred years have been the leaders in the improvement of the breeds. The Types of Horses. — There are three general types of horses. First, the heavy draft horse to draw heavy loads. This class originated in the good agricultural lands of west Europe. The second class is the thoroughbred or running horse, a product of England's race courses, and the third class is the driving horse. Of these latter there are many kinds, including the trotting horse, or roadster, developed in America. There are various sizes and minor classifications in each of the three classes. As an industry, the production of horses for sale is always car- ried on in regions that are good for the production of cattle because both animals have the same physical and climatic wants. The THE ANIMAL INDUSTRIES 183 farmer with his hay and his pasture grounds has the choice of selling his crops in the form of grain and hay, as cattle, or in the more valuable form of horses. The form he selects depends largely upon his skill and taste and the district in which he lives. A given amount of forage will usually be of more value when converted into a horse than when converted into a bullock or cow, but owing to the nervous, sensitive, high strung character of the horse, it takes more care, watchfulness and labor to bring him to maturity, without accident, which so often reduces or destroys his market value. The Breeds and Growing of Horses in Europe. — In northwest- ern Europe many horses are raised, but, as with cattle and sheep, their number is insufficient to meet the needs of the people. Britain has two heavy draft breeds, called the Shire and Clydes- dale. Leige in Belgium is a famous market for the sale of the heavy Flemish draft horses grown in that vicinity. The north of France produces many horses of the Belgian breed and also the Percheron named from the French department De Perche. This breed, owing to an infusion of Arabian blood, is the quickest of the heavy draft animals, and was long used to draw the omnibuses on the streets of Paris, but in January, 1913, was finally replaced by the automobile. The Percheron is the lead- ing draft horse in America, the Clydesdale Shore and Belgian breeds being used to a lesser extent. In Germany the greatest horse-growing region is the grassy country near the North Sea. From northeastern Prussia come many cavalry horses, an industry which is encouraged by the German government which has so great an interest in its army. Denmark has been an important exporter of heavy draft and cavalry horses to Germany and England, but the Danish farmers are finding that they can get better returns from their oats, barley, and hay by converting them into dairy products. In Hungary horses and mules are allowed to run in large herds on the level plain which comprises most of that country and which in the central part is rather too dry for grain growth but excellent for pasture land. Russia, with a hundred million people and half the area of Europe, including an enormous region of level pasture plains, has quite half the horses' of all Europe, and recently had more than any other country in the world, and now has about the 184 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY same number as the United States. Russian horses are most extensively grown in the central, southern and southeastern parts of the Empire. THE AMERICAN HORSE INDUSTRY Horses of the European breeds early made their escape from the Spanish settlements in Mexico and ran wild on the western plains and mountains for three centuries until, with the buffalo, they vanished before the American settler in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. A few bands have survived into the twentieth century in New Mexico and Colorado. These wild or half wild horses usually called Indian ponies or Cayuses, had degenerated in size but developed wonderful endurance. After the first settlement of the Plains, they ran on the range and were cared for like range cattle, being caught up at intervals, branded, and sold when ready for the market. Like the wild cattle this breed has now almost disappeared through admix- ture with the European breeds brought from the eastern states. One of the best-known centers of American horse production is the blue grass region of central Kentucky, with the city of Lexington as its center. This plain of eight or ten thousand square miles is underlaid by a bed of limestone which upon ex- posure to the air breaks up into a soil of great fertility and one in which blue grass grows to perfection. This is one of the best of pasture grasses, especially for horses, which may be called one of the chief money crops of this region. Trotting and carriage horses are the chief kinds and the horses from the Lexington market are to be seen prancing through every fine city park in the United States and many of those in Europe. The small area of the Kentucky blue grass region causes it to be of far less total importance in horse production than is the corn belt. Throughout the whole extent of the corn belt alongside the farms where some men are fattening pigs and others fattening cattle, still others have droves of colts usually of the heavy draft breeds originally brought from France, Scotland, or Belgium. When four or five years old, these horses are sent by carloads to the eastern cities and to many agricultural districts in the east where the farmers find it more profitable to raise crops suited to THE ANIMAL INDUSTRIES 185 nearby markets and buy their horses because they can so easily come from afar. The industrial depression in the United States in 1894-97 was particularly severe in the horse market. In ad- dition to general stagnation, the bicycle and electric trolley car were rapidly extending in use, with the combined result that horses were so cheap that a five-year-old would sometimes bring no more than he had as a six-months-old colt. At that time American horse dealers sought a market in Europe and began an export of horses which has continued to the present time, the chief markets being England, Germany, Holland, and Belgium. In this export Canada also participates, the farmers of Ontario and Quebec supplying nearly one-third of the horses exported to England, There are occasional horse ranches on the Great Plains of the United States from Canada to Mexico, whence horses are sent to the mining and timber camps of the mountains. The raising of a few colts is a widely scattered supply crop and an occasional money crop on some farms in almost all parts of the United States. It is of greater importance in the Piedmont section of northern Virginia than in any other district east of the Appalachians. Excellent cavalry horses are produced here and the United States Government maintains a remount station at Fort Royal. 1. The Pony. — Where the horse has been long in regions of scanty food supply,, he has degenerated in size. Ponies have been thus produced, the breeds usually bearing the name of region of origin — Russian, Manchurian, Welsh, Iceland, Orkney, Shetland, Zacetecas, and many of them show pronounced adaptation to their environment. The Zacetecas pony from the Mexican state of that name is of Spanish stock, sleek of coat, long of limb and fleet from the climbing of high mountains and going far in an arid country for his food and water. The slow, short-legged, coarse-maned Shetland pony with his long and shaggy coat has been produced by the humid, raw and cold climate on the heather-clad hills of Shetland near the latitude of southern Greenland. Grant them pasture, hay, and a shed in Iowa and they increase in height, 10 per cent, in a generation. 1 2 and 3. The Mule and the Donkey or Ass. — The mule, 1 Eli Elliott: The Shetland Pony. Shetland Pony Club, Lafayette, Ind. 186 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY which has a donkey for a father and a horse for a mother, is in some respects a better draft animal than either parent. The donkey is conspicuous among the common draft animals because of its extreme hardiness, longevity, and ability to thrive like a goat upon rough food and under poor conditions. The wild ass is still found in the most desolate parts of Turkestan, where his fleetness and hardiness enable him to survive even in. the home of the wild camel. From this parent the mule inherits long life, !*'. T '' ' -'% S" ■Jk ' ■ i ■ Fig. 71. -The Shetland pony with its long coat is an interesting response to an environment. (Photo C. S. Plumb, Columbus, O.) a hard small hoof, sure footedness, and the ability to thrive on little food, in all of which respects it excels the horse, from which it inherits size and strength. The chief reason why the mule has not displaced the horse in many more lands than it has is a question of pride. Men love their horses and admire them, but the mule with his long ears, his noisy bray, and a superior in- telligence which makes him resent abuse with his heels, is not so much loved or so popular. For nearly all kinds of service he is THE ANIMAL INDUSTRIES 187 really the superior animal, yet the world's horses are six times as numerous as the mules and asses combined. The Distribution of Donkey and Mules. — The mule and the donkey (especially the donkey) prevail where conditions of life are hard. Thus Asiatic Turkey and India have nearly half the donkeys of the world and Spain, Italy, and Algeria have a fourth. The north of France, with its rich pastures, produces the fine, Fio. 72, — The donkey, servant of the peddler of American oil in Portugal. (Standard Oil Co.) fat percherons and the French coach horses. But southern France, with the drier climate of the Mediterranean, has poorer pastures and here mules and donkeys are bred. Spain has half the mules of Europe, and from its arid plateaus exports to all the world the finest asses to be used in the breeding of mules. Spanish horses are but one-fourth as numerous as the donkeys and mules. Throughout the desert region from Morocco to Pekin the mule and the donkey climb the hills, thread the mountain passes, 188 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY browse on the arid plains in companionship with the camel, which braves the worst desert, the ox that draws the creaking cart, and the horse that bears the proud chieftain. In the mountains of every country and every state between Alaska and Patagonia, the mule and the donkey are of great relative importance. They serve wherever work is difficult, as in climbing the mountain trail, hauling loads of logs in lumber camps and cars in mines. They toil alike upon the fearful trails from the ocean to the Andes beneath the equator, or before the mine car filled with gold ore in Colorado, with coal in Pennsyl- vania, or lead in the Altai Mountains of Siberia. Good mules are grown and used in Manchuria and north China and even exported from Tientsin for service in the British army in India (U. S. Con. Rep., March 16, 1911). InPekingthe mule has the favored position of being the chosen driving animal of the government officials as they travel about the city in their "Peking carts." The ability of the mule to resist more humidity of climate than the horse gives him prominence over the horse in the tropics and in the southern part of the United States. In Illinois, Iowa, and Kansas the mules comprised 5 per cent, of the 4 1/4 millions of equine draft animals but more than half of the 1 2/5 million in Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisana were mules. Some of the cotton states show a greater number of mules than do the mule- producing states, for the cotton cultivator is almost universally muledrawn. The mule often stays in the state of his origin b ut two or three years, but plows cotton for twenty years. The American Mule Industry. — The finest mules in the United States are grown in the horse belt of Kentucky and adjacent districts of Tennessee, where the mothers are of the driving horse breed. Missouri is probably the greatest mule-producing region of the United States and under a single roof in St. Louis 5,000 mules are sometimes for sale. From this market, and from Kentucky and Tennessee, they are distributed over a very wide area in the United States and in foreign countries. Whenever there is war, the demand for mules arises to bear the army burden. When Spain was at war with Cuba, she bought Ameri- can mules for the use of her armies in that island and during the three years of the Boer War in South Africa our mule export was THE ANIMAL INDUSTRIES 189 six times the normal figure. The English dependence upon American mules was so great that officers of the British army opened headquarters in all the American mule markets, bought mules by the thousands, sent them from New Orleans to Cape Town by shiploads, and so reduced the number in America that their price is still (1912) higher than that of horses. These mules made such a reputation that the Johannesburg Corporation imported 124 mules in January, 1911, stipulating that they should all be bred in Missouri (U. S. Con. Rep., March 16, 1911). There is little doubt that with the increasing cost of horse feed in the United States the good qualities of the mule are being more appreciated and his use is becoming more extensive. From 1896 to 1912 the number of horses increased about 35 per cent, and that of mules about 95 per cent. 4. The Ox. — In almost all cattle-keeping countries oxen are used, to a slight extent at least, as work animals, but not so much as in past periods, because of the competition of the more efficient horses, mules, and donkeys. Among the peasants of north- western Europe, even the cow that supplies the family with milk is at times harnessed to the wagon to help with the farm labor. Although very slow, the ox is unquestionably stronger than the horse, and, deep in the mud of a swamp, will pull where a horse would not even make a try. Consequently, their most general use in the United States is to haul logs in the lumber operations in the woods and they are also of value on the rocky lands of New England where the ox is more common than in any other part of the United States. In the muddy sugar-cane fields of Cuba and on the very bad roads in parts of tropic America the ox-drawn cart is generally used because it is the best wheeled equipment for the special conditions, which often resemble those of the morass or lumber camp. Oxen and Agriculture. — The general use of oxen in agricul- tural labor is usually an indication of an industrially backward people who are willing to content themselves with slow helpers or who must take advantage of the factor of cheapness arising from the fact that the ox can eventually be sold as a beef animal. Such a combination of oxen and primitive agriculture we find among the Armenians, Bulgarians, Turks, and other peoples of southern and eastern Europe, and in places throughout central 190 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY Asia to Pekin and Manchuria. The Boers of South Africa still continue to use teams in which several spans of oxen draw a wagon of enormous size. In India it is probable that there are as many oxen used as in all the rest of the world. The hundreds of millions of people there use almost no other beast of burden. As cattle can survive the tormenting tropic insects better than horses or even mules, oxen are probably the most used agricultural work animal of the tropics. In Porto Rico, for example, they are the mainstay. On the muddy roads and muddy rice fields of the Philippines and southeastern Asia the Carabao or water buffalo, an economic duplicate and a zoologic cousin of the ox, is the prevalent beast of burden, although his slowness probably makes him the least efficient of all the larger draft animals. India's 75 million cattle other than dairy cows make that country far and away the leading cattle country of the world without counting the 15 million buffa- loes that really belong in the same class economically. 5. The Dog. — Least important of the general draft animals is the dog, rival to man in his ability to live in all climates. He goes wherever man goes, living on a diet of meat and fish if upon the shores of the Arctic Sea, or of beans and bananas mixed with a little meat in Equatorial Africa. As a draft animal he is to the snowy parts of North America what the reindeer is to Lapland. He had drawn the sledge of the Aleut and the Eskimo, the Hudson Bay fur trader, the Labrador explorer, and the gold prospector in Alaska and the Klondike. He does the same service in some of the colder parts of Europe and Asia, but it is probable that the dog is most used in the densely peopled agri- cultural regions of northwestern Europe. In the north of France, Holland, Belgium, and western Germany regions where the horse predominates, it is a common sight to see a team of two, three, or four muscular dogs hitched to a surprisingly heavy cart, taking to market a load of milk, vegetables, or other farm prod- ucts. It is not uncommon to see a peasant woman on one side of the wagon tongue and the dog on the other. This hard labor is due to poverty, and the poverty is due to the density of popula- tion, which only leaves a small patch of land for each family so that they cannot feed any larger work animal than the dog. In parts of Germany the pet dog is heavily taxed, but the work THE ANIMAL INDUSTRIES 191 dog is untaxed. In Japan, the population being still greater in proportion to resources, man is of necessity his own beast of burden. GROUP 2. THE DRAFT ANIMALS OF SPECIAL LOCATION The five draft animals of special location are generally inferior to the horse and the mule, but have some peculiar adaptation to environment that enables them to work in places where the horse and mule are less efficient, if they can survive at all. 1. The Reindeer. — The reindeer is a specialist at surviving cold and a poor diet, such as the moss which grows on the other- wise bare ground of the almost continually frozen Arctic plains, called tundras. Over this bleak, treeless, and uninviting Arctic region the caribou and other species of the reindeer family are widely distributed. Two domesticated kinds of reindeer are used by the sparse populations from the Atlantic Ocean in north Norway to Kamchatka and Bering Straits. Their southern limit in central Asia reaches almost to the Amur River and Lake Baikal. In this vast region the population is very sparse, and the people use the reindeer chiefly as a sled animal, although they occasionally ride him. The reindeer are essential to the life of many of these people, for in addition to acting as beasts of burden, they furnish milk, skins, and meat to the herdsmen, who count them as their sole wealth. The recent introduction of reindeer into Alaska and Labrador, countries similar to their own, has met with success; their number in Alaska has increased to 33,000 and it will probably be but a short time before they are distributed throughout the Arctic and sub-Arctic regions of North America. The first commercial shipment of reindeer meat has already reached Seattle. 2. The Yak. — The yak, a close cousin to the ox and the buffalo, is a native of the Himalaya Mountain regions and is adapted to high elevations, and scanty food, but especially to deep snow. The under parts of his body have long thick hair reaching nearly to the ground, so that he can lie on this natural mattress with warmth and comfort on the deep snows of high mountains. This animal is at present used only in Tibet and the adjacent high regions of central Asia, where he draws carts and carries burdens on his back. The naturalist, Mr. Thompson Seton, has pointed out that large areas of Canada, not well suited to ordinary 192 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY cattle, might well be given over to yak pasturage. The yak has shown his fitness by thriving for six generations in an English park. 3. The Llama. — The llama of the highlands of Peru and Bolivia does for the Andean Highlands the service rendered by the yak in the Himalayas. The llama is a small animal resem- bling both the sheep and the camel, and is used only for carrying packs which cannot exceed a hundred pounds in weight. He does not have great amounts of snow to contend with, but for sure footedness in climbing the exceedingly precipitous Andean heights, the llama has no superior. It is possible that the llama, as well as the yak, might be a source of profit in some other mountainous regions. 4. The Camel. — The camel is well known as a specialist in the ability to survive in comfort for several days without food or water and to live upon the harsh vegetation of the desert. From unknown antiquity this animal has been distributed from the western Sahara through Africa and central Asia to eastern Mon- golia, and has lately been introduced into the Australian desert. There are two kinds, the one-humped and the two-humped or Bactrian camel. This latter is found all the way from the Crimea in south Prussia to Pekin, and from the trans-Siberian railroad to northern India, where it crosses the territory of the yak. Without the camel many parts of the desert region of Asia and Africa could not be inhabited and many deserts over which caravans have passed for ages could not be crossed. The largest heavy draft camel can slowly carry a pack of from 700 to 1,000 pounds, the fastest saddle animals can take a man a hun- dred miles a day; and they can carry these burdens for several days, living the while upon the accumulated fat which has been stored in the humps upon their backs. This storage of energy in the camel's hump is like that accumulated by the pig and the bear in autumn to enable them to lie for days contentedly in their beds when the winter season makes hunting for food difficult. The camel, on the contrary, uses his surplus to carry him over a hard region rather than a hard season. One attempt was made to introduce the camel to southwestern United States, but it was interrupted by the Civil War. There is no apparent reason why he should not thrive and be useful there. THE ANIMAL INDUSTRIES 193 5. The Elephant. — The elephant has a restricted field of use- fulness because he lives only in the tropical forest regions of Asia and Africa. He is an enormous feeder, eating in proportion to his weight more food than any of the other work animals, so that he can be used only where the humid tropic climate makes forage most abundant. Only Asiatics have been energetic enough to domesticate him in modern times. Many of the work elephants are caught wild in the forests, and then, with the assist- ance of tame elephants, are laboriously broken to do the work of man. They draw plows and wagons and carry passengers on their backs, but are most useful in lumber yards where with great skill and dexterity these live cranes lift and pile logs which a dozen men would have difficulty in handling. In times of war they have even carried, lifted, and placed cannon for artillery regiments, and are a regular part of the British army equipment in India. Two thousand years ago the Carthoginian armies invaded Roman territory with war elephants. To-day the African ele- phant is wild, and is pursued with relentless vigor into ever farther fastnesses and slaughtered at the rate of 60,000 per year and his extermination threatened because of his valuable ivory. This, too, in a region where none of the other domestic animals can live because of climatic conditions and where land trans- portation of necessity falls upon the backs of men. It would seem that the moderns, if possessed of any ypark of appreciation for resources, should duplicate the achievements of the ancients, redomesticate the elephant and give to central Africa the most powerful of all beasts of burden where it now has the least effi- cient — man. Parts of Africa have some hope of a beast of burden through the probable fitness of a new hybrid, the Zulebra, a cross between the horse and zebra — an equine that resembles the horse quite as much as the ass does. The African tsetse fly kills all the domestic equines, but four species of zebra are native and immune — possible bases for an efficient new work animal for which several million square miles of middle Africa are sadly in need. io. POULTRY AND SMALL ANIMAL INDUSTRIES There seems to be small discernable relation between the importance of industries and the amount of attention that is 194 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY bestowed upon them by economists and publicists. Wheat, cotton, and iron seem constantly before the scientific mind if we may judge by the number of books, treatises, articles, and statistical analyses pertaining to them. The intellectual neglect of the lowly hen is not due to unimportance, for poultry and eggs of the United States (750 million dollars' worth 1 in 1911) are of more value than the wheat crop, the cotton crop, or the hay crop and are exceeded only by the corn crop. The pig iron out- put of all our furnaces is far exceeded in value by our poultry and eggs. This lack of interest may be partly explained by the universality of production, the non-capitalistic production, the difficulty of securing statistics, the absence of large financial or speculative operations in connection with poultry and eggs, the small influence of legislation upon them, and the small part they play in international trade. Poultry keeping is none the less im- portant and is undoubtedly the most universal form of animal industry in United States and also in Europe, east Asia, and other foreign countries. The names of breeds attest their world- wide distribution — Peking and Muscovy ducks; Cochin, Brama, Leghorn, Hamburg, Minorca, Indian Game, Wyandotte and Plymouth Rock chickens; Brabant geese. Fowls are found to some extent in great cities and are kept in villages as well as on farms throughout the United States. They are usually a kind of by-product, often a perquisite of the farmer's wife. "The very large majority of the fowls in this country are found in comparatively small numbers (42 per farm in 1900), on a very large number of farms, where they gather their own subsistence, and receive practically no care. The consequence is that the eggs are produced at little cost. The development of this industry to an extent incredibly larger than it is at the present time is among the easy possibilities." 2 There has been a marked increase in the number of specialized poultry farms since 1900. One of the causes of this change is the work done by the mechanical incubator. It works on a very large scale, and is as successful as the hen, who is now free to devote her whole time to the production of eggs. 1 Year-book Estimate. 2 Distribution and Magnitude of the Poultry and Egg Industry. U. S. Department of Agriculture, Year-book, 1902. THE ANIMAL INDUSTRIES 195 Poultry keeping is equally well fitted to be a by-product in extensive agriculture or a main product in intensive agriculture with a strong tendency to be important where agriculture tends to be intensive. Thus egg production predominates in value over the less intensive poultry selling (meat production) in all parts of United States except the region south of the Potomac and Ohio rivers, which have no local markets of importance, and parts of the corn belt which have unusual opportunities to fatten poultry. In Maine and New Hampshire the eggs are about double the value of the poultry. The relation of poultry to intensification is well shown in Canada. In 1902 Canada's egg export amounted to nearly $2,000,000. It decreased rapidly and in 1910. eggs were imported from China and Russia. The great development of railroad building and wheat growing in west Canada has enlarged the Canadian market and afforded a new business opportunity for the people of the eastern provinces who had before exported eggs. During a similar period of western development the United States poultry industry went through the same fluctuation. In 1870 a great railroad building and western development began and in 1872 our egg imports suddenly rose to 5 million dozen. From 1882 to 1890 they were 15 million dozen per year, then suddenly fell away during the next four years and their export rose steadily from 1897 to 1911, when it reached 8 million dozen. China affords the best evidence of the suitability of the poultry industry to intensive production. It is the general testimony of travelers that enormous quantities of poultry are grown, and eggs are exported. Factories in Tsingtav, German China, convert millions of dozens yearly into dried eggs, dried yolks and albumen (dried white of egg). By this means 1,000 eggs can be reduced to 22 pounds' weight, easily transported and said to keep indefinitely. The price of eggs in China helps to explain how the Chinese have been able to live at all on the very low wages of which we hear. China, being so isolated, such a world to itself, has had a set of prices all its own — low prices, so that the low-wage man bought low-priced commodities. A few years ago eggs cost four to five cash (two cents per dozen, U. S. Gold.) at Yangtse ports; and now since the government has abolished the old 196 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY currency and the ten cash piece (cent) is the smallest coin, eggs are five to six and two-third cents per dozen at Shanghai (U. S. Con. Rep., May 10, 1912; July 6, 1911). x The greatest commerce in eggs and, with the possible exception of China, the greatest, production, is in Europe. Great Britain Fig. 73. — Boatload of eggs on Chinese canal. Evidence of intensive agricul- tural industry. (From Farmers of Forty Centuries, F. H. King, Madison, Wis.) imports far more eggs than all the rest of the world combined, nearly 200 million dozen per year. Russia sends the half of them, and France, Belgium, Germany, and Denmark are important contributors. Even Morocco and Egypt send more than does the United States. The European peasant farmer finds it more necessary to sell eggs than does the American with 1 King, F. H. {Farmers of Forty Centuries, p. 180), found eggs in early April selling near Shanghai, at forty-eight cents (American gold) per hundred, little chicks $1.29 per hundred. At the same place the wage of a man per ten-hour day was twenty-four cents, the price of four and one-sixth dozen eggs. THE ANIMAL INDUSTRIES 197 more land, but we are tending rapidly in that direction, as shown by our great poultry increase. Poultry raising and especially egg production responds readily to the fostering care of government or other outside aid. The application of the laws of animal breeding cause large increase in the average egg output, as various agricultural experiment stations have shown. In the marketing, great improvement is possible, as proved by recent Irish experience. France and Denmark sent the best eggs to the British market a few years ago, but recently the Irish Agricultural Organization Society began the giving of lectures and instructing classes in poultry production, and organized cooperative societies for the marketing of the eggs. The resulting improvement in the freshness, clean- liness, and careful packing of the eggs has so greatly im- proved their standing in the markets that Irish egg export increased one-third in six years, 1904 to 1910, and the Irish export of poultry products is now greater than the butter export, and is exceeded in value only by linen and cattle. Owing to the high value of output in proportion to food, it should be emphasized that the distribution of the poultry industry depends more on man and less on the environment than any other of the animal industries thus far discussed. It should also be noted that in its large scale prosecution the failures far outnumber the successes, because of the unusual amount of detail involved. Turkeys, ducks, and geese comprise about 6 per cent, of the poultry of America, but despite the feathers of the ducks and geese, these birds, because of their small number of eggs, lack the double source of income furnished by the chicken. In Germany the tractable goose is esteemed as the untractable turkey is in America, and it is common to see boys herding them in large flocks at pasture. The rearing of rabbits and hares is, in its economic aspects, close kin to the poultry industry. Hares have the advantage of being able to thrive in closer confinement than poultry, and they will feed on a very wide range of vegetable food — weeds as well as hay and grains. They are quite generally kept by the small farmers of northern France and Belgium, whence they are exported to England by the hundreds of tons. The 198 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY total British import of rabbits amounts to over $5,000,000 per year. In ostrich farming we have an interesting example of a new domestic animal and a new industry. This feather-producing bird is a native of semi-arid Africa, being found over most of the Sudan and large areas in South Africa. The Hamar Arabs in West Kordof an, Sudan, keep a few birds in pens, but the feathers are inferior to those from wild birds which were until recently the sole supply in all lands. The British in South Africa are the real founders of the ostrich industry, having found that when enclosed by a strong fence and supplied with suitable food of grain and good grass the ostrich will thrive about as well in domestication as the sheep. In forty years the Afrikanders have reduced ostrich keeping to a science, established systems of registry for pure bred birds and improved them to the point where $5,000 has been paid for a single bird for breeding purposes. The number of tame birds in the fields of Cape Colony farmers is estimated at 500,000, the best feathers sell at over $200 per pound and the feather export at $9,000,000 rivals that of wool even though the colony has 18 million sheep. 1 To prevent other lands from starting up the industry, the export of birds and eggs is strictly prohibited. This much used mediaeval device has worked fairly well in that the Germans have failed because of it in German Southwest Africa. There are, however, enough ostriches outside of Africa now to start the in- dustry. An ostrich farm in southern California has attracted much attention and the climate of that district resembles that of the ostrich's native habitat. There are already ostriches in Arizona, Florida, Argentina, Australia, and New Zealand. Bee keeping, with its products of honey and wax, preys upon the blind thrift of an insect. Like poultry it depends to an important extent upon the human element, but it also must have an environ- ment affording nectar-bearing flowers. Where rainfall permits abundant vegetation, the tropics are best bee lands, and honey and wax are important exports from the Greater Antilles, and there seems to be plenty of room for extension of the industry. 1 In one irrigated district on the Grobbelaars river two miles by seventy, 80,000 ostriches are kept at pasture on alfalfa. They yield over $20 apiece per year and the land sells for $750 to $1,000 per acre. A change in styles might change all this. THE ANIMAL INDUSTRIES 199 Bees are among the most highly developed of animals. Their care is, if well done, one of the most scientific of the animal industries. A small amount of bee keeping is common in nearly all the warmer parts of United States and Europe, but it is a by-product industry which, owing to its dependence upon bloom- ing plants, cannot be intensified. The rearing of song birds is an interesting avocation or by- industry that might in its economic side be considered as a sort of miniature poultry industry — the artisan's poultry as compared to the farmer's poultry. The canary bird is the most important of these birds and the Hartz mountain region of Germany, where there is a dense industrial population in a mountainous district, is the greatest center of their production. These people are well educated, but receive low wages, and the rearing of song birds can be carried on at small expense in the home, very much like the keeping of pets. • A British working man is reported to have made $400 in one year breeding canaries. As long ago as 1880 it was estimated that the sales of canary birds brought over $300,000 per year to the Hartz mountain peasants, and St. Andreasburg canaries are known in many lands. The keeping of cage birds is a custom worldwide, and of un- known age, but large traffic in the birds has arisen only since the coming of fast transportation by steamships. The United States imports over 300,000 birds per year, mostly German canaries, and the trade is increasing rapidly. Belgium, Scotland, and England, especially the textile districts of Norwich and Bradford, also grow them. So greatly have they been changed by their four centuries of domestication that they are now imported into their native Canary Islands. Two centuries ago there were twenty-seven varieties of this species and many of them are so dependent upon man that liberty would be death. The interest in this difficult but inexpensive industry is attested by hundreds of associations of bird raisers, bird shows in many cities, and numerous journals of aviculture. The more abundant relation of people to resources in United States is well attested by the failure of our only bird journal, and the practical absence of commercial bird raising in a country where they are bought by hundreds of thousands. 1 1 Year-book of Department of Agriculture, 1906. 200 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY REFERENCES See General References Carroll, Charles C. The Government's Importation of Camels. Circular, U. S. Department of Agriculture. Andrews, Frank. Cost and Method of Transporting Meat Animals. Year- book U. S. Department of Agriculture, 1908. Rasmtjssen, Frederick. Cattle Breeders Associations in Denmark, Bulle- tin, U. S. Department of Agriculture, 1908. Fossum, Andrew. Poultry and Egg Industry of Leading European Coun- tries. Bulletin, U. S. Department of Agriculture, 1908. Hatward, Harry. Facts concerning the History, Commerce and Manufac- ture of Butter. Circular, U. S. Department of Agriculture, 1908. Holmes, George K. Meat Supply and Surplus. Bulletin, U. S. Depart- ment of Agriculture, 1908, Bulletin 55. Langworthy, C. F. Cheese and Other Substitutes for Meat in the Diet. Yearbook of the Department of Agriculture, 1910. CHAPTER VI THE VEGETABLE, FRUIT AND WINE INDUSTRIES Vegetables and Garden Products. — Nearly every farm has a vegetable garden and some plants are cultivated and eaten by almost every people. Owing to the large yield of a small plot of ground under intensive care such gardens are very common in villages and small towns of both Europe and America. Through the food and income from this source, the retired farmer of America is able to live comfortably in country towns on sur- prisingly small cash income from other sources. In the European and American gardens are to be found a large variety of plants that represent in their origin every conti- nent and almost every country in the world. In many cases they have been cultivated until they bear little resemblance to their original form, and in our list of vegetables is found in edible form every part of a plant— roots, stems, leaf stalks, leaves, blossoms, pods, seeds. The Nitrogen-producing Legumes or Pulse. — The most im- portant of all the plants which we commonly call vegetables is the group of legumes, comprising the many kinds of peas and beans called pulse in the Old World. These differ from all other vegetables in the large amount of proteids or nitrogenous food, meat substitutes, which they contain. (See table of food analy- sis.) Nitrogen, as food for man, beast, or plant is expensive to buy, yet over three-fourths of the air is nitrogen, which owing to its chemical inertness, is hard to obtain in available forms. Hence its high cost. The legumes have the ability, great for the present, and greater for the future, of producing upon their roots nodules which are colonies of the microscopic plants called bacteria. These organisms catch nitrogen freely from the air and thus enable the legumes upon which they live to render to mankind a service of incalculable value by giving nitrogenous food for man, beast, or plant. By the aid of these bacteria the 201 202 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY legumes can grow in poor soil and leave it the richer in nitrogen because of the nodules on the roots that remain in the ground. The pulse plants are represented chiefly by peas in northern climates and beans in southern climates, and are of less use in the United States than in any other large region. This is be- Fig. 74. — The roots of the sweet pea, one of the legumes, with the nodules made by the nitrogen-gathering bacteria. cause the people of the United States get their nitrogenous food in the expensive forms of meat, cheese, and milk, of which we use more per person than any other large group of civilized people. In the United Kingdom, before the potato was introduced, pulse plants were more important than they now are, but there THE VEGETABLE, FRUIT AND WINE INDUSTRIES 203 are several hundred thousand acres of them grown each year and thousands of tons of peas and beans are imported; the former chiefly from Canada, half of the latter from Egypt and Manchuria. Importance of Pulse to Poor Peoples. — In the Mediterranean countries the pulse plants are much more important than among the richer peoples of north Europe. The lower wages of the Span- iards and Italians make it also impossible for them to buy meat from abroad, as do the British, and the dense population com- bined with the lack of grass make impossible the rearing of ade- quate numbers of meat animals per million people. Italy has only about one-twentieth as many sheep as the United Kingdom and two-thirds as many cattle, and Spain, while it has as many sheep per million people as the United Kingdom, has but one- thirtieth as many cattle. But the poverty of the Spanish and Italian people causes them to export some of the little meat they have, whereas England, with more meat animals, is the heaviest meat importer in the world. To get their nitrogenous food the Spaniards, Italians, and other people of the Mediterranean turn therefore to the cheaper forms of peas and beans. The gram or chick pea is said to -be the leading article of diet in Spain, and is also greatly used by the peoples of Morocco, Algeria, and Tunis, whence it is carried by caravans into the desert in exchange for dates. With this, as with other staples of food, the European supply is insufficient. In 1908, Spain imported 10,000 tons from Mexico alone. England imports them especially for making soup, while France imports not less than 35,000 tons per year from northern India. Lentils, vetch, and lupine, other pod- bearing pulse plants somewhat like our peas and beans, are much grown throughout all Mediterranean countries, and from the Isle of Cyprus there is considerable export of the flat seeds of the carob tree, a legume sometimes called locusts. 1 As the people of the United States are more able than those of England to buy meat, they use less pulse, and as the people of England are richer than the peoples of the Mediterranean and use less pulse, so are the peoples of the Mediterranean richer than the hordes who occupy southeastern Asia. To the latter, ac- cordingly, foods of the pulse family are an absolutely indispensable 1 Widely used as a substitute for oats in horse feeding and said to have been the food of John the Baptist in the Wilderness. .204 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY article of diet. Rice, substitute for bread and potatoes, is de- ficient in nitrogen, but peas and beans are grown throughout these countries to supply this need. In India, the chief de- pendence is the lablab pea, the product of a climbing vine, eaten by both man and beast. In China and Japan the chief dependence is the soy bean, a nutritious legume with three times as much protein as wheat. It is cultivated among the Mongolian peoples in many varieties and eaten in many forms, including the oil as a butter substitute. Fig. 75. — Chinese coolies carrying soy beans up to storage stacks for oil manufacture. Newschwang, Manchuria. (F. N. Meyer, explorer, U. S. Dept. Agr.) Aside from this, the dietary use of the soy bean in the Orient is chiefly similar to that of our garden beans; the plant is a field crop of great importance. For example, the Manchuria crop of 1910 was estimated at 1,500,000 tons, of which 1,127,000 tons were exported, an amount one-half as great as the United States wheat export for 1911. Korea exported $2,500,000 worth in 1910, nearly all to Japan. In Manchuria and Korea the beans have been crushed between heavy rollers to extract the oil and the resulting cake has for centuries been carried in junks to Japan to feed cattle or to be used as fertilizer by the Japanese garden THE VEGETABLE, FRUIT AND WINE INDUSTRIES 205 farmers. Recent British experiments have shown it to be more economical stock food than linseed cake or meal. It was only in 1907 that eastern beans were sent to Europe. This was due to the utilization of the oil in competition with cottonseed, linseed, and soap-making oils which had suddenly- gone up in price. 1 The suddenness with which this oriental farm product sprang into importance is almost startling and shows what a resource we have in the commerce with the Mongolian brother when we Fig. 76. — Lifting water from well to irrigate Chinese gardens at Liao Yang, Manchuria. The fence in the background is made of sorghum stems, and is used as trellis for cucumber and bean vines. (Photo F. N. Meyer, explorer, U. S. Dept. Agr.) establish a reciprocal relation. The trial shipments of beans to Europe in 1907 were followed by 100,000 tons in 1908, 245,000 in 1909, and in 1910, 800,000 tons to England alone. 2 The Commerce in Vegetables. — On account of the large bulk and perishable nature of fresh vegetables they have been unim- 1 The increased price of these beans has started their cultivation in Ceylon and the Caucasus. Five hundred tons were shipped to Hamburg from Batum in 1910, and an export of about 11,000 tons was expected for 1911. The soja, soya, or soy bean has been recently introduced into the United States. We do not eat it but it is gaining in importance as a forage crop and as a green fertilizer, because the crop following it is richer for the nitrogen left on the roots. 2 Porter: Full Recognition of Japan. 206 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY portant in commerce until the recent improvements in trans- portation. Owing to the fact that statistics of domestic trade in America are hard to get, Europe affords us the best opportunity to see the magnitude of the present commerce in these products. In the United Kingdom alone the importation now amounts to from $60,000,000 to $70,000,000 per year. In addition to this there is a lively local trade between south and southwest England, the Channel Islands, and the colder parts of that country. These islands in the English Channel have a relatively mild climate, because surrounded by a comparatively warm ocean, which gives them the advantage of early maturity in their crops and the ability to grow those usually found further south, so that the newer industries are competing severely with the Islands' old specialty of dairying. Daily steamers now take large quantities of garden stuffs, grapes, small fruit, and flowers to the English cities. Most of the vegetables imported into Britain come from the south of France, Spain, and Italy. The whole region north of the Alps receives large quantities of these southern products that are grown so easily in sunny Italy and Spain, while frost prevails in the colder north. France has a large traffic in early vegetables from her warm colony of Algeria, sheltered from the cold north winds by the waters of the Mediterranean. Egypt's sunny climate becomes of value to her through the 80,000 (1910) tons of early onions she exports between March and May to Liverpool, London, Hull, Hamburg, Trieste, and the United States. Resemblance of Flower and Vegetable Industry. — The French have a flower industry so closely akin to vegetable growing in its economic and climatic aspects that it merits mention here. Every night during the winter months the "Cut Flower Limited Express" picks up ten car loads of flowers between Nice and Toulon for delivery in car loads to Paris, Frankfort-on-the-Main, Munich, Berlin, Vienna, St. Petersburg, and London, and Manchester, via Calais. This industry began about 1880 and has made such growth that a single Commune (Hyeres) has in its sheltered plain between the mountains and the Mediterranean 3,000 irrigated acres on which nearly 6,000 persons are busy raising violets to sell between November and March (U. S. Con. Rep., April 14, 1911). THE VEGETABLE, FRUIT AND WINE INDUSTRIES 207 The American Trade in Vegetables. — In the United States the foreign trade in vegetables and garden products is no index of their importance. Trade between different states in Europe is foreign and similar trade between the states of our Union is local and not covered by statistics. Fifty years ago each town and city depended upon its immedi- ate locality for vegetables, and there is at the present time a large area near almost every city where farmers grow fields of peas, beans, cabbages and other garden crops, of which the family garden has but a short row or two. The vegetables from these market gardens are usually consumed in the nearby market in the season of ripening, but months before the local supply is ready similar products are sold in the city market. The best are produced in nearby hot houses, but the great bulk is brought by the refrigerator car, express freight, and the coasting steamer, which make possible the purchase of practically any vegetable any week in the year. In emancipating the city from dependence on local fields these transportation facilities have caused the development of an enormous trucking industry in rather concen- trated areas throughout the whole length of the Atlantic Plain from the east end of Long Island to the tip of Florida. So im- portant is this traffic now that sometimes a passenger train has to take a siding while an express freight loaded with cabbage, lettuce and tomatoes rushes north. Vegetable Production on the Atlantic Plain. — This Atlantic Plain is a nearly level area lying between the Atlantic Ocean and the first stratum of hard rock that limits the sands and clays of the Plain and causes in the rivers crossing it a series of waterfalls extending in a nearly straight line from New York southwestward through the cities of Trenton, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washing- ton, Richmond, Raleigh, N. C, and Columbia, S. C. This plain, largely composed of sandy soil, is one of the least developed parts of the United States. Much of it is still in pine forests 1 because the sandy soil has little plant nutrition in it and when first cleared is unsuited to the growth of grain or of grass and has for generations been considered barren by the grain and cattle growers of America. Fortunately, however, this sandy soil 1 The wild deer lives within 15 miles of New York City, on land smooth enough to permit the easy use of agricultural machinery. 208 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY suffices for the growth of excellent peas, melons, cabbages, straw- berries, etc., which are composed almost entirely of water, and which have a much earlier planting and harvest-time on light sandy soil than on heavy clay soil, which does not dry so quickly as sand. Thus the Atlantic Plain has an advantage over the Piedmont and Appalachian districts lying to the west, with their fertile but heavy clays. The fitness of this infertile sand for certain kinds of production is attested by the shipment in one season of $300,000 worth of berries (chiefly raspberries, blackberries, and strawberries) from the town of Hammonton, a station between Philadelphia and Atlantic City. The possibilities of sandy soils for garden products are shown by the practice of some New Jersey growers who harvest on the same field a pea crop June 1, a cantaloupe crop August 15, and turnips October 1, and at the same time have the land well set in crimson clover, a legume which gathers nitrogen, makes humus, and is plowed under the next April or May, when nearly knee-high and full of scarlet blossoms. Another New Jersey truck combination is Canada peas picked May and June, followed by crop of corn with a legume side crop of vetch, cow peas, or crimson clover — to fertilize the earth. These are not average practices. They are exceptions showing the possibilities of a land most of which is entirely unutilized. From this sandy Atlantic Plain there comes throughout the cooler part of the year a procession of vegetable products that follows the advance of the seasons. When October's breath of winter turns the fields of New Jersey and Long Island brown, the huckster and the groceryman of the northern city begin to sell beans, lettuce, egg plants, and cucumbers from south Florida, and at Christmas come strawberries which New Jersey can produce only in May and June. The Florida truck farmer often has a rapid rotation of crops. A typical farmer ships heads of lettuce in January, the ground is immediately set to tomato plants from which the crop is shipped in March, then potatoes are planted for shipment in May, while, through the summer, the velvet bean, a rapidly growing legume of the tropics, makes food for his mules and leaves nitrogen in the soil for the crops of the succeeding winter. THE VEGETABLE, FRUIT AND WINE INDUSTRIES 209 As the spring advances northward so does the location of the truck harvest. Next after the supplies of Florida come those from Savannah, Ga., then Charleston, S. C, districts including the nearby islands have their turn, followed by New Berne and Wilmington in eastern North Carolina, while Norfolk, Va., with steamboats running to Washington, Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York, and Boston is one of the greatest trucking centers in the United States. This port ships enormous quantities of early potatoes and strawberries to the northern cities, to be followed in its turn by the peninsula between the Chesapeake Bay and the sea known as the "Eastern Shore," which, with its ramification of navigable bays and estuaries, with railroads on the land, has one of the finest systems of transportation and is one of the finest agricultural districts of the United States. Lastly come the heavy shipments of truck crops from the fields of southern and eastern New Jersey, Long Island, and the smaller areas near the New England manufacturing cities. The bulky nature of products of this class gives a great advan- tage to the producer who can haul the crop to market in his own wagon. Hence there is a much- greater concentration of production near the larger cities, especially within a 30-mile radius of Philadelphia, where good truck land is within easy reach of city market. The Influence of Climate. — The price of the vegetables varies from season to season, indicating that the business is uncertain and, as shown by the extent of the variation, a perilous one. The earliest products on the market bring the best returns, so the truck grower always aims to be as early as he can and therefore is in constant danger from the frost, of which the cold waves always hold possible store. A promising harvest may be blackened by frost, such as occurred in late January, 1904, when $2,000,000 worth of damage was estimated to have been done in northern Florida. Rains and cool weather in one section at times retard the development of the plants, causing the product of two or three great centers to mature at one time and produce more than the market demands, so that the price goes down to the point where the shipments will not pay the freight. The Vegetable Industry of Mississippi Valley. — Chicago and the central part of our country draw off-season supplies partly 210 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY from certain sandy districts in Tennessee, Mississippi, north- eastern Texas, and in southern Texas on the Gulf plain near the mouth of the Rio Grande. In the main, trucking districts duplicate the products of the Atlantic Plain, but the Rio Grande district is developing a specialty of onions. The California Vegetable Industry. — The open winter of Cali- fornia gives that state an important vegetable industry which probably reaches its highest development on the reclaimed delta lands ("tules") at the mouths of the San Joaquin and Sacramento Rivers. These deltas are especially fine for the production of asparagus, which is grown in vast fields, shipped to the Atlantic states, and also canned. The great drawback of the California trucker is the long distance and high freight rates to the eastern markets. This is less of a deterrant on the dried beans, concentrated and non-perishable, which are grown in great quantities on the semi-arid lands near the sea in southern California. American Foreign Trade in Vegetables. — The building of a new railroad through the whole length of Florida and out across the coral keys to the island city of Key West, where it connects with car ferries to Havana, promises to give the frost-free fields of Havana a chance to compete easily with the truck districts of the United States which are less favored in this respect. In fact this competition has already been the cause of bitter com- plaint by Florida growers, who pay more for the carriage of their product from Tampa to Chicago than the Cuban pays for similar freight from Havana to Chicago via Tampa. 1 Porto Rico also exports some vegetables to the United States. Other West Indian and Caribbean regions have excellent resources to produce these crops, but as yet lack marketing facilities, a condition of affairs that was until recently found also in Porto Rico, where the vegetable growers and the steamship lines each waited for the other to begin. Garden Seed. — The production of garden seeds is a part of the vegetable industry well suited to isolated or distant locations where the marketing of the fresh product is difficult. The J To get the Cuban goods, the road must bid low against New Orleans, and to make up its profits it charges its Tampa shipper a high rate because he has no alternative. THE VEGETABLE, FRUIT AND WINE INDUSTRIES 211 American onion crop is grown largely from seed produced in California and the Canary Islands, where an important onion seed industry has sprung up since 1895 in the isle of Teneriffe. The cantaloupe crop of the Atlantic Plain is in large part grown from Colorado seed. In western Kansas and Nebraska enor- mous crops of watermelons and squashes are fed to the farm animals (which are the chief product of that region) after the seed has been saved for the planters of localities more favorably situated to ship carloads of melons or squashes. On the east end of Long Island a small locality grows practically all of the cabbage seed grown in the United States, while the other end of the island adjacent to Brooklyn grows the bulky cabbage and other products for the nearby metropolis. 2. THE APPLE Distribution of the Apple Tree in America. — The apple tree is the longest lived and, excepting the cherry, the largest of all our fruit trees. Its trunk frequently attains a diameter of 2 feet (a girth of over 12 feet is known in Pennsylvania). A large tree will often produce ten to twenty barrels of fruit. From New England to North Carolina it is not uncommon to find trees healthy and bearing at the age of 100 years. The tree is hardy and adapted to a wider range of soil conditions than any other important fruit. It grows wild along the fence rows and in fields from Nova Scotia to North Carolina and throughout most of the Ohio Valley. In the long and humid summer of the cotton belt it is not at its best, and is grown only to a limited extent for local use. It does well (when the buds are not de- stroyed by frost) on the plains and prairies of the corn belt, reaches a high degree of perfection in the Ozark Plateau, while the handsomest and highest-priced apples in America are pro- duced in the Rocky Mountains and north Pacific coast states. In the northern part of the North Central States the severity of the cold waves of winter combined with the heat of summer has somehow served to make the trees short lived and there are few varieties that can survive even for short periods the rigor of that climate. In the early settlement of Dakota one man planted some thousands of apple trees and seeds each year, getting varie- 212 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY ties from all parts of the world, and as a result of many years experiment he found just one apple tree that could resist the winter climate. That survivor has become the parent of most of the apple trees in that part of the country. There are over 1400 varieties of apples in the United States, most of them of local value only. Some growers manage to have fresh fruit on hand from their own cellars throughout the entire year, and while this is uncommon, apples are now in the market of most cities every day in the whole twelve months. The Apple as a Supply Crop and as a Money Crop. — In regions where the tree will thrive, a few apple trees for the family supply were until recently a part of the equipment of almost every American farm. The growth of perfect apples is difficult, as is their transportation to market without bruising; the packages are expensive and the fruit has large bulk in proportion to its value, hence the development of apple growing as an industry to supply distant markets is comparatively new. Since we have such a wide territory suitable for apple culture, the origin of apple- shipping districts has been a matter dependent upon some minor advantage of location or upon some pioneer grower showing the people of his locality that this crop could be profitably marketed. Commercial apple growing in America is an important industry in localities as widely separated as Nova Scotia, Ontario, Dela- ware, Virginia, northern Georgia, Missouri, Michigan, New Mexico, Arkansas, Watsonville, California (near San Francisco), and British Columbia. Apple Growing in New York and Michigan. — New York is the leading state in commercial apple growing; four counties on the shore of Lake Ontario in western New York have for a number of years been the most important shipping districts in the United States. The Erie Canal and the railroads that followed it gave this region an early advantage of transportation to New York and other eastern markets, and also made low prices for grain and animal products that had been staples there. In addition to this disadvantage for growing staples, and the advantage for apple transport, there is also an advantage in production. The large bodies of water with their melting ice in spring serve to delay the blossoming time until there is small danger of injury from frost. These advantages for apple growing were not fully appre- THE VEGETABLE, FRUIT AND WINE INDUSTRIES 213 ciated until after the Civil War, when grain growing had become unprofitable, owing to the competition from the new, rich, cheap lands of the West. The farmers in New York had to find some other crops than grain in order to realize satisfactory profits, and in this district of the Lake shore plain the alternative was apples, as in the other districts it became dairying. But even here, although apples are the chief money crop, there is no county in which the orchards cover over a tenth of the land surface, a rather surprising fact, tending to show the rarity of the entire dependence of any locality upon only one crop. The prediction has been made that within fifty years the south shore of Lake Ontario will become one continuous fruit orchard. The present profits of the business there and the rapidity of planting and the rising price (now several hundred dollars an acre) of land suitable for orchards make this prophecy appear reasonable. The lower peninsula of Michigan is important in the production of apples for reasons very similar to those prevailing in western New York. Ohio, Pennsylvania and Virginia. — A small field in apples is a not uncommon feature of small farms in both Ohio and Penn- sylvania, both of which states rank high as apple producers, but it is probable that Virginia has two apple districts with quite as large a proportion of the land planted in apples as is to be found anywhere east of the Rocky Mountains. First, in the Great Val- ley of Virginia and West Virginia not far from the cities of Winchester and Martinsburg is a low ridge called Apple Pie Ridge, upon which fifty years ago an enthusiast planted a large field in apples, which eventually brought him many thousands of dollars. This started his neighbors to planting apple trees, until now the ridge for 25 miles is almost one succession of apple orchards, and they are being extensively planted on the ridges to the west of the Great Valley. Along the eastern slope of the Blue Ridge Mountains in central Virginia is another apple district from which large quantities of finely flavored varieties are annually exported to England. It is said that where the Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad crosses the Blue Ridge west of Charlottesville, one can walk along the slope of the mountain for 7 miles and pass continuously from one apple orchard into the next. Neither of these Virginia apple districts has any known 214 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY advantage either in production or transportation over other territory in the United States where the business has not hap- pened to get started. The same thing may be said of nearly all American fruit localities. The Open Mississippi Valley and the Ozark Plateau. — On the southern edge of the corn belt in Illinois, northern Missouri, Iowa, and Kansas have been planted some very extensive apple orchards, some of them covering more than a square mile, but the sweeping cold waves that come unimpeded down the open Mississippi Valley have frequently frozen the fruit buds in April and May, and some of these apple districts are not prospering. In the winter of 1910-11 one corn-belt orchard of 64,000 apple trees (1,600 acres) was pulled up because two crops in ten years showed it to be less profitable than corn growing. In the Ozark Mountain region of Missouri and Arkansas, however, an extensive apple culture has developed. About 1880 a pioneer in commercial apple growing planted an apple orchard of 1,400 acres. He took magnificent specimens of the fruit to the World's Exposition at Chicago in 1893 and advertised to the world the virtues of the Ozark Mountains as a place for apple growing. Seven years later, the Census of 1900 showed that Missouri led all the states in the Union in the number of her apple trees. Orchards of from 100 to 1,000 acres in size are common. The rapid extension of the industry was made possible by the very low price of the land in the Ozark plateau and ridges, an old, worn down mountain system ill suited to grain farming, but very well suited to the production of fruit. The elevation and the protection of mountain location causes it to escape many of the freezes that are so destructive to the open plains to the north and east. The crop of the year 1907 was almost entirely obliterated in the open valley from the Appalachians to the Great Plains and from the Ozarks to Canada, but a single Arkansas county in the southern Ozarks, immune from this particular May cold'iwave, produced over $2,000,000 worth of apples. The Rocky Mountains and the Northwest. — In the newly settled states of the Rocky Mountains and north Pacific coast there are many irrigated districts that produce beautiful apples. Some of these, as the Hood River Valley in Oregon, the Yakima Valley in Washington, and Delta, Colorado, have already be- THE VEGETABLE, FRUIT AND WINE INDUSTRIES 215 come well known in the eastern part of the United States through the beautiful fruit they send out. Parts of Idaho, Montana, Colorado, and a few sections of northern California are equally well fitted for the growth of this fruit. Because of the bright sunshine of the semi-arid district, the apples grown here are the most beautiful produced in America. The large profits yielded by these orchards have caused some of them to sell at remarkably high prices. These western fruit districts, which must be in the valleys, are of restricted area, because of the limitation imposed by soil requirements, irrigation, water drainage, air drainage, and protection from strong winds. Owing to the small population of the Rocky Mountain and Pacific region, the extensive plantings in the irrigated valleys of the Northwest depend for their market very largely upon the eastern states and Europe, which subjects them to a heavier transportation cost than must be borne by their competitors in the east. The Extent of the Apple Industry. — Ordinarily, we grow one to two bushels of apples per capita each year in the United States. The crop of the year 1900 was 175 million bushels, of which 39 per cent, were grown in the three states of New York, Pennsyl- vania and Ohio. That figure proves nothing, owing to the fact that the apple crop of any locality fluctuates constantly from 20 to 100 per cent, of a full crop. An apple tree will rarely bear two heavy crops in succession and this fact, in combination with occasional injuries by frosts, makes it exceedingly rare that all the different export apple districts have a full crop at the same time. When they do, as in the year 1896, the crop exceeds the demand, and they have almost no value (seventy-five cents per barrel in March, 1897). Insects and Other Pests. — As a result of our world commerce and the introduction of new varieties of plants, each locality also gets nearly all of the world's weeds and plant enemies. Thus came many insects, fungi, rusts, and other plant enemies which combine to destroy nearly all the fruit that forms on the trees of the unprotected orchard. Fortunately they can usually be held in check by skillful care, much of which consists in spraying poisonous liquids on the trees. This makes the production of good fruit one of the most scientific of all pursuits, and is trans- 216 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY f erring it from the small orchard of the general farmer to the large orchard of the specialist in the better located fruit districts. This is causing rapid increase in the commerce in the apple which is more generally used by all classes in the United States than in any other country. In the last two decades the sale of apples in country stores in the farming districts has become quite common. ' ** ^ f ^SSJ-f--^'* 1 kf"- 7 ^ V sia Jm?t<--M ' * ' 1 '•> . • •'' " ' :. ,*t ■',... 5f*V< '-. " . Fig. 77. — Spraying an apple orchard in Virginia with poisonous mist to kill insects. (U. S. Dept. Agr.) The Effect of Refrigeration. — Under good storage conditions some varieties of apples will keep well for a full year, so that cold- storage warehouses, refrigerator cars, and refrigerator ships have made possible the easy distribution of American apples all over this country, and their export to Europe, and have also made THE VEGETABLE, FRUIT AND WINE INDUSTRIES 217 possible their sale and use every day in the year. The United States now exports 1| million of barrels each year (1901-1910), chiefly to the United Kingdom and Germany. A few thousand barrels each year are sent to Cuba, Brazil, Mexico, and other tropical American countries, where the apple cannot be grown. The greater distribution of fresh apples has caused a marked falling off in the use of dried apples. Canadian Apple Growing. — Canada is also an apple exporter of nearly as great importance as the United States. The apple does well from Lake Huron to the mouth of the St. Lawrence and two localities have utilized their especial advantages for developing the apple as a money crop for the foreign trade. The most famous of these is the Annapolis Valley in Nova Scotia (crop 1911 estimated 1,500,000 barrels). This narrow valley in the western part of the Peninsula is protected by the Bay of Fundy and a sheltering mountain range, and is well suited to the apple. These advantages, together with an early start, convenient access to the sea coast, and its relative unfitness for other forms of agriculture, have given it a development of apple growing which has made its product famous in Britain. The export apple is the chief money crop and financial dependence of its people. The second Canadian apple district is near Niagara Falls on the peninsula between Lakes Erie and Ontario, where it has the protecting influence of the water similar to that which benefits the New York lake shore apple belt, of which it is really an extension separated only by the Niagara River. European Apple Growing. — Apples are at home in Eurasia from Edinburgh to the Mediterranean, from the Bay of Biscay to Tokio. They are quite commonly grown throughout western Europe, being the chief fruit crop in the 200,000 acres of British orchards. But western Europe does not supply enough for its own use. The regions of greatest production on the continent are the mountain valleys in the highlands of south Germany, of Switzerland, and of the eastern Alpine regions in Austria. The individual orchards of Europe are smaller than those of the United States because of the small size of the farms in all the above-mentioned apple-growing regions. The total European 216 # INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY production is large and there is a heavy traffic to the cities of Berlin, Paris, and London, and the numerous small towns of the manufacturing districts of the Rhine Valley and the adjacent territories of France, Germany, Holland, Belgium, Switzerland, and Austria. In some cases canal boats are loaded with apples in bulk, taken to the city, and tied up to the bank until the load is sold out to consumers. In some parts of Germany and near Paris, apples of exceptional quality and local repute are grown under conditions which typify the painstaking methods of the European gardener, fruit grower, and small farmer. When of the finest quality and size, these apples bring the fabulous price of a dollar a pound in the markets of London and Paris. Only a few of them can be grown on each tree, which by careful pruning is sometimes kept in a form resembling the grape vine. In a recent year a frost happened to destroy all the buds on the trees in one district in the Rhine Valley, and the growers avoided the apparent loss of the crop by methods which could only have been practised by the painstaking gardeners of Europe or the Orient. From another part of Germany where the buds of this variety had not been destroyed they secured twigs with good buds on them. These twigs were grafted into branches of the frosted trees so that they lived and bloomed. A second branch of the tree was side grafted into the bud-bearing graft to nourish it. By this great care each double graft was made to produce one of the precious apples. The Apple in Asia.— jFrom Constantinople eastward through- out the central regions of the Asiatic Continent the apple can be grown in almost any location where there is sufficient water, but this must usually be supplied by irrigation, although it grows wild in many mountain districts. The fruit is quite commonly grown by the Chinese farmers of the Upper Yangtse Valley and in all cooler parts of China and to some extent also in Manchuria, Korea, and Japan. Although important in meeting the wants of the local population, it has not in this region of undeveloped transportation become an important article of commerce. The Apple in the South Temperate Zone. — The south tem- perate zone, with the reverse arrangement of its seasons, can THE VEGETABLE, FRUIT AND WINE INDUSTRIES 219 send its fresh autumn fruits to the North at the end of winter when ours are gone or have been longest in storage. The south temperate zone has climate and resources that seem well suited to the apple, particularly in the Island of Tasmania, which is about as large as West Virginia. It much resembles this state in its mixture of mountain and valley, its good rainfall, and its suitability to the apple, and in its mountain orchards. Its orchard area is one-tenth as great as that of Britain. Tas- manian apples are sent to Australia and to a limited extent to England. South New Zealand with a similar climate sends more of them to the British market. The total export from the southern hemisphere, however, is small in comparison to that of the United States and Canada. South Africa also has an apple district and the tree is said to grow wild in parts of southern Chili and to be largely grown for local use on the fine plains near Santiago. It is quite probable that with the opening of the Panama Canal this district, which will then lie almost as near to New York, Philadelphia, and New Orleans, as does Italy, will begin to send us apples at the sea- son when the trees of New York, Virginia, and Washington are just beginning to bloom. Small shipments are already coming to New York from Cape Colony and Tasmania. Future Supply and Adaption to Natural Resource. — The apple and other fruits are unlike meat and grain, in which we have reached a limit of resource so that greater product means higher price. The yield of the apple (100 to 800 bushels per acre) is many fold that of grain. It is capable of being produced on rough unarable land of which there is a great deal, especially east of the Mississippi River. Some of the finest apples grown in the eastern part of the United States are produced on hillsides which are quite steep and rough. This suggests that as our agriculture becomes better adjusted to the geographic conditions of the country, the hillsides are likely to produce a greater and greater proportion of our fruit, leaving the level lands for tillage and grain production. The large yield from small area (with great resources) suggests that low prices may be expected, and overproduction is possible. In this respect it belongs distinctly with the potato, the truck crops and all the other fruits. 220 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY 3. THE PEACH The Perishable Nature of the Peach and Its Commercial Effect. — This delicious fruit is regarded as more of a luxury than the apple, chiefly because by its perishable nature it is less adapted to being a staple of commerce. The standard market peaches cannot be kept in good condition more than ten days or two weeks without excessive cost, while some varieties of apples will keep in good cellars from October until June. But such is the high esteem of this fruit that while a few years ago it entered into commerce but little, it is, since the coming of fast trains, refrigerator cars and steamships, marketed all over the United States and Europe and even sent across the ocean. Owing to the perishable nature of the peach there is but one day upon which it can be picked for market. The day before it is too green, a day later it is too soft. A thou- sand-acre peach orchard must have a perfect succession of varieties so that each day the labor force may be fully em- ployed, from the first ripenings in July to the last in October, when the little army of peach pickers breaks camp and the men disperse to their distant homes. Wide demand, in com- bination with difficulty of production, gives a high value to the peach and makes it an excellent money crop for the favored localities that can produce and market it successfully. The Susceptibility of the Tree to Climatic Influence. — The peach tree is apparently a native of Persia, and grows well from the Atlantic coasts of Portugal and Africa to the Pacific coasts of Japan, but like the apple, the peach is nowhere throughout this vast region an important article of commerce except in small sec- tions of Europe. The tree, unlike the apple, yields well only in restricted localities under special climatic conditions. Spring frosts often destroy the buds or young fruit, which requires a warm summer and much sunshine for proper ripening. This condition does not exist in Germany, Holland, Belgium, the north of France or Great Britain, and the tree can only be grown in these countries under the artificial conditions of hot houses or on south side of walls where the tree is trimmed so that it spreads out like a fan against the flat surface, thus catching the direct rays from the sun and the heat reflected from the wall. THE VEGETABLE, FRUIT AND WINE INDUSTRIES 221 The European settlers brought to the United States varieties that had for several centuries been growing against the walls of north Europe. A recent discovery by an American professor of horticulture shows the great dependence of industry, partic- ularly of agriculture and fruit growing, upon science. The peach tree in north Europe needed heat and by the strange adaption to the environment which plants possess, it gradually Fig. 78. — Scotch pear trees near Abbotsford, the home of Sir Walter Scott. In Scotland peach and pear trees need to be spread out flat against a south wall. acquired a reddish bark, a color which absorbs more heat from the rays of the sun than a light color, which reflects more of the sun's rays, just as light clothing reflects heat and is cooler than dark colors which absorb heat. But by acquiring ability in England to absorb heat, the peach was fitting itself for destruction in America where over the whole eastern half of the country with its continental climate the great danger of the peach is its tend- 222 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY ency to bloom in the first warm days of spring and have the blossom or young fruit killed by a subsequent frost. It has been discovered that the red twigs of European varieties get warmer in spring sunshine, bud earlier, and are destroyed oftener than varieties with a light green bark. This has set the plant breeders to searching for green bark varieties of peaches to replace the prevalent red bark ones, so that the tree will be a little less subject to frosts. At best the peach can only become an important money crop in regions somewhat immune from early frost. The United States has at least eight such districts, where an industry is already developed. The Peach Belts of the Great Lakes. — Two of these localities where peach growing is specialized, and has become an impor- tant money crop are furnished by the Great Lakes whose cold water surface makes the cool spring temperature that delays the blooming of the peaches until after the frosts. The peach area is important and rapidly increasing in the part of western New York where apples are important. Some peaches are also grown along the shores of these lakes in southern Ontario, and along the so-called Finger Lakes of central New York. The second peach belt, determined by the Great Lakes, is on the eastern shore of Lake Michigan where the prevalent west winds, blowing inland from the lake, give the necessary tem- perature control over a belt, less than ten miles in width, in a latitude where upon the opposite shore of the lake the peach is often not grown at all or is of small importance. The history of peach growing in this Michigan district gives another good exam- ple of the dependence of industry upon science. A mysterious and incurable and fatal disease called "the yellows" spreads from peach tree to peach tree. Unchecked it worked destruction in the west Michigan peach belt and reduced the number of trees in one county from 600,000 in 1870 to 30,000 in 1884. This reduced the value of land to $10 or $20 per acre when it had been worth from $50 to $100, and brought communities to the verge of bankruptcy and social disorganization. At this point it was discovered at the State Agricultural Experiment Station that if every tree having the yellows was removed when the disease was first discovered, only one or two per cent, of the trees per year would be killed, and the peach industry could thrive. The THE VEGETABLE, FRUIT AND WINE INDUSTRIES 223 Michigan peach industry rose again. The county that had but 30,000 trees in 1890 had over a million in 1906, and throughout the peach belt prosperity again prevailed. Nearly every farm here has its money crop of peaches, which are sent in boat- loads to Chicago, and carloads and trainloads to New York, and many other distant cities. The Chesapeake and Allegheny Peach Belts. — The third peach belt is in the peninsula east of the Chesapeake Bay in the states of Delaware and Maryland. Here, upon sandy soil ill suited for growing grain, grass or live stock, and somewhat protected from frosts by the adjacent waters, arose shortly after the Civil War the first great centralized peach business in the United States. It has been discovered within recent years, however, that the cooler climate of the mountains in the Allegheny Region, to the west of the Great Valley, delays the blossoming of the peach tree and makes an orchardist sure of four crops in five years, while the greater prevalence of frost upon the low penin- sula east of the Chesapeake Bay reduces the average number of crops there to about three in five years. The advantage of the hill over the plain is due to two climatic factors. First, the coolness of elevation makes a later start in spring growth. The second advantage is frost drainage. Cold air is heavier than warm air, and upon frosty nights it settles to the lowland where fruit buds freeze, while the hills are frost free. Due to this advantage the fourth peach belt is developing rapidly upon the mountain slopes of the Blue Ridge and the Alleghenies in the Potomac drainage basin in southern Pennsylvania, western Maryland, and the eastern part of West Virginia. Here are some of the most highly organized of all agricultural industries. Single peach orchards comprise from 100 to 500 acres and there are cases of single orchards 1,000 acres in extent. Southern New England Hill Peaches. — The ability of the peach to do better upon mountain tops than upon lowlands has led to the discovery that it can be grown upon many of the higher hills of southern New England. Consequently prosperous or- chards are now yielding good crops on the hill tops overlooking the Connecticut Valley in the state of Connecticut, an area which has never before known a commercial peach production. The Ozark Peach District. — In the central part of the country 224 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY the Ozark ridges furnish some frost protection in a vast plain where cold waves are perilous to the peach. There is an enormous peach production in Arkansas and southwestern Missouri, but the crop seems to be less certain than that of Appalachia or New York. The Southern Peach Districts. — In all these northern peach belts the main crop is not ready for the market before August. Since the express service has been perfected upon the railroads it has been found possible to grow fine crops of peaches on cotton land in central Georgia and market them in northern cities some weeks before the crops of Maryland, New York or Michi- gan are ready. Georgia's chief advantage in peach growing is the absence of rival producers rather than surety of production. The uncertainty of the peach as a crop dependence is shown by the uprooting of a 2,100-acre Georgia peach orchard, 1911, and the planting of the land to the more reliable corn and cotton. In the Southwest, in eastern Texas, a seventh peach belt is coming into prominence. This is a counterpart of the Georgia belt and normally supplies the southwestern and central part of the coun- try, but the practical certainty that there will never be a full crop in all of the peach districts at one time causes each peach district have an ever changing place for its product. If one or two districts happen to have a monopoly the profits are very large. California Peach Growing. — California has the eighth and last peach belt in America. Bordering upon the Pacific Ocean with the prevalent warm westerly winds from that great body of water, this state has a normal oceanic climate free from the cold waves and strong winds that spread over all territory east of the Rocky Mountains. Peaches can, therefore, be raised with fair assurance of getting a crop, but frost destruction is also known there. Peach orchards are of great extent, and, owing to the perfection of the California methods of picking, packing and shipping, it is, in seasons of short crop in the East, sent to all the larger eastern cities and at times even as far as London. But a full crop in the eastern districts makes it impossible for California growers to pay the transport 1 cost and millions of pounds of the fruit are then dried and canned. 1 The force of this limiting factor for Pacific Coast fruit growers is shown by a New York market report of August 20, 1911. "The losses to recent shippers of pears and plums from the far West have in some cases been as much as $300 per car." THE VEGETABLE, FRUIT AND WINE INDUSTRIES 225 The exacting care required to successfully market the peach crop has a tendency to cause the commercial growing of this fruit to be the chief occupation of the grower, who must be some- thing of a specialist. European Peach Growing. — In England the peach is always a high-priced luxury, the small import into that country coming chiefly from the south of France, and from Italy. There ap- pears to be no good reason why proper development of trans- portation facilities should not give western Europe a cheap and abundant peach supply from Spain, Portugal, and North Africa. The increasing export from the United States and Canada shows that the fruit can stand the transportation. The Peach in the South Temperate Zone. — The peach does as well in the south temperate zone as it does in the north temperate zone. It is said that peach tree wood was for many years one of the chief sources of wood supply for the city of Buenos Ayres in the Argentine Republic, and peaches of ex- cellent quality are grown in Chile, South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand. Thus far, the only country in the south tem- perate zone that has been able to market its peaches in Europe or America is South Africa, 1 whence the British mail steamers in February and March bring small quantities of excellent fruit to European markets. They are even sent to the United States, but many of them decay in the three to four weeks that they are in transit, with the result that they retail at exorbitant prices (often twenty-five cents each) and the market is naturally very limited. The improvement in ocean service and the opening of the Panama Canal may lead before many years to much quicker and cheaper transportation of this much prized fruit, particularly from the less distant peach region of Chile, and to a consequently enlarged importation in the spring months when northern frosts still prevail. 4. THE CANNING OF FRUITS AND VEGETABLES The Canning Process and Its Service to Mankind. — The process of canning food, which was discovered about the middle 1 The Cape Government has adopted the policy that has been so successful in other British Colonies, notably New Zealand, and laid down stringent regulations as to the size and kinds of' fruits and packages that may be exported with the Government stamp of quality upon them. 226 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY of the nineteenth century, consists in hermetically sealing the food product, and then cooking it, often above its boiling-point, to destroy all bacteria. Under these conditions the food keeps almost indefinitely. By 1883 the methods of doing this work had been so improved that machinery did nearly all the work, including the soldering of the cans and even the pasting and trim- ming of the labels. Before the coming of railroads and steamboats and the process of canning, a crop of tomatoes could be consumed only within a few miles of the place in which it grew and within a few days from picking time. After transportation by rail and boat was organized and improved, the tomatoes might be carried several hundred miles, but they still had to be consumed within a few days. After the canning process was perfected and developed into an industry, the perishable products of field or orchard could be preserved for consumption at any time within two or three years and in any corner of the world to which they could be cheaply carried. This elimination of the time limit on perishable commodities has revolutionized agriculture in many localities by suddenly giving perishable products access to the world market. The distribution of crops and of production now depend upon geographic and economic conditions which make certain localities best able to produce certain products rather than upon the more artificial conditions that recently compelled their production close to the market of the nearby city. The importance in consumption is even more marked. Most parts of the world can now have many kinds of cheap foods previously unused or even unknown. The workers in a paper mill in the woods of Maine may now eat the tomatoes and peaches of Maryland, the cherries and apricots of California. The same is true of the gold digger upon the Klondike, of the engineer on the Panama Canal, of the rubber gatherer in the jungles of the Upper Amazon, and the whaler who spends a season in Bering Sea. The recent discoveries of silver in the cold and inhospitable woods of Upper Ontario have caused the building of a railroad and growth of a mining town at Algoma, but the fact that it is now far beyond the farm line does not prevent this town from having THE VEGETABLE, FRUIT AND WINE INDUSTRIES 227 a good food supply through the aid of canned goods. A century ago, the whaler on a voyage of a year or two often came home, if he came at all, sick with scurvy, a disease due to under- nutrition from poor food of insufficient variety. But when Nansen and his men drifted in the Arctic ice for years in an attempt to reach the north pole, they returned in perfect health because they were nourished with all kinds of canned and preserved meats, vegetables, fruits, fruit juices and extracts. Canning, more than any other invention since the introduc- tion of steam, has made possible the building up of towns and communities beyond the bounds of varied production. The Extent of the Industry. — Practically all classes of food, fruits, vegetables, soups, fish, meat and even bread and pudding are now preserved by canning. The canning factories of the United States prepare yearly from 20 to 30 pounds of fruits and vegetables for each man, woman, and child in the country. Among the vegetables the tomato is most important, corn ranks second, and peas and beans third, while among the fruits the peach leads, followed by pears, apricots and apples. The output amounts to over a hundred million dollars per year, and is produced in nearly all parts of the United States. Can- ning tends to be scattered in small towns wherever a surplus of some product is available, such as may occur in a truck farm or orchard district. Furthermore it is capable of being operated on a comparatively small scale. Owing to the seasonal nature of the work, the labor is nearly all done in the summer time and often by new immigrants who flock in from nearby cities for temporary residence of a few weeks or months. The Atlantic Plain. — Although widely scattered, the canning industry in the United States has three distinct belts showing greater development than other regions. The first of these regions to develop the industry was the Atlantic Plain. Mary- land is the center and most important part of the Atlantic plain canning district, extending from North Carolina to New York. This section has become important for the same reasons that made it important in the shipment of truck crops to the city markets, namely, the sandy soil which is exceptionally suited to vegetables, and not well adapted to the growth of other agricultural staples, especially wheat and grain. Maryland 228 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY is the leading state partly because it has so much suitable land and partly because of the exceptional transportation facilities which, by centering in Baltimore, have made it the only important city center of the canning industry in the United States. Ordi- narily, canneries are located wherever a few farms grow a surplus of any crop. But the ease and safety of navigation on the many far reaching arms of the Chesapeake gives Baltimore remarkable facilities for assembling farm products. They are brought in steamboats from points as far away as Fredericks- burg, Richmond, and Norfolk, in Virginia, a great number of places on both sides of the Bay in Maryland, while the Chesa- peake and Delaware Canal opens a way for the Baltimore fruit boats to go up the navigable creeks of New Jersey to such towns as Salem and Bridgeton. The Baltimore canneries have another advantage in the fact that oyster canning gives employment to both labor and equip- ment in winter season — a cost factor of great importance. The sandy southern part of Delaware gives that state an importance in the canning industry that is quite dispropor- tionate to its small area. Maryland and Delaware are important also because they are large peach and pear growing and fruit canning states. The New York, New England, and Lake Region. — New York which is both a great agricultural state and a fruit grower, is the center of the northeastern canning belt, the second region of great importance. This state leads all the others in the can- ning of apples, pears, and corn. It is rather remarkable that this state and the New England States exceed the corn belt in the canning of corn. It is a peculiar fact that this arises from a handicap rather than from an advantage. Although not the best possible place to produce corn, that crop is the most prof- itable, all things considered, that many northern places may produce, although other regions have a greater natural fitness for its production. Thus Illinois is vastly superior to New England as a place to grow large crops of corn. The New England summer is almost too cool and short to ripen the grains well. For that reason Maine with a very small corn acreage cans a great deal of corn, since corn for canning does not ripen but is harvested a full month earlier than it could be if sold as ripened THE VEGETABLE, FRUIT AND WINE INDUSTRIES 229 grain. Sugar corn for canning is more valuable than common corn for the market, so that^ a small sugar corn crop on a New York or New England farm is as valuable as a larger crop of Illinois corn. The somewhat cool summer that makes of parts of New York, Michigan, and Wisconsin second-class corn producers, makes them first-class producers of peas which are here exten- sively grown and canned. If the same factory can lengthen its season by canning several kinds of fruits and vegetables it is a great advantage through the better utilization of the plant. Thus a plant at Janesville, Wisconsin begins its season in June with peas, and ends it late in autumn with sauer kraut, and usually packs the following, employing 250 to 300 persons in height of season: 35,000-40,000 cases peas = 600 acres peas. 65,000-80,000 cases corn = 1200 acres sweet corn. 50,000 cases canned kraut = 300 acres cabbage. pickles = 900 acres cucumbers, 75,000-100,000 bushels, In northwestern Ohio is a good example of the specialization of agriculture through canning. Near the west end of Lake Erie, especially in Sandusky County, it has been found that the black swamp land with its mixture of sand is well suited to cabbage growing, with the result that there now are six large sauer kraut factories within 10 miles and 3,000 acres of cabbage are annually grown. Pacific Coast. — The most important canning district is Cali- fornia. This state has become important from the combined influence of the climate, excellent for the growth of fruits and vegetables, and the great distance from eastern markets which makes it possible to ship in the fresh condition only an uncertain fraction, and that the most perfect, of the total crop. This state cans nearly all the apricots, many of the peaches and other fruits, except apples and berries, and is very important in the output of canned tomatoes, peas, and asparagus. The industry also has large possibilities in the other Pacific coast states. The Possibility of Increased Production and of Overproduction. — The possibilities of increase in the production of fruits, vege- tables, and canned goods in the United States are very great. Of the sandy Atlantic Plain, so admirable for the growth of 230 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY small fruits and truck crops, but a small portion is now used and the production is only kept down by the unprofitable low prices which result from the rather frequent overstocking of the mar- ket. If, for example, the farmers of the United States could be assured ten or twelve cents a peck for tomatoes at their farms for the next ten years, it is probable that their production would be increased ten-fold, for they are now commonly grown for less than that price and occasionally the crops are so great that the factories cannot handle them and tomatoes rot upon the ground by the hundreds of tons. This is a great deterrant to industry. Even with the aid of the outlet afforded by canning, the small fruit and vegetable industries yield so enormously that over- production, 1 with its glutted markets and frequent losses, is a 1 A most convincing illustration comes from Britain which we properly think of as a chronic food importer and jam user. "The light soil of the Blairgowrie (Perthshire, Scotland) district is well adapted to the growing of raspberries and strawberries. In 1900 the strong demand for raspberry pulp for jam manufacture turned attention particularly to the cultivation of this fruit, and new plantations were made. Raspberry growing requires much labor, as well as an abundance of good fertilizer, the annual expendi- ture for these purposes exceeding $100 per acre. Plantations yield 1 1/2 to 4 tons, or an average of about 21/2 tons per acre. Up to 1900 the fruit was grown principally on land leased at the agricultural rate of $5 to $7.50 an acre per annum. The large profits realized led naturally to higher rents, which in 1906 reached $58 per acre for land near the town of Blairgowrie, and $30 per acre farther out. In 1903 the price of raspberries had been as high as $209 per ton, yielding enormous profits to the growers and attracting other horticulturists and farmers into the flourishing industry. In the three succeeding years a profit of $195 to $245 per acre was not uncommon. One Elantation showed per acre in that period for one year: Three tons of rasp- erries, at $136 per ton, $408; expenditures, including rent, $146; net profit, $262. The value of plantations, apart from the land, at full bearing (in the fourth year) a few years ago ranged from $195 to $487 per acre. About 1,000 acres in the district were .devoted to raspberries alone, the annual shipments to English jam factories exceeding 2,500 tons. "Falling prices in 1907 marked the beginning of the decline of the industry. In 1909 the supply largely exceeded the demand, with disastrous results to the growers. Up to 1906 the average price was about $112 per ton. In 1907 it fell to $92.50, in 1908 to $68, and in 1909 to $44. Plantations became unsalable. Many fruit-growing tenants asked proprietors to take over their plantations as they stood (five-year-old bushes), without payment of any kind, and to let them terminate the leases, which were rated at only $24 per acre. In one case a plantation which was bought three years before at $487 per acre was offered at $49. Land rents have fallen about one-half, which may enable the industry to recover in the course of a year or two from its present state of collapse." — U. S. Con. Rep., 1910. This is an admirable description of the agricultural boom — overproduction — glut-cycle which has been repeated with variations of detail thousands of times; for example, black- berries at Hammonton, New Jersey, 1895-96. THE VEGETABLE, FRUIT AND WINE INDUSTRIES 231 factor which, like frost, is ever in the mind of the producer and almost annually visits each locality of varied production. Foreign Trade In Canned Fruits and Vegetables. — Canned fruits and vegetables are an important export from the United States to Great Britain and many other countries. England herself is an important manufacturer of preserved fruits — pre- serves being fruits so rich in sugar that they will keep without sealing. Certain brands of English jams and preserves made from the fruits grown in the south of England and even on the mainland of Europe are known throughout the world, are widely exported especially to British colonies and are extensively con- sumed in Britain where bread and jam is a favorite article of diet. 1 The possibilities of the production of canned fruits in the tropics are much greater even than that of canned vegetables in the United States, although little has as yet been done in this direction. Canned pineapples are produced by Chinese labor under British management in the Strait Settlements, at and near Singapore, and exported to Europe and even to America. More recently the industry has sprung up in Hawaii, where Chinese and Japanese laborers predominate, and the product is widely distributed over the United States. 5. DRIED FRUITS The Shifting of the Industry to Lands with a Dry Summer. — Before the coming of steam transportation, when each locality lived to a great extent upon the local resources and the farmer's family lived almost entirely upon the products of its own farm, the drying of fruits in humid America and Europe was almost as common as their production. The only other methods of preservation were the then expensive ones of preserving them in sugar or brandy or of pickling them in vinegar, which latter processes make of them merely a condiment. Steam transporta- tion and world commerce have worked a quick revolution by developing a large traffic in dried fruits from those parts of the world having unusually favorable conditions for their production. 1 "Fruit jams, and especially marmalade, are found upon every Brit- ish table, private and public, and are always served with afternoon tea." — U. S. Con. Rep., February 17, 1911.) 232 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY It has become easier to dry fruit in the sunny and rainless summer of countries having the Mediterranean type of climate and ship it great distances than to combat the difficulties of drying it at home with artificial heat in evaporators. The only exception to this is the drying of apples, an industry suffering from the competition of the commerce in fresh fruit, and still Fig. 79.- -A rainless summer helps to locate the dried fruit industry by permitting it to be dried upon trays in the orchard. (U. S. Dept. Agr.) most extensively carried in the eastern apple districts, especially New York, from which state thousands of barrels of dried apples are sent to Europe, chiefly to Germany, Holland, and Belgium, where they are used for food and for the making of wine. From some isolated farming districts in the Appalachian Moun- THE VEGETABLE, FRUIT AND WINE INDUSTRIES 233 tains and the southern and eastern parts of the United States, there is still small shipment of dried peaches, apples, cherries and even dried blackberries laboriously prepared over the kitchen stove or on trays in the sun, but the humid climate and the cloudy air with occasional showers blacken these products so that they bring a low price in the market. In almost any grocery store in the United States to-day, boxes of dried prunes, apricots, peaches, dates, raisins, figs, and currants may be seen, and the names and addresses stamped on the boxes will show that they have come into these American communities from many distant parts of the world, but nearly always from districts with a long dry summer, in which fruit exposed on trays beside the trees is dried by the constant sun- shine with great ease and no labor except piling the trays and covering them on those rare occasions when rain threatens. Competition of California with South Europe. — Californian names will predominate in the list of addresses on dried-fruit boxes, although thirty years ago the labels usually showed European names. These industries grew up first in southern Europe and have very recently come to southern California, where they have developed with surprising rapidity and now supply almost the entire home market and a surplus of some varieties for export. One of the first of California dried-fruit exports to compete with Europe was the prune, which has long been exported from several Mediterranean districts, chiefly France, where Tours is the best known center of prune production. Italy is second in prune production, and Germany produces some for home consumption. The recent large export to the United States has almost entirely ceased, and European fruit growers must depend chiefly upon the European market, to which American prunes now go in years of European crop short- age. In comparison with canned fruit, the dried fruit has the disadvantage of becoming wormy in summer, but it is much more concentrated and easily transported. Prunes in large quantities go from California in steamships around Cape Horn or by trans-shipment across the Isthmus of Tehuantepec in Mexico and even by rail from California to New Orleans, and Galveston for forwarding to the eastern states and Europe. The raisin has for centuries been an export of Almeria in 234 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY eastern Spain, where the peasants for generations have kept vineyards and dried the grapes. Sultana raisins, produced from a seedless variety of grape, are produced on the eastern Mediterranean, the chief center being Smyrna, with other centers of productions upon islands in the Mgean Sea, and to a Million Founds 900 / Calif U.S. >rnia Impo Prod ictioi / / 800 700 f 600 500 400 300 / \ / \ 1 / \ 1 J / \ \ \ 200 / \ ^ _#-- , / N / > 100 / 0. s « 3 - 3 fr a 3 C s s ? r ■i o [ o 3 T l< U 3 « 3 *■ O 3 C ft c > OO as as Fig. 80. — United States production and imports of citron fruits. less extent in Greece itself. In 1880 the United States took 1,200,000 boxes of Malaga raisins alone and in 1909 the total United States import of Spanish raisins amounted to 72,000 boxes — in 1911, 32,000— such is the influence of the California raisin industry upon our import trade. THE VEGETABLE, FRUIT AND WINE INDUSTRIES 235 The Apricot and Its New Significance in Russian Central Asia. — The apricot is a close cousin of the peach which it re- sembles in all physical features, but because of early blooming, it is more sensitive to frost, and fruits regularly only in locations with good frost protection. In the United States it is a good crop only in California, which state produces enough to supply the whole country with dried apricots and a few fresh ones during the early months of summer. Some are also exported both fresh and dried. It is also grown in northern India, and the dried fruit transferred by caravans over the snowy and perilous Himalayas to Thibet and western China, where the product is greatly prized. The communities of central Asia afford a good example of the effect of dry climate, and good transportation facilities on the fruit industry. The Russian Government, since its con- quests in central Asia, has built a railroad connecting the Black Sea with the Caspian and the Caspian steamers connect at the port of Krasnovodsk with another railroad that crosses the desert to the oases of Bokhara and Samarkand. These are densely peopled communities living upon irrigated lands where streams fed by the snows upon central Asian mountains permit the irrigated farms to spread over a few square miles of the level plain. These newly conquered cities on the oases are among the oldest settlements in the world. Before Rome was built caravans came and went, but their commerce had always comprised only the most valuable products, like metal work, fibers and fabrics, skins and tea, until the cheaper rates on the new Russian railroad gave a new commercial horizon and made it possible for these regions to become in part the California of the Russian Empire. Within a few years dried apricots which had been a local food supply for milleniums became an important export. The Fig. — Commercially the fig is a subtropic product but the tree is hardier than the orange, grows over most of southern Europe and even survives in sheltered places in England, Texas, and many parts of the Southern United States, but the growing of figs was successfully established in California only at the end of the nineteenth century. For many years the trees had grown well but bore no fruit because of the absence of a certain insect that lives in Mediterranean lands, and crawls into the hollow 236 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY cavity of the fig and fertilizes the many blossoms therein con- tained. The establishment of fig growing in California waited for the successful acclimatization of the insect, which was diffi- cult and required many expensive attempts. The industry in this large sense is still an Old World industry. Fig drying, during which sugar exudes from the fruit and clings upon it in white particles, is a laborious process which has until the present time had its chief center in Turkey and Asia Minor, where in the valley around Smyrna figs are largely produced, making Smyrna the best fig market and Smyrna figs the best known in the world. The Importance of the Date In Desert Countries. — The date, more nutritious than beef (see table of food values), the fruit of a tall palm growing in many warm arid lands, is the bread of the desert, and also food for the beasts. Even milch cows in Oman, Arabia, are fed principally on dried fish and refuse date kernels (U. S. Con. Rep. Sept. 27, 1910). The date is called the tree of the desert, but it really requires much water, and is a tree of the oasis. Underground streams of water occasionally reach the surface in the Sahara Desert, either by natural flow or by pumping, and create most fertile oases. These are care- fully cultivated and support a surprisingly dense population. Their scattered locations make possible the caravan routes which cross this great desert from oasis to oasis. Millions of date trees yield the chief crop, both supply crop and money crop, of all this region. The French Government has recently built a railroad across the Tell or fertile agricultural plain which faces the Mediterranean throughout the whole coast of north Africa and Tunis, through the Atlas Mountains, with their pastures and cork forests, down into the Oasis of Biskra in the Sahara itself. This point has become one of the greatest date markets in the world. Here they are brought in by caravans from many other oases and shipped by rail to Constantine and Algiers, thence by steamer to Marseilles for distribution to many lands. The date grows through the desert parts of north Africa and western Asia as far as Persia. It is the chief export from the little independent Sultanate of Oman in southeastern Arabia, whose arid coasts look like the desert itself and whose popula- THE VEGETABLE, FRUIT AND WINE INDUSTRIES 237 tion and products are to be found in the irrigated fields of a few inland valleys where the date tree enables the Arabs to have food and also purchase the goods left at Muscat by the steamships from England, France, Germany, Italy, and America. In Persia, a land of aridity and oases, the date, as in Morocco and Algeria, is one of the important food products, while Meso- potamia is at the present time the chief source of the world's Fig. 81. — Eight-year-old seeding date palm with phenomenal yield of 400 pounds fruit. Phoenix, Ariz. (Photo W. T. Swingle, U, S. Dept. Agr.) commercial supply. To the city of Bagdad with its river steamers and to Basra with its ocean steamers, caravans of camels and mules bring the dates (worth three to four cents per pound) for shipment by steamer to the western world. Introduction of the Fig and Date to the United States. — The date tree, like the fig and the olive, has been found to grow well in southwestern United States, where the climatic conditions resembled those of western Asia. As with the fig, date culture has not passed the experimental stage in the United States, but the 238 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY results are very promising especially in Arizona. It is possible that the American imports of these Old World desert fruits will share the fate that has met our import trade in prunes, raisins, and apricots, of which we now export a surplus, which amounted in 1911 to prunes, $3,300,000; raisins, $1,000,000; apricots, $2,100,000. Fig. 82. — Olive orchard, in Salt River Valley, Arizona. (Photo U. S. Dept. Agr.) Each Continent has a Natural Dried Fruit District. — Since each continent has its region of summer drought and irriga tion, there is prospect of world competition in dried fruits as other countries of the world become better developed. In the Austra- lian state of Victoria, for example, the well-known irrigation Colony of Mildura on the Murray River has under irrigation a quarter million acres of land under the same kind of arid climate that prevails in California, Spain, and Asia Minor, and the people are already producing dried prunes, dried peaches, dried apricots, dried currants, and raisins for the Australian THE VEGETABLE, FRUIT AND WINE INDUSTRIES 239 market, and occasionally exporting to Great Britain, where they compete with the products of the Mediterranean countries and California. South Africa is engaged to a limited extent in producing the same crops, while Chile has her California on the plains and irrigated fields near Valparaiso and Santiago. Over the Andes from these Chilean orchards are the foot hill settlements of San Fig. 83. — Furrow irrigation of four-year-old apple trees at Wenatchee, Wash- ington. (U. S. Dept. Agr.) Juan and Mendoza in Argentina producing raisins, dried fruit, and wine for that country. The South Americans have as yet done nothing worth mentioning in export, but, as in Africa and Australasia, the natural resources are there, awaiting the labor and care of the husbandman. 6. THE CITROUS FRUITS The Difficulty of Transporting Tropic Fruits. — The citrous fruits, including the orange, the lemon, the lime, the grapefruit or 240 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY pomelo, and several others of small commercial importance, are the advance guard of the tropic fruit supply. People of the north temperate zone are enabled to transport these fruits because of the tough, thick, oily and bitter skin which serves as an effec- tive protection against insects, bruises and decay, while a host of delicious tropic fruits remain practically unknown to com- merce because they lack such natural protection and could not enter commerce until recently. 1 It is now possible to bring many of these tender tropic fruits to temperate zone cities and the chief deterrent of large traffic is the lack of demand resulting from our ignorance of them. The natural conserva- tism with regard to new articles of diet is surprisingly strong, but may be expected to diminish and permit the gradual introduc- tion to our markets of many new southern fruits. The alli- gator pear and the Japanese persimmon and the mango, 2 good examples of this, are already arriving in small quantities. The Orange. — The orange is a native of southern Asia, possibly China, where as in India it has been used for many centuries. It was brought by the Portuguese to Europe in 1458, became the basis of an important industry there, as it has become within recent years in the United States. The orange grows through- out the tropics and on the edges of both temperate zones, and is everywhere much prized by the inhabitants of those lands. Like many other fruits it produces its finest fruits near the colder limit of its production, so that the fruit of the United States is superior to that of the West Indies. It is to be had at almost all seasons of the year, since an orange tree carries ripe fruit and green fruit at the same time that it is in blossom. Its wide distribution makes possible an almost unlimited production, but inasmuch as the fruit is quite bulky and its commercial handling expensive it, like the banana, can only enter into commerce in large quantities where transportation facilities are of the best. Consequently, while it is important in com- merce, the world's great supply is from a few localities readily 1 The recent successful import into Germany from Kamerun of fresh pineapple packed in peat dust is very suggestive. 2 The mango, a delicious fruit as much used in the tropics as we use the apple and peach, is cultivated in India to the extent of a hundred named varieties. Being more durable than the peach we could easily get them from Cuba if the demand existed. THE VEGETABLE, FRUIT AND WINE INDUSTRIES 241 accessible to the world's great markets. It is quite certain that more oranges waste beneath the tropic orange trees than are eaten by the people of the north temperate zone. This wasting frequently occurs even in such nearby places as Jamaica and the other West Indian Islands, whence "it appears almost impossible to get a profitable outlet for oranges except in the very early weeks of the season" (U. S. Com. Rept., Oct. 7, 1910). Jamaican oranges could, however, come to the United States but for the American tariff. In Paraguay, a country far up the Parana River, north of Argentine Republic, oranges are regularly used for fattening hogs, and it is only from the dis- tricts adjacent to steamboat landings on the banks of the great river that they are exported down the stream to Argentine Republic and Uraguay. These countries have in Paraguay a subtropic garden spot whence they derive, as does Pennsyl- vania from Florida, fruits and vegetables of a warmer clime. Importance in the Mediterranean Countries. — It is in the Mediterranean countries that the citrous fruits give rise to the greatest commerce. There, the combined warming influences of the Mediterranean Sea, the Sahara Desert, and the Atlantic Ocean make these the most northerly of all regions with climate warm enough for these fruits. A short distance away are the millions of people of northern and western Europe, connected with the orange lands of the South by steamer and numerous railroads. The orange is found on the west coast of Portugal as far as 40° north. Orange districts skirt the southern and eastern coasts of the Iberian Peninsula, but the interior is too high and cold for this fruit except in the plain of Audalusia. The most important Spanish orange-growing district is on the shores of the Gulf of Valencia, near the central part of the eastern coast. The steamship lines that skirt this coast carry thence to Great Britain half the orange supply used in that country. Much British marmalade is made of Spanish oranges and the people of Holland manufacture a drink called curacao from the skin of the bitter orange which is grown for this pur- pose in Spain. The Importance of Islands in European Citrous Fruit Grow- ing. — It is upon islands that the growing of citrous fruits seems 242 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY to reach its most extensive development by Europe, chiefly because the surrounding waters afford frost protection. The Azores have long been important shippers of oranges. Orange production is probably more important to the Balearic Islands than to any other part of the Spanish territory. Malta has long been known for the excellence of its oranges, while in Sicily and the neighboring shores of Calabria we have the greatest develop- ment of the Italian orange and lemon industry. This industry is quite as important to Italy as it is to Spain, Italy possessing an orange or lemon tree for every two persons in the whole country. Although the orange reaches its highest northern latitude for the world, 44°, on the protected coast of Italy not far from Genoa, it is not important north of Rome, and the lemon, being more susceptible to cold, will not grow north of Rome at all. Sicily greatly predominates over the mainland in the products of both these fruits, having almost a monopoly of the production of lemons, whence they have for a century been distributed to the lemon-consuming regions of Europe and America. The Italian and Sicilian peasants give these fruits the greatest care. South of Naples they can only be grown in those few spots that can be irrigated. The ground is usually cultivated with the hoe and the spade, garden crops are often grown between the trees, and much of the soil is so steep that it is kept from washing into the Mediterranean only by the laborious building of terraces restrained by stone walls. It is chiefly this intensive kind of agricultural industry that has given to rugged and arid Sicily a population of 300 persons to the square mile. Africa and Asia. — France receives a large part of her orange supply from the African colony of Algiers, the chief center of production being near the port of Oran. With the exception of the Barbary States, all Africa seems to be beyond the limits of orange transportation under present conditions of production, although there are large areas where it grows. A few Asiatic oranges go to England from Jaffa on the Syrian coast and from southern Japan a few come to the United States, otherwise Asia, the native home of the orange, has almost no foreign commerce in it, although it grows from the Mediterranean to the China seas. THE VEGETABLE, FRUIT AND WINE INDUSTRIES 243 The Early Import into the United States. — This country began to import oranges from Italy and Sicily (where the industry had long been established) about 1835 when the American sailing vessels were perfected to great speed. With the develop- ment of the steamship this import became large and regular and the West Indies also participated in the supply, the chief sources being the nearby Bahama Islands and the British colony of Jamaica. Recently the home production has almost ended the import into the United States. The Influence of Railroads and Cold Waves in Florida Orange Growing. — Between 1880 and 1890, when through railroads were built to the south it was discovered that Florida could grow oranges and ship, them to northern states. This was the beginning of the American commercial orange industry which promptly spread to other Gulf states. The product of this southern region is excellent, but the orange growers have had much trouble with the occasional cold waves coming from the center of the continent and bringing freezing temperatures to the Gulf shore and to nearly all of Florida. If not in rapid growth at the time, the orange tree can resist some frost, but the moisture of the Gulf climate may make the tree grow rapidly at any time during the winter and as a result frosts have destroyed practically all the orange groves that have been set out on a large scale in Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia, and the frost of January 1, 1894, was almost a state-wide calamity to Florida. The industry had previously proved profitable in Florida although not in other Gulf states. Large plantings had been made, some of them were coming into bearing, and the crop was about doubling each year. On January 1, 1894, a single cold morning altered the prospects of the state by killing practically all the orange trees in the northern part of the peninsula and bankrupting many of the growers. Groves were renewed and despite occasional injury to crop and sometimes to trees, there has been no other such destruction as that of 1894. Many growers now protect their orchards with artificial heat. Florida is again a heavy shipper of oranges and by 1911 the competition between our two orange-growing regions had become keen. The astonishing freeze over the whole of the California 244 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY citrous fruit belt in January, 1913, had not been duplicated in 40 years. The loss of fruit, estimated at from $20,000,000 to $40,000,000, tends to even up the competition between the two regions. The Grapefruit and West Indian Orange Growing. — Recently there has been placed upon the market the grapefruit, a citrous fruit first shipped from Florida. Its pungent, bitter flavor is causing a rapid increase in its use and production. The fear of frost destruction in Florida caused a boom in orange planting in Cuba in the few years immediately after 1899 when Cuba became independent. Orange and grape- fruit groves were planted, chiefly by Americans, at an expense of $10,000,000, but the Cuban grapefruit is said to be sweet and therefore not so desirable as that of Florida, while the tariff and shipping costs leave so little money for the Cuban growers that there seems to be small prospect of large orange shipments from that island to the United States, or to Europe with its Mediterranean supply. The Cuban orange, seems, like the Jamaican orange, destined to lie upon the ground rather than enter into foreign trade unless calamities overtake Florida and California, or the manufacture of orange products takes un- wonted strides. California Oranges. — Florida's misfortune in 1894 proved to be California's advantage. The northern limit of the orange in Florida is about 30° north latitude while, in California, owing to the oceanic climate of the Pacific Coast, the tree grows as far north as 37° near San Francisco. However, the region in which the industry has had nearly all of its large development is south and west of the coast range in southern California. Here the cold wave of the Mississippi Valley is unknown and the danger of a destructive freeze is much smaller than in Florida, although frosts that destroy the crop are not uncommon in many local- ities. The high prices of oranges after the destruction of the Florida crop in 1894 led to large planting in California where the orange is grown with the most perfect care on irrigated land of high value, the orchards often being valued at $1,000 and more per acre. This very high value is due not to scarcity of land but to scarcity of water, which amounts to scarcity of orange land, since unirrigated lands cannot grow fruit. Great THE VEGETABLE, FRUIT AND WINE INDUSTRIES 245 pains are taken to get and save water for the irrigation of the California fruit orchards. Tunnels are sometimes dug back in the hillsides to strike the underground flow, wells are dug and pumps lift the water to the land where it is sometimes carried in pipes and put around the base of each tree so that the smallest possible amount may make an acre prosperous. The great ■ - i ■ ■ ■. ■ ■ ■■ . . -.,■-■ % Wk ^ *CT'" S '*sP^. Fig. 84.- -Irrigation of Arizona citrous fruit tree by the basin method, econom- ical of water. (XJ. S. Reclamation Service.) distance from the eastern market has made transportation costs high, so that only the best fruit can be shipped. To attend to these matters the fruit growers have formed associations which are good examples of cooperative enterprise. They ship thou- sands of carloads (above 40,000 in 1910) to Chicago, New York, and Boston, for distribution throughout the East. In the southern part of the California citrous district the 246 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY lemon is now being extensively grown for the American market, but our import of about $3,000,000 per year, almost entirely from Sicily, shows that the home supply is well under the demand. Our Declining Orange Import and Possible Export. — The development of the two American orange belts cut down our imports 50 per cent, between 1904 and 1908, and those of 1910 were less than a third as great as those of 1908. The small quantities that we -still import come from Jamaica, Cuba, Honduras, Mexico, Spain, Italy, and Japan. The steamship lines from Italy that once carried hundreds of thousands of boxes of oranges and lemons now come with a scanty cargo of lemons, but often full of emigrants getting away from over- peopled Italy. It is likely that in a short time we will reach the position of an orange exporter and develop strong competi- tion between Florida and California. Florida has more danger from frosts, and, owing to her moist climate, has more fungus diseases which at times injure the trees, but she is nearer to the market in the great centers of population of the East and makes the claim that her oranges are juicier and that her grape fruits are better than those of California. The professor of Horti- culture in the University of California states that California is using for oranges only one-tenth of her suitable orange land. Florida, with but 12 per cent, of her area in cultivation, with only fourteen persons to the square mile, an abundant rain- fall, and about half of her area in reclaimable swamp of great fertility, has a much higher ratio of possible expansion than has California. The comparison of Florida with Sicily is even more striking. Florida is nearly all level and capable of til- lage, Sicily very hilly and rocky; Florida well watered, Sicily dependent upon irrigation for all important crops but wheat and possessing twenty-five times Florida's population per square mile. Manifestly the limit of orange production in the United States is to be set, not by resources, but by prices. Unchecked production in Florida and California can easily produce the same low price that prevails in the tropics where oranges lie unused on the ground. The citrous fruit market is easy to glut, as shown by the shipment of 800,000 boxes from Sicily to the United States in three months in 1895, when the price went down to THE VEGETABLE, FRUIT AND WINE INDUSTRIES 247 such a low figure that it only paid shipping costs and duty — a condition that faced the Cuban orange shippers in 1909. The Lime. — The lime, excepting the new kumquat, the smallest of the commercial members of the citrous family, seems to do best in the tropics, the chief supply coming from the Lesser Antilles. The leading producer is the little island of Dominica in which the people, since the decline of the sugar industry, have given great attention to the production of the lime which is well suited to the steep, rocky limestone hills of the island. Here are plantations and factories owned by the great candy manufacturing firms of Europe who prepare lime juice for the preparation of candies, and sell citrate of lime and lime oil for use in the preparation of drinks, medi- cines, and some commercial products. The neighboring island of Montserrat also produces limes. 7. THE GRAPE History and Requirements of the Vine. — The grape is con- sidered a luxury wherever it can be obtained, being a delicious food and material for the much prized wine. These two factors have combined with its importance in classic lands to make the grape the most celebrated of fruits. The vine is indigenous in eastern United States and from Hungary to Afghanistan in Eurasia. Grape seeds are to be found in the remains of the Swiss lake dwellings dating back to the bronze age, but it is probable that the Old World industry as we now know it began somewhere in western Asia. Old Testament references to the vineyards show its high antiquity among the Hebrews. The grape was early introduced among the Greeks and Romans and has spread throughout the world wherever the climate and soil permit of its cultivation and even beyond the natural climatic bound, for large quantities of most delicious and expensive grapes are produced in the hot houses of England, Holland, and France. The chief requisite for the grape is a summer of considerable heat lasting into September. The vine sends its roots to great depth and can thus search out water in arid soil and will thrive in dry climates when surrounding vegetation is brown and dead. 248 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY Thus, it grows in southern Italy without irrigation on the hills above the orange groves. In California where irrigation must be used for many other fruits and crops, the grape crop is usu- ally grown without any artificial watering whatever, even in some localities where there is no rain from blossoming time until harvest time. Accordingly, the grape is at home upon the edge of the world's sub-tropic belt in each of the three continents of the northern and southern hemispheres. Too much moisture is detrimental, producing fungi which attack and destroy both the leaves and the fruit. Thus the monsoon climate of India, China, and Japan with its great summer rain makes extensive grape growing impossible. Often under the best of conditions fungi sometimes appear and work great damage, as the fungus called the "odium," which has practically destroyed the vine- yards of the Madeira Islands and worked great havoc in other parts of the world. The Limits of Grape Growing. — Although the grape is grown on the sheltered Channel Islands, the line marking the limit of the industry on the mainland is curved from the west coast of France near the mouth of the River Loire northward to latitude 53° in east Germany. This northward trend is due to the increasing heat of the summer as we go eastward from the moderating influence of the ocean into the greater heat of the continental summer. In Russia the summers, though hot, are shorter and the grape line descends to the Sea of Azof and thence runs eastward through south Russia and Asia. In America, there is a similar bend of the grape limit from 37° north in California to 40° in south Ontario where the lake belt gives grape growing a northward extension. In the southern hemisphere grapes grow in the chief centers of population in Australia, South Africa, and temperate South America. Before the coming of the present extensive and easy commerce in wine, grapes were grown and wine was important in the valley of the Severn in England, and in parts of Germany above the present line, but the quality was poor, the harvest uncertain, and the industry is now limited to districts of more favorable climate. Importance and Difficulty of Transplanting the Industry. — Grape growing and wine making reach their greatest importance as a national industry in France, Italy, and Spain — countries THE VEGETABLE, FRUIT AND WINE INDUSTRIES 249 which produce five-sixths of the world's wine. Other countries of importance are Austria, Russia, Switzerland, and the United States. But the three leading European countries have long dominated the wine industry of the world and have held their leadership despite vine growing and the effort to introduce wine making into many other parts of the world. The industry is hard to move. In the first place it is an intensive industry requiring a dense population. Like a garden crop it requires much labor to produce the grapes. The yield is great, in France about 200 gallons of wine per acre. In the second place, expen- sive appliances and much labor are required for the fermentation of the juice into good wine, and great skill is required to get the desired flavors in the product. Lastly, wines are sold by the name of the country or place producing them, as Burgundy, Madeira, Champagne, etc., and a long time is required to establish a reputation. If the growers of Burgundy wine should go to some other part of the world, they could not be sure that they would find the proper soil and climate to produce more Burgundy, for few crops are so affected by the soil, the moisture, and the temperature as is the grape. If the people from Burgundy made wine as good as Burgundy in Cali- fornia or Australia, it would take them two generations to establish the fact and get the price. But there is no guarantee that Burgundians could make Burgundy wine in a foreign land. Owing to the soil influence, particular varieties of grapes are often limited to narrow localities, a conspicuous example of this being the species of the vine grown in Greece and producing the fruit sold in commerce under the name of dried currant. This im- portant little fruit is the best cared for of all the crops of Greece, and the annual product is 150,000 tons, a year. The half of the currant crop that is exported makes up about half of the total exports of Greece. The currant grape, because of pecul- iarities of soil and climate, is produced only on certain islands and along a certain part of the Gulf of Corinth, from which the word currant is derived. The Italian Wine Industry. — Italy depends more upon grapes and wine growing than does any other nation. While her wine is not, unfortunately, so highly prized as that from some other countries, Italy nevertheless exports great quantities of it. 250 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY The limestone hills and dry summer permit the grape to thrive better than most other crops, and they are grown in all parts of the country. Vineyards cover not less than 15,000 square miles of territory or about one-seventh the entire area of the kingdom, one-sixth of all used ground, and one-half as much land as all the grain crops combined. These figures become more significant in comparison with the corn crop of the United States, which covers about one-seventeenth the area of the country. French Wine Industry. — France is the leader of wine-producing countries, and her people consume on the average at least 25 gallons of wine per capita per year. While the grape area is only one-half that of Italy, the yield is greater than Italy's, a measure of the superiority of French land and rainfall and agricultural methods. The French grape crop covers only one-eighth the area given to the grains and although it does not extend into the northwestern part of the country, the wine- growing province of Champagne reaches the Belgian boundary. The good esteem of French wines, among them claret, burgundy, and champagne, makes wine, after textiles, the chief export of the country. Her foreign commerce and prosperity depend to so great an extent on this trade that a calamity to grape growing is a national calamity. Such was the Philloxera, an insect pest which came from America to Europe, where it spread through all the wine-growing countries, thence to Algeria, and finally reached South Africa, Australia, and South America. The Philloxera, a tiny insect of the aphis family, gets upon the roots of the grape vine and sucks the juices from them until the vine is killed. No cure has been found, and France, which had nearly 6 million acres in the vine in 1875, had less than 2 million acres of healthy vine in 1885, and another million acres invaded by the Philloxera. The only thing which prevented the practical extermination of grape and wine growing throughout the world was the fact that in America, the home of the Philloxera, there were varieties of grape immune to its attacks. These were imported to Europe, set out by millions in the vineyards which the Philloxera had devastated and tops of the European varieties were grafted upon their roots, making a composite plant with American root to resist the destroying insect and a European top to produce the desired wine grape. Thus, the industry rose THE VEGETABLE, FRUIT AND WINE INDUSTRIES 251 again until, at the present time, France has three-fourths as many acres in vines as she had in 1875 and the yield is four- fifths as great as at that time. While French wines are consumed wherever throughout the world the people wish to drink the best of wine, the French themselves are large wine importers, taking practically the entire crop of Algeria, which is one-seventh as great as that of France, and getting also large quantities from Italy and Spain. Some- Fio. 85. — Chief wine-producing areas of France. Names of wine and brandy centers underscored: (After Brigham.) times they sell their own high priced wines and use the cheaper wines of Italy and Spain for home consumption. Much of the import, however, they mix with native wines and flavor, label, and export as French wines. They even import as much as 150 million pounds per year of the dried currants (grapes) from Greece, which are manufactured into wine for export. Germany also imports these currants for the purpose of enlarging the output of her choice brands of wine. The wine industry of politically German Alsace is French in kind and method. The French province of Alsace was annexed by Germany after the war of 1870-71 and has become the lead- 252 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY ing wine state of the German Empire, having about 77,000 acres of vineyards. It employed one person per acre and yielded over $40 per acre in 1909, thus showing the suitability of the industry to dense populations, for the wheat crop of the United States for the same year was worth $15.64 per acre. Spanish Grape and Wine Industry. — Spain, the third great THE VEGETABLE, FRUIT AND WINE INDUSTRIES 253 wine-producing country of the world, is also a grape exporter, sending to England, especially from Malaga and other south- eastern ports, most of the 3 to 4 million dollars' worth of grapes which England each year imports. In 1891, before the Philloxera had done its work in Spain, wine made up one-third of the export from that country, but now the proportion is somewhat less. The best known of Spanish wines is the "sherry" which, since the time of Shakespeare, has been exported from Jerez de Frontera, a town near Cadiz. Jerez has been corrupted into "sherry." Portugal, which resembles Spain in people, resources, climate, and industry, has^ one-tenth of its cultivated land in vineyards, and wine which goes chiefly to Great Britain and Brazil makes up half or more of the exports of the kingdom. Port wine (derived from Oporto) is the leading brand. Hillside Grape Growing in Europe. — In the northern parts of the European grape belt the desired heat and sunshine can be obtained by planting the vineyards on the southward sloping hillsides. In this way they are protected from the north winds and exposed, by the inclination, to the practically direct rays of the sun, and often get in addition the reflected sunshine as from the surface of the Rhine, the Moselle, and the Swiss lakes!. By this means Switzerland has become a wine producer, utilizing the slopes overlooking Lake Geneva and the other Swiss lakes, but the total, aided by a higher yield per acre, is one-fifth that of France. Germany, with a production one- twelfth that of France, is probably the best example of hillside grape growing. The most famous of the German districts are upon the steep south slopes that come down to the Rhine, and its tributaries, the Neckar and the Moselle. The vineyards upon these riverside slopes prosper in latitudes where otherwise they would scarcely exist. Some of the Rhine terraces have been in grapes continuously for centuries, and so highly prized have certain brands of wine become that new terraces have been built from time to time in places so forbidding that a retaining wall had first to be built and earth carried up from the river bank (often by women), before the vines could be planted. One particular mountain slope near Bingen pro- duces the most famous Johannesberger wine and is valued at $7,000 per acre, the equivalent of $33 per front foot for a build- 254 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY ing lot 185 feet deep. These terraces, so steep that horses cannot be used, are cultivated entirely. by hand, even to the carrying up of baskets of manure, strapped upon the backs of men and women. So dense is the population of these districts and so great the pressure upon resources that when the green ends of the vines are cut off in August to hasten the ripening Fie. 87. — Stone walls hold the earth in Rhine slope vineyards worth $7000 per acre. Tower and castle of mediaeval barons who lived by their exactions from Rhine traders. Freeing the Rhine was one of the great steps in moderniz- ing Germany. of crops, they are carefully saved and fed to the goats, and when the vines are trimmed in winter the cuttings are sold for fuel. Owing to the scarcity of land, terrace vineyards are common on Italian hills and mountains. Nearly 200 terraces, one above the other, may be seen on the southern slope of the Apen- nines, near Lucca. THE VEGETABLE, FRUIT AND WINE INDUSTRIES 255 Spread of Wine Growing to New Countries. — There have been many attempts to establish wine growing in other countries, but for reasons already stated the progress has been surprisingly slow when we consider the vast areas in North and South America, north Africa, Australia, and Asia that are probably just as well suited to wine making as is Europe. The growth of sheep, cattle, and grains springs up in a new country in a decade, but the amount of capital, labor, and skill required for making wine, combined with the even greater handicap of a new brand, leaves the three original wine-growing countries overwhelm- ingly predominant. The colonies and frontiers may produce the bread and meat, as for decades they have done, but all of the colonies of Great Britain combined do not produce one-half of 1 per cent, of the world's wine. Roumania and Russia, pos- sessing the dense population to supply the necessary labor, have made greater progress in the last thirty years than any colony. In rate of increase (400 per cent, between 1880 and 1900) Roumania has led all other countries except the United States, and the wine districts of southwestern Russia, adjacent to Roumania, are increasing rapidly and in 1897 exported a surplus to Great Britain for the first time. Grapes thrive in Turkey, Asia Minor, Syria, Persia, Turkestan, and other parts of western and interior Asia, where travellers and explorers frequently find them of excellent quality and of local use, but not affording a basis for any commerce. Australia. — Australia has large vine-growing areas near her arid interior and it is admitted that the product of certain vine- yards in Victoria is practically as good as any wine in the world. Good wine is also produced in the adjacent states of south Australia. In New South Wales, the farmers have been driven to grape growing because the droughts, although they ruin the wheat, will not prevent a crop of grapes. Owing to the sparse population of Australia, however, its production is insignificant. Export, which would stimulate production, still labors under the handicap that the reputation of Australian wines has still to be made. South Africa. — South Africa claims to have, in the western part of Cape Colony near Cape Town, just the right conditions of soil, sunshine, and moisture to make it the best grape-growing 256 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY region in the world. The Dutch settlers succeeded well with French and Rhenish vines, and in 18.22 this region sent more wine to England than did France. The fungus and insect pests of the nineteenth century, however, have kept the industry down and the present production, though greater than that of Australia, is small. The government has recently made at- tempts to foster the industry, and the present small output is no index of the future. The ripening of the fruit in the spring- time, when we have nothing but expensive hot house products in northern latitudes, causes the export of some fine grapes to Great Britain along with the peaches and plums previously mentioned. South America. — South America has its grape districts upon the edges of the desert belt which cuts diagonally across the continent from northern Chile to southern Argentine Republic, between the eastern rain belt of the trade winds and the western rain belt of the westerlies. Chile is a large consumer of wine, the crop of 1909 amounting to 15 gallons per capita. This was grown on 159,000 acres, an area half as large as the German vineyard area, and located in the northern part of the great valley of Chile, a region supporting most of the agriculture and population of that country, and greatly resembling the valley of California in all respects. Near Santiago there is a splendid plain given over to intensive culture by irrigation and to the growth of grapes which are made into a wine of local fame. Chile has a small export of wine but, as from all other new wine regions, she has to meet the difficulty of convincing wine users that her output is as good as the established brands of Europe. In Argentine Republic the chief grape and fruit districts are dominated by French wine growers in the irrigated settlements of Mendoza and San Juan, watered by snow-fed streams from the nearby Andes and separated from the agricultural plains of the east by some hundreds of miles of level sheep and cattle ranges. Special trains carry fruit and a large part of the wine to Buenos Ayres, the largest city in the south temperate zone and in popu- lation a rival to Philadelphia. The value of the Argentine wine crop has reached $12,000,000 in one year. Uruguay also has some wine production, but like that upon the coast settlements of the Peruvian desert plain, it simply serves a local need. Some THE VEGETABLE, FRUIT AND WINE INDUSTRIES 257 European wine is imported by every country of South America, every country indeed, throughout the world where white men exist in large numbers. Grape Growing in the United States. — When the European colonists landed upon the shores of the United States and stocked their gardens with the plants and trees of Europe they were pained to find that all the grape vines promptly died from some mysterious kind of blight that destroyed the leaves. It was new fungi thriving in the heat and humidity of the eastern American climate, enemies to which the plant had never been subjected in cool west Europe or dry south Europe. Yet the colonists found in the American forests wild grape vines growing to prodigious size, climbing to the tops of the tallest trees and often reaching a thickness of half a foot or even more. From this stock the people of the eastern part of the United States have in three centuries evolved a number of varieties of edible and of wine grapes, their names, Concord, Clinton, Niagara, Delaware, Agawam, Catawba, Early Ohio, etc., showing their American origin. There are now two widely separated centers of commercial grape growing in the United States: The eastern, near the Great Lakes, and the western, in California. The grape is widely grown throughout the eastern and southern parts of the country as a garden crop, but the cold waves of the continental climate with their late spring frosts make it uncertain as a money crop except in localities where water bodies give frost protection. Consequently, the eastern grape belt lies close to the shores of Lake Erie, to a lesser extent to those of Lake Ontario, and to the five slender north and south lakes of New York, called the Finger Lakes. The vineyards of the Finger Lake district are upon the southern and western slopes of the hills along the eastern shores of the lakes, the prevalent west winds blowing across the waters in spring giving the desired temperature. The fact that New York state possesses the Finger Lakes and touches the two Great Lakes, Ontario and Erie, gives it leadership in eastern grape growing, while Ohio with a long stretch on Lake Erie is second, and Pennsylvania with one county on the lake is third. All along the southeastern shore of Lake Erie, especially on certain islands in the lake and even on the Canadian lee shore, 258 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY the grape field is much the most important field upon the farm and is often the entire dependence of the grower. The grapes of this eastern district are chiefly of the Concord and Niagara varieties which are much prized as table grapes and are widely shipped to the cities, small towns, and country districts of eastern and central states. They are far cheaper, sweeter, and also more generally liked than the edible grapes of central Europe. California, with her Mediterranean climate, has become a second Mediterranean country in other respects than as a pro- ducer of citrous and dried fruits. The climate has attracted Italian and Swiss vine growers who have formed colonies and grow the European grapes which thrive in this part of America. Two hundred and fifty thousand acres of land usually level and mostly in the great valley are devoted to grapes with a yield per acre greater 1 than that of any other region in the world. California grapes of European varieties are sent all over the eastern part of the United States, where they are sold at a price much higher than the Lake Erie grapes. Wine manufacture has been taken up with considerable success, and some of the prod- uct is exported, although the choice brands of Europe are far above it in reputation and price. Wine growing yields a commercial by-product of a character one would little expect, namely, argols or wine lees, the settlings in the wine vat or cask, of which we import over two million dollars' worth per year for the manufacture of cream of tartar, baking powder, and other drugs. REFERENCES See General References Corbett, L. C. Truck Farming in the Atlantic Coast States. Yearbook of the Department of Agriculture, 1907. Kellerman, Karl F. The Functions and Value of Soil Bacteria. Year- book of the Department of Agriculture, 1909. Powell, G. Harold. Co-operation in the Handling and Marketing of Fruit. Yearbook of the Department of Agriculture, 1910. Sttjbenrach, A. V. The Handling of Deciduous Fruits on the Pacific Coast. Yearbook of the Department of Agriculture, 1909. 1 This high yield is due partly to the richness of the deep valley soil, new to grapes, and partly to the fact that the European growers devote themselves to varieties of special qualities but often with low yield. THE VEGETABLE, FRUIT AND WINE INDUSTRIES 259 Powell, G. Haeold. The Status of the American Lemon Industry. Year- book of the Department of Agriculture, 1907. Kellebman, Kakl F. Nitrogen Gathering Plants. Yearbook of the Department of Agriculture, 1910. Sake, E. R. Prune Culture in the Pacific Northwest. Circular U. S. Department of Agriculture. Parloa, Maria. Farmers' Bulletin 203,359. The Canning of Fruits and Vegetables. U. S. Department of Agriculture. CHAPTER VII SUGAR Source and History of Sugar. — Nearly all plants have it in their sap at some time in their growth so there are many sources of sugar. Many plants store sugar which can be used in other seasons, just as other plants store and use starch. All fruits have some sugar, the grape being especially rich, and a consider- able portion of sugar is even found in the onion. The more important of the sugar-storing plants are beets, carrots, and parsnips, which hoard it for use in the second year of their growth to make their heavy top, blossom and seed. In the tropical zone the date palm, Palmyra palm, and coconut palm, are all used to some extent for sugar manufacture in the lands of their growth. The American Indian got sugar from maple trees. The sugar cane, a plant much resembling an earless stalk of corn filled with sweet juice, grows throughout the moister parts of the tropics and in its natural condition was so superior to other sugar yielders that it was practically the only source of commercial sugar supply until the nineteenth century. An exception should be made for the primeval sugar supply of honey (the sugar of blossoms), which was much more important in past centuries than it is since other sources of sugar have been developed. The general and heavy use of sugar among temperate zone people is recent and it has rapidly passed from luxury to a neces- sity. In 1589 a pound of sugar cost as much as a quarter of veal. In 1700, 50,000 tons per year were used in all countries of Europe. At the present time, that quantity lasts the United States about five days. Within the last century there has been a seven-fold increase in the world's commerce in sugar, and the people of the world are using more and more per capita each year. 260 SUGAR 261 The Perfection of the Sugar Beet.— Sugar is one of the few commodities in which there is competition in production between the temperate zones and the tropic regions. During the last sixty years, there has been a strong competition between cane- sugar producers and beet-sugar producers, and it will doubtless continue for decades to come. It is probably due to the Napoleonic Wars that the beet has become a great source of sugar supply. The military and com- mercial blockades of these wars cut off France and often the rest of Europe from the cane-sugar supply of tropic colonies. At the order of Napoleon French scientists examined hundreds of plants in the search for a promising sugar supply. Among them the grape and the beet, were most seriously considered because of their high contents of sugar, but industrial effort centered itself upon the beet which, the Germans first used in 1799. In 1806 the French government offered a bounty for beet-sugar production, and in 1811 Napoleon ordered 80,000 acres of beets to be grown for sugar. Only one sugar factory survived the Napoleonic Wars and the renewed competition of cane, but the industry lingered along until finally by the middle of the nineteenth century it had become firmly established. The beet-sugar industry affords us one of the best examples of the service that science renders to man. In 1836 it took 18 pounds of beets to make a pound of sugar; in 1882 about 10 pounds sufficed; in 1904 less than 7 pounds yielded a pound of sugar. This great improvement has been brought about chiefly in Germany, where on large sugar plantations trained scientists, often doctors of philosophy and chemistry, devote their whole time to improving the sugar content of the beets. Samples are cut from the most promising roots and tested; the best beets only are saved to produce seed the next year, and so on for generation after generation, always selecting the best. This process of systematic selection has, within the life span of man, trebled the sugar content of beets and along with improve- ments in the process of sugar extraction, made possible one of the great agricultural industries of the temperate zone. The process of improvement has not yet ended. The per cent, of sugar in the beet crop of the United States rose from 14.8 per cent, to 16.35 per cent, between 1901 and 1910. In eight years the 262 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY percentage of sugar extracted rose from 10.95 per cerjt. to 12.56 per cent. — 14 per cent, increase in the amount of sugar pro- duced per ton. Climatic Requirement and European Development of the Beet-sugar Industry. — While the beet will grow in a very wide range of territory from the tropic nearly to the Arctic, the conditions for beet-sugar production are exacting — a moderate amount of spring and summer rain and a summer of moderate heat, but not too hot, and a cool, dry autumn. Corn-growing climates, for example, are in the main too warm in mid-summer, but as the cool climates of England and Sweden suffice, it is plain that corn and sugar beets are rare competitors. Irrigation, especially in America, gives the best conditions for beet growing and this rarely suits corn. In Europe the best region for beets is the great northern plain from Normandy to central Russia. Germany is the leading producer and, in 1900, so great had the industry become that 60 per cent, of the German product was exported. Germany and Belgium began to export shortly after 1870, Russia in 1888, France in 1889, and Holland in 1895. Spain depended entirely upon the sugar from Cuba and the Philippines while she ruled them, but after losing these posses- sions in 1898, she began at once to grow sugar beets in her northern provinces with such astonishing rapidity that her local production rose from 2 million pounds in 1896 to 113 million in 1899, and 207 million in 1903, when the import of foreign sugar practically ceased. Southern Sweden and southern Denmark have also taken up the industry, but have not yet become sugar exporters. Relation of Sugar-beet Growing to Intensive Agriculture. — The growth of the sugar beet is an intensive agricultural industry. It can be prosecuted only in fertile mellow soil, rich in lime, and neither too clayey nor too sandy, finely prepared, and plowed so deeply that a sub-soil plow must often follow the ordinary plow. Caring for the crop is most laborious because of the large amount of hand labor required. The young plant is so small that only human fingers can rescue it from the up-springing weeds, so that men, women, and children, especially women and children, go into the fields in nearly all beet regions, including the United States, and spend days upon their knees weeding SUGAR 263 the young beets. A little later, when the plants have become established, they must be thinned out with the hoe. Thus far the inventors of machinery have been unable to replace either of these kinds of hand labor. After the plant is established there must be many cultiva- tions, and in the late autumn the beets are plowed out of the ground and the tops pulled off. The roots are then piled, covered with straw and sometimes with earth, until delivered to fac- tories by wagon, train, or boat throughout the winter months. Fig. 88. — Women and children weeding a sugar-beet field, western United States. (U. S. Dept. Agr.) The beet-sugar factory to be economical must be large, costing a million dollars or more. The beets are ground to pieces, the sugar soaked out of them in hot water, and finally crystallized and sent to the refinery to be put into final form. It is common for American beet-sugar factories to have refineries also. The by-products of the beet field serve to enhance greatly the usefulness of this crop in the intensive agriculture of a populous country. The leaves and tops of the beets are worth in Germany, for cattle food, $4.50 to $5.75 per acre, which makes an interesting comparison with the $9.37 which was the farm value of the average acre of wheat in the United States for ten years, 1896-1905. 264 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY The pulp from which the sugar has been extracted is taken back by the farmers and fed to cattle, and the average value of this in Germany is $10.40 per acre, whereas the average American hay crop in the years 1896-1905 was worth on the American farm $14.41 per acre, a figure that is less than the value of combined pulp and leaves of the German beet crop. It is, therefore, plain that beet growing plays an important part in the cattle-keeping agriculture of the small farms of north Europe. The German beet farms are almost universally well cared for, because the beet-manufacturing companies, to assure themselves an abundance of beets, insist in their contracts with the grower that a careful rotation of crops shall be followed. Furthermore, the care and fertilizing required by the beets leaves the field in excellent condition for the production of a fine crop of small grain the succeeding year. This results in such increased yields of grain per acre that it is said that the addition of beets to the crop rotation has not reduced the total grain yield of the beet districts. THE ACREAGE, PRODUCTION, AND VALUE OF THE LEADING CROPS IN GERMANY FOR FIVE AVERAGE YEARS, 1898-1902 Crop Per cent, tilled land in Ger- many Area (acres) Production (bushels) Estimated value (dollars) Average value per acre (dollars) Rye Oats Wheat Barley .... Potatoes... Sugar beets 23 16 8 6 12 2 14,696,478 10,223,409 4,709,031 4,175,750 7,902,374 1,091,632 345,771,316 bu. 485,647,752 bu. 130,038,110 bu. 139,959,940 bu. 528,094,827 bu. 14,893,089 tons $302,646,524 259,898,923 135,046,363 108,000,331 318,651,012 60,167,934 $21 25 29 26 40 55 The surprisingly small acreage that produces the European beet crop is another proof of its fitness for intensive agriculture. Belgium, the most densely peopled of all western countries, has only 3 per cent, of her area in this crop, but has long been a regular sugar exporter. Germany, with the most fully developed SUGAR 265 266 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY agriculture of any of the large nations, is a heavy exporter, yet the table of various acreages and their percentage of the tilled land shows that but 2 per cent, of the German farm is in beets, while potatoes, the main crop of all Germany, occupy six times as much, and rye more than thirteen times as much. European Centers of Production. — The map of beet production in Europe shows that while its growth is scattered throughout central Europe from northwestern Spain to Moscow, there are four centers of importance. The greatest is in central Germany, near Magdeburg, where beets occupy from one-tenth to one- seventh of all the cultivated land. Here the beet fields spread in great expanses over the level, perfectly tilled plains and while the peasant children pull weeds, their mothers may be seen plowing the beets, using at times the family cow for a draft animal. During the winter the manufacture of the sugar occupies much of the laboring population and the by- products help to feed the animals on the farms. This dis- trict is well situated for export of sugar because it is on the navigable Elbe, which carries nine-tenths of the traffic in this territory. The beet region of Holland, Belgium, and the north of France between Paris and the English Channel is economically one region separated only by imaginary political boundaries across which the beets are freely passed to the nearest factories without tax or duty. Northern Austria, in the plains around Prague, also on the navigable Elbe, has the greatest intensity of beet culture in all Europe. In southwestern Russia a large part of the level plain centering in the Kief district, is a beet section where, although the yield is only about half that of Germany and their sugar content lower, beets are extensively grown. Within the ten years from 1892 to 1902, the Russian share of European sugar production increased from 13 to 23 per cent. Governmental Influence and the Brussels Conference. — The sugar industry is one to which governments have given much attention and about which many laws for both protection and taxation have been made. In many countries the sugar indus- try exists only by the special privilege of government protection. Throughout central Europe sugar is generally high in price SUGAR 267 because practically all the producing nations have a protective tariff to keep out foreign sugar and in addition an excise or local tax of several cents a pound on sugar. Thus, in 1902, the German excise tax was two cents and the French tax five and one- fourth cents per pound. The consequent high prices lowered sugar consumption. England, which has no tax on sugar and whose sugar price is therefore the cheapest in the world, had in 1902 a sugar consumption of 90 pounds per person; that of the United States with a two cent tax 1 was 71; while the Russians and Spaniards ate one-sixth as much, the French one-fourth, the Germans less than a half, and the Italians but a tenth. When the production in Germany, Austria, and other countries of Europe was greater than the consumption, they could not with- out loss sell it in foreign countries until after the excise tax had been repaid by the government. For example, the German manu- facturer who paid his excise of two cents per pound, could not get more than three cents per pound for his sugar in England, leaving him one cent for the sugar unless the government re- funded the excise upon the exported sugar. This the government did, and to encourage the foreign trade, the export refund or "drawback" was usually larger than the excise, and, therefore, resulted in a bounty on export sugar. The industry was further complicated by the formation of sugar trusts by the refiners in Germany and other countries. There refiners' trusts raised .the price to the people of the home country, and because of large profits from this source could afford to sell the surplus abroad at exceedingly low prices. When Germany, France, Austria-Hungary, Holland, Belgium, and Russia were thus partly paying for the exported sugar, it became an expensive business for those governments, but one from which the two great importing countries, United States and England, chiefly profited. These . bounties so stimulated production on the continent of Europe that surpluses of sugar accumulated and the competition with cane sugar became so keen that the British sugar producing colonies of Jamaica, the other West Indian Islands and Guiana suffered great depression through the reduced price of sugar. To protect her colonies, England threat- 'The United States has had for many years an import duty of two cents or more per pound. 268 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY ened to lay on all sugar imported into that country a tax that would just equal the bounty that it had received in the export country. This would benefit the British treasury at the direct Tons 8,500,000 8,000,000 7,500,000 6,500,000 6,000,000 5,000,000 4,000,000 3,000,000 2,500,000 2,000,000 1,500,000 1,500,000 1,000,000 500,000 1 1 1 1 Jl i r< s h Beet b ° i\ S s 1 1 1 , ; 1 ,< i 7 r f \ t~' -V .A i -* \' _^ V" Fig. 90.— World production of cane and beet sugar, 1853-54 to 1910-11. expense of continental treasuries and to seek means of relief, a sugar convention was called at Brussels in 1901 and 1902, at which most of the European countries agreed to stop all export bounties whatever. As a result the world's sugar export went SUGAR 269 forward on a more normal basis. The removal of export bounties lowered the prices in exporting countries and raised it in import- ing countries. Thus England saved her colonies from the com- petition of sugar made cheap by export bounty and the people of beet-growing countries had for the first time cheap sugar for home consumption. This made instant increase in consump- tion in beet-growing countries. In Germany it increased 50 per cent, in a year and in France it nearly doubled. Competition of Beet and Cane. — During the fifty years before the Brussels convention the proportion of beet sugar had in- creased from 14 per cent, of the total world production to 64 per cent., but the revival of the cane industry in Cuba and the smaller planting of beets in Europe, after the Brussels conven- tion, caused it to fall to 58 per cent, in three years and in the six years following the Brussels Convention, beet-sugar production increased 300,000 tons, while cane sugar increased a million tons, to the considerable concern of sugar growers of Europe. During the four years 1908-11, the world's average produc- tion of cane sugar exceeded that of beet sugar. Beet-sugar Growing in the United States. — As a natural result of the labor and climate required, the sugar-beet industry was late in its establishment in the United States, although we have great land resources for it. We had a production of but 3,000 tons, in 1890, but, stimulated by a high tariff made price, it reached 400,000 tons and passed the cane crop in 1906, and the pro- duction is still increasing, the crop of 1911 having exceeded 600,000 tons. The possible beet area of the United States is several times as large as the possible cane area, and seems to follow rather closely the July isotherm of 70° which traverse the whole length of California, thence to Utah, down the west side of the Rocky Mountains to central New Mexico, thence up the Rocky Mountain front through Colorado, Wyoming, and Montana, then bending above the corn belt, passes eastward through the Dakotas, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, Ontario, past Buffalo and Albany to Portland, Maine. The sugar beet thus offers a money crop to the American farmer in those regions where the climate is a little too cool for the maximum development of corn. The beet with its heavy labor requirements did not interest 270 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY the American farmer while corn land was still to be had for the taking. It had its practical beginning in the early nineties, 110,000 acres were grown in 1899, 292,000 acres in 1903, and 470,000 acres in 191 1. The relative importance to some American localities is as great as in any part of Germany. Thus, Eddy County, New Mexico, had 15 per cent, of the improved land in beets, while Bay County, Michigan, had 13, and Ventura County, California, and Spokane County, Washington, had 6 per cent. each. Fig. 91. — The line through the shaded area is the July Isotherm of 70°F. The shaded area shows the zone in which the sugar beet grows best and the dots indicate the location of the beet-sugar refineries in the United States. It is quite common in the beet-growing districts of the United States for the hand labor to be done on contract by newly ar- rived immigrants. A peasant from Roumania, Hungary, or Poland, accustomed to the growth of beets, and to a low standard of living, will contract at so much per acre to take care of the beet fields. With the assistance of his wife and children he then takes entire charge of the crop for the American farmer. The intensive character, large labor cost, mellow soil require- ments and high yield of beet growing fit it especially to irrigated land. Irrigation also insures the dry October, a month in SUGAR 271 which warm rains can do so much injury to the beets. The adjustment of these factors gives more than one center of beet production to each of the four irrigation states of California, Colorado, Idaho, and Utah. The adaptation of the beet to rather light and sandy soil makes it important in Michigan and Percentage California 27.0 Colorado 83.1 111.8 ' Thousand Tons 129.9 Percentage "|" Million Long Tons Germany 31.6 Michigan 22.8 Utah 8.7 Idaho 3.7 Wisconsin 3.5 Austria-Hungary ig.7 All others 11.2 1 110.0 42.1 18.1 17.0 53.9 Russia 19.1 United States (contiguous) 6.2 All others 23.4 1.37 0.43 1 1.64 I Total 482.2 Fig. 92. — United States beet-sugar production, three-year average, 1909-10 to 1911-12. Total 6.97 Fig. 93. — World production of beet sugar, three-year average, 1908-09 to 1911. to a lesser extent in Wisconsin on the glacial areas too far north for corn and not well suited to grass. New York and Ohio are on the southern margin of beet growing and have one beet-sugar factory each. The plant for extracting the sugar from beets is so large and 272 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY costly that it requires hundreds of acres of beets to keep one running through the fall and winter season, and it must run for many years to be profitable to the owners. Hence it is to their interest to encourage beet growing and in America, as in Ger- many, the sugar manufacturer, through contracts with the far- mer, controls the crop rotation, the method of beet growing and, to the community's benefit, becomes virtually a teacher of agriculture. Climatic Requirements, Harvesting, and Distribution of Sugar Cane. — The battle between cane and beet is carried on at long range, the plants themselves never meet. The sugar cane is as distinctly limited to warm climates as beet is to cool ones. It will grow on the edges of the temperate zones in such districts as Louisiana, Natal, New Zealand, and Cape Colony, and has been grown at 32° north latitude in Spain and 31° south in New Zealand, but it is at home and does its best only where free from frost. It invades the frost zone only where there is a long growing season, and freedom from competition, as by tariffs and bounties. The best crops require such conditions as exist in Cuba, Java, Brazil, and India, where there is a temperature of 75 or 80° F. the year round and a rainfall of 60 inches or its equivalent by irrigation. The necessity of much sunshine gives irrigation a great advantage. THE GROWING OF CANE Cane does not require such careful handwork as the beet. It is cultivated with plows, not hoes ; by men, not by women and children ; and even the steam plow may do much of the work, as has been proved in the British island of Trinidad and in Hawaii. The method of planting consists in putting cuttings in the ground, or, as in Louisiana and Cuba, in laying in the bottom of a furrow a row of cane stalks which sprout up from every joint. After eight months' or more growth and cultivation the leaves are stripped off, and the stalks are cut by hand because no machine has been found to do it, and carried away to the factory. The transport of the cane to the factory is a serious problem. A good crop is 15 or 20 tons per acre. The fields are often muddy and the distance to the factory is increasing with the SUGAR 273 size of the factory, which is large. In backward countries, cane is sometimes carried on mule back, but in the great shipping districts, carts drawn by oxen or mules are used, while the best sugar equipped plantations have portable railway track placed in the fields and diminutive plantation locomotives to pull the cane cars. Cane resembles beet-sugar making in the size of the plant required to economically extract the juice and dispose of the by-products. Several thousand acres of cane make a good unit. The guaranteeing of this amount of cane year after year is difficult if many independent tropic farmers must be depended upon. This tends to make the sugar company grow its own cane — a process that is much easier than the growing of beets by a corporation on a huge scale. Thus we find in the Argentine province of Jujuy one of the leading plantations of that country employing (1911) 5,160 workers (of whom 4,520 were Indians at thirty cents per day for women, and forty cents per day for men), with 19 miles of permanent railway, 19 miles of temporary railway, 600 cars, and seven locomotives. Cane growing is a far less scientific agriculture than is beet growing. Most plantations in Cuba and even in the United States are still growing the crop year after year on the same ground without adequate crop rotation. As this cannot continue indefinitely, the establishment of crop rotation will require larger area and increase the difficulty of carrying cane to the mills. The Distribution of Cane Growing.— The adaptation of the sugar cane to practically all moist lowlands lying between Louisiana and Argentina in the New World and between southern Italy and India, Natal and Queensland in the Old World, gives an easy source of sugar to all tropic peoples. Cane growing is a local industry in practically all such countries, although only a few of them export it, because, while a crude ox-driven mill will suffice to crush the cane for local use, it cannot compete in the world market. In India, for example, it is estimated that there is an annual production of over 2 million tons, more than in any other country, but it does not enter into foreign com- merce because all this and more is consumed locally. Sugar cane is grown in the lowlands of Mexico and of each of the Central American countries, and also in every South American country except Chile. But throughout most of this 274 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY Percentage British India 25.9 Java 14.8 "United States (including ^ q Porto Rico and Hawaii) All others 25.9 2.1 1.6 1.2 region the process of manufacture is crude, the conditions of transportation, of labor, and of capital are unsuitable for the development of a large cane-sugar export, although there are in tropic America large areas of excellent cane land. This is especially true on the shores where the trade wind blows. The lowlands of the Caribbean, coast of Mexico, and Central America are excellent examples of such lands. The export supply of cane sugar comes only from especially rich plains and fa- vored tropical shores, such as Cuba, Java, the Philippines, Hawaii, and Brazil. At no place is cane sugar grown for ex- port in locations distant from the seashore and from ocean transportation. Sugar Export from the Mainland of North and South America. — The only export of cane sugar from the North American continent is a little from Nica- ragua at times between the intervals of chaos accompanying the frequent civil wars. South America has three sugar ex- porters, each producing under distinctly different conditions. The British Colony of Guiana on the northeast coast of South America is one of the most interesting of cane-sugar producers, showing intensive cultivation and the untouched wilderness side by side. Large areas of coast swamp have three-year been reclaimed from the sea along the i9i"iL e ' 1908 ~ 09 *° north shore in the same wa ^ the Dutch (the original settlers of Guiana) have done in Holland. This is the more unusual because most of the country remains a great forest absolutely uninhabited, save for a few uncounted savages. The explanation of this unused land is to be found in the climate which is so ill suited to white colonists that they number but 5 per cent, of the total popula- 2.1 Total 8.1 Fig. 94. — Production of cane sugar, SUGAR 275 tion and merely occupy positions under the government and in the management of stores and plantations. In the attempt to people this fertile desert and work the productive lands, the government has permitted the recent importation of thousands of East Indian coolies accustomed to growing rice and sugar cane. This has led to the rapid increase of rice growing along with the continuance of sugar-cane growing which has been for many years the main export product of this colony. The reclaimed swamp land is very fertile, has a large rainfall, and, in addition the flat and level dyke lands, are easily irrigated for both sugar and rice. Further than that the drainage ditches serve as canals for the boats that carry cane from field to factory. In contrast to the capitalistic and highly scientific sugar in- dustry of Guiana, Brazil has a sugar industry whose methods have not changed in a century. There is a small sugar export along 1,800 miles of coast in the central regions in that country, but it has declined with the decline of price and now comes chiefly from Pernambuco and Maceio, points just south of the eastern point of the continent where the southeastern trade winds make heavy rainfall on the moist low plain near the Atlantic. Peru is the third South American sugar exporter. In that country the sugar plantations are located in the fertile rainless coast desert from which the high Andes cut off the moisture- laden east winds from the Atlantic. A few streams fed by the Andean snows and flowing down to the Pacific save this Peruvian plain from a condition of hopeless barrenness. There is sufficient water to irrigate parts of the valleys, and to make possible a luxuriant growth of cane, which along with alfatfa, orchards, and gardens makes a strong color contrast with the brown desert beyond the last irrigation ditch. The yield per acre is good, because of the proper amounts of sunshine, and water that irrigation affords, but there is small room for the extension of Peruvian production. The Argentine Republic has an isolated cane-sugar region in the subtropic province of Tucuman, latitude 28° south. The production per acre is rather low, but the total production is sufficient for the national supply. Sugar in the West Indies. — The history and description of 276 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY sugar growing in the West Indian Islands is in itself an economic and geographic study of some magnitude with many instructive phases. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, these islands were much prized by the colony-owning powers of Europe, and they were the center of the world's sugar production. At the end of the eighteenth century they were in a high degree of prosperity, based on plantations owned by Europeans, worked by African slaves, and largely given over to the growth of export sugar and rum, distilled, then as now, from the cane juice. The emancipation of the slaves brought decline in the sugar crop of many of the West Indian Islands, but in none so much as Hayti where political chaos succeeded French rule and the jungle is crowding more and more into the abandoned sugar fields. Latterly, the sugar growers of the West Indies, particularly the British West Indies, have had the severe competition of European beet sugar, which has further depressed the prosperity of the sugar colonies. Sugar is, however, an important export from Trinidad, Barbados, and Jamaica. Until 1880 it was practically the only export from Guadeloupe and Martinique, but since this date tobacco, fruit, and cacao have been claiming increased attention from planters. The discontent of British West Indian colonies, some of which desired to become possessions of the United States to get advantage of free import of their sugar into the United States, was one of the reasons leading up to the British action that produced the Brussels sugar conference of 1903. The advantage of free admission of sugar into the United States is well shown in Porto Rico. After its annexation, a decade of free admission of sugar into the United States increased the crop of an island less than half as large as New Jersey, from 50,000 to 250,000 tons, and increased the value of the export from $2,500,000 to $19,000,000. This focusing of attention on sugar has caused the coffee export to decline from $7,500,000 to $4,500,000. The sugar is grown on the coast lowlands and the increase has come about largely through the consolidation of many small plantations and the modernizing of factories by American capital. The same process of capitalistic consolidation is in progress in the British West Indies, in some of which, as in Barbados, the in- dustry has survived from colonial periods in a rather primitive condition. SUGAR 277 In addition to its part in the sugar industry the island of Barbados is interesting as an example of the way man supports himself upon the earth. This island of 166 square miles has nearly 1,200 people to the square mile. Two-thirds of the island is cultivated and on half of it the tilled land is in sugar, which is allowed to stand three years and is then followed by cotton, corn, or potatoes. Laborers at farm work earn thirty to forty cents per day and the women half as much. "Field work is all done by hand. Sugar lands are cleared by hand labor and put in condition for the next crop with spade and fork. I saw very few, not over five plows during a forty-mile drive" (U. S. Con. Rep., Oct. 3, 1911). There is a strong contrast between this small-scale, semi- oriental industry of Barbados and the scientific and large scale operations of Cuba and Hawaii. Cuba. — Cuba is, next to India, the greatest cane-sugar producer in the world, yielding at times one-fourth of the total produce, and leading all others in the amount exported. About half of all the cultivated land in Cuba is in cane fields, which shows the great dependence of the people upon this crop. In a recent year sugar occupied 78 per cent, of cultivated lands in the Prov- ince of Matanzas; in Santa Clara Province, 71 per cent.; in Puerto Principe and Santiago 35 per cent.; and in Havana, where fruit and vegetables are important, 27 per cent. ; and in Pina del Rio, the tobacco province of the West, it was but 6 per cent. Normally the island has been producing during the last decade of the nineteenth and first decade of the twentieth centuries about 1,100,000 tons per year, but the war with Spain cut this down in 1896 to less than one-fourth and destroyed seven-eights of the sugar mills. Under the stable government that followed independence, it recovered its normal position by 1903, and has since taken a higher position than ever in the world's sugar market, the crop of 1910 being 1,900,000 tons. Cuban sugar plantations are usually of large extent, most of them all owned by Europeans or Americans. The use of plan- tation railroads with locomotives to haul the cane to large factories is quite common. The plantations are being enlarged and improved machinery is being put in to reduce costs since labor cost is rising and the price of sugar declining. The present 278 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY price of two and one-fourth cents per pound at plantation leaves some profit. Cuba has been able to produce such great quantities of sugar because she has had a fairly stable government, a population superior to that of most tropic countries, and an abundance of good, rich, well-drained sugar land. Only one-fourteenth of the sugar land is now in use, so that the industry can be very unscien- tific. When land has been exhausted the industry has been able to move, generally to the eastward from Havana where the indus- try had its first center. The increasing labor scarcity is at present setting the limit of Cuban sugar growing. Hawaii. — The Hawaiian Islands, with a total area nearly as great as Massachusetts, are second only to Cuba as a source of sugar import for the American market. The sugar yield per acre is the largest in the world, due first to the virgin fertility of the phenomenal soil, decayed lava from the great Hawaiian volcanoes. Fine yields are further guaranteed and produced by irrigation on the lee side of the islands. In the absence of suitable rivers at the right elevation for stream diversion the water is gathered near the sea level from streams and wells and pumped up, sometimes hundreds of feet, through iron pipes and spread over the fertile lava slopes, making some of the most spectacular plantations in the world. Hawaiian crops have averaged over 9,000 pounds of sugar to the acre, twice the harvest of West Indies or Java, and these islands in turn yield better than cane fields upon the rich delta of the Mississippi where the climate is too cool for the best growth of cane. 1 Hawaii has had the especial advantage of receiving a higher price than any other sugar exporter except Porto Rico. This high price was due, before the islands were annexed in 1898, to the reciprocity treaty of 1876, admitting Hawaiian sugar to the United States without the payment of duty. The 11,000 tons produced in 1875 grew to 250,000 in 1899, and 506,000 in 1911. Since annexation all of the export goes to the United States free of duty. This special privilege to the sugar growers of Hawaii has led to high profits and the suppression of other industries in the islands. 1 Rains of December, 1911, were reported to have caused a loss of $8,- 500,000 to the sugar-cane crop of Louisiana. SUGAR 279 These profits began when the islands had a few thrifty white people and many easy-going natives, giving an admirable oppor- tunity for the formation of great estates which loudly called for workers. These came from China until the Chinese exclusion treaty shut them out in 1898. Then came Japanese until the Japanese government checked their emigration to the islands. Then came laborers from the Philippines, Portugal, and Russia. As an accompaniment and cause of this population condition the sugar is grown on a few vast estates. One company reported for 1910 having harvested 6,448 acres yielding 56,865 tons of sugar, an average yield of 8.76 tons of sugar per acre. It took only 6.89 tons of cane to make a ton of sugar (U. S. Con. Rep., May 4, 1911). This cane is exceptionally rich, the yield phe- nomenally large, as were the plantation profits of $2,261,000. The Advanced Development in Javanese Sugar Growing. — Java, an island about the size of New York, is very remarkable in the world's commercial geography. Forty per cent, of the land is cultivated. It supports a population of 30 million who yet have food products for export. The chief export is cane sugar, of which it furnishes about one-fifth of the world's crop, being second only to Cuba and India. In sparsely peopled countries like Cuba, sugar can often be grown on newly cleared land, and as the cane will live for many years with an annual cutting, new sugar lands are often made to give six or eight or ten crops before replanting. In Java, the larger area under cultivation makes it impossible to keep moving to new land, hence the most scientific agriculture to be found in any cane- growing region. Since the first cutting of canes, following the plowing and plant- ing, is always the best, a field is allowed to yield but one crop, as is the case in Louisiana because of frost. This is followed the next year by beans, then by corn, then rice, then back to sugar. Under this systematic cultivation and a complex system of government control which at times amounts to compulsory labor, the sugar output increased three-fold in the twenty years following 1884. When the Cuban supply was temporarily stopped by the devastation accompanying the War of 1895-98, Java played an important part in supplying the United States, sending to her in 1899 as much as 71 per cent, of the crop. This 280 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY meant that every other day throughout the year, a tramp steamship skirted the coast of Java, loading 600 pound bamboo baskets of sugar for the American consumer, 10,000 miles away. After the United States, China is Java's best customer. The rest of the sugar goes to Japan, India, Australia, and other eastern countries, practically none of it going to the mother country, Holland, or any other part of Europe, because of the beet supply. The Philippine Islands have admirable soil, temperature and rainfall for the growth of sugar. The sugar resources are much greater than those of Java, which is but a third as large; but the population is 8 million rather than 30, there is no Dutch Govern- ment with a system of compulsory labor, the industrious Chinese are excluded, and the high price of hemp and coprah have given other outlets for enterprise, and the United States has taxed the sugar when it reached the United States. The result is a fairly stationary sugar industry with smaller crops than were produced between 1880 and 1898. The methods of extraction and manu- facture have always been wasteful, but improvement is expected as a result of a campaign of agricultural education now in progress in that archipelago. Mauritius, Reunion and Egypt. — Sugar is the predominating export from the two tropic islands of Mau- ritius (British, 713 square miles) and Reunion (French, 970 square miles) in the Indian Ocean near Madagas- car. They have a combined popula- tion of over half a million, of whom a large part are industrious coolies brought from India and China, so that these small lands play a comparatively large r61e in sugar commerce, exporting nearly all of their quarter of a million ton crop. Egypt has excellent resources of soil, sunshine and irrigation water to grow sugar, but she plays an unimportant role in this respect because her population of 930 per square mile demands rice, corn and beans, whereof the acreage far exceeds the sugar acreage. Fig. 95.— The Nile Delta surrounded by the desert shown in dots. One of the first oases in the world with a close counterpart in the Imperial Valley of California. SUGAR 281 The Supply and Production of Sugar In the United States. — The United States, with a sugar consumption of over 3 1/2 million tons, has been growing cane sugar for a century, beet sugar since 1890, yet our import increases year after year, in spite of the fact that our home product has trebled within twenty years. Cane Sugar In the United States. — The home-grown cane-sugar supply has had small chance of supplying the huge home demand Fig. 96. — Lifting water by the rocker process in Egypt. One of the many laborious processes by which the eastern peoples get water to their crops. because the areas suitable for cane growing are limited, and inferior to tropic districts. The superiority of the tropics is in climate rather than soil. The freezing of the American winter makes it necessary to plant the cane each year in Louisiana and then often interferes with the crop. In the frost-free climates there are records of fifty yearly cuttings from one planting, and in parts of Porto Rico it has lived and been cut for twenty years, while the Cuban plantations regularly cut eight or ten crops from one planting. Those of Louisiana must plant annually four 282 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY tons to the acre, while the average yield is 12 to 15 tons per acre. There is the further handicap in the expensive labor of planting, occasional frost injury, and the fact that Cuban cane yields more heavily and has one-fourth to one-third more sugar in it per ton than that of Louisiana. These factors combine to make it plain that our cane-sugar industry is one which, like our beet sugar industry, could not survive without the high price produced by a protective tariff. Tons 660,000 500,000 450,000 400,000 350,000 300,000 250,000 200,000 150,000 100,000 50,000 0, / / / / \ / / / / > / ---" ll s \ — ». / I 1 i \ *' .,- 1 1 1- t / / / / / / / J / / Can Bee c Su ,Su gar ;ar m ^m - — — -'' ■-" "**"" , ""^- / Or-itNeoTjiOcot-oocn 0,-<(JiCO-VincOE-QO Fig. 97. — United States sugar production, 1890-1911. Owing to these climatic limitations cane-sugar production, even with tariff aid, only attains importance in the southern third of Louisiana, a coast strip in eastern Texas and a few locations in Florida. The sugar territory of southern Louisiana is part of the SUGAR 283 swampy flood plain of the Mississippi River. The only tillable land is within a mile or two of the Mississippi, or other streams, where the deposits of the overflowing streams have built up a little land a few feet above the general swamp level. In two of the parishes (counties) of Louisiana (St. Mary's and Terribone), over half of the cultivated area was recently in sugar, while in seven other counties it was over 25 per cent, and increasing. The total cane-sugar crop of the United States is not increasing and only amounts to about 4 pounds per capita for our people. The limitation is not set by land possibilities, for it is reported that we have 10 million acres of good cane land and now cultivate one twenty-fifth of it. It should be kept in mind that this same land, where drained, is good for rice, cotton, corn, and many forage plants and meat production. The American cane-sugar growers have always had to combat labor scarcity as well as troubles of climate, and above all the uncertainties of the tariff. The extraction of cane molasses for local use is a simple proc- ess rather widely distributed in the south, and a little cane is grown for this purpose as far north as Arkansas and eastern North Carolina. Cane Sugar as a Local Supply Crop. — Beet sugar is only edible after it has been through the machinery of a great refinery. In contrast to this cane juice is a prized article of food in all stages of manufacture, and is often sucked directly from the cane itself, which is nature's stick of candy for the tropics, where it is widely used in that simple way. Living and yielding for years beside the native's palm hut, the cane patch is a pleasing element in that completeness of support which the tropic climate yields to man with so little labor on his part. Crushed by ox or man power between rude rollers and boiled in the family kettle, it makes a cheaper sugar supply than the grocery store yields in the land of frost. The cane is an important and widely distributed source of food throughout the thousands of Polynesian islands from Australia to Singapore, and thence to Hawaii, 6,000 miles to the eastward. It becomes an industry where the human element is strong, as in Java. In the Fiji Islands there is an important cane-sugar industry, producing under British management about one-fifth as much as the cane-sugar crop of the United States. The 284 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY chief market for this sugar is in the neighboring islands of New Zealand. In the warmer part of Australia there is a very large area of admirable cane land, especially in Queensland, but the population is less than one per square mile, and the strenuous desire of the Australian commonwealth to remain a white man's Percentage " Percentage Cuba 21.7 Dutch East Indies 20.3 Germany 13.7 Austria-Hungary 12.0 Prance 3.6 Russia 3.4 Mauritius 3.1 All others 23.2 Million Pounds 1670.9 500.1 479.6 435.2 8217.9 Total 13911.0 Fig. 98. — World's sugar export, three- year average, 1908-10. United States 30.0 United Kingdom 27.3 British India 9.6 China 4.7 Canada 3.7 Japan 2.6 Turkey 2.3 1 ~ France 2.0 Switzerland 1.6 All others 16.2 Million Pounds 3910.2 1262.0 620.1 498.8 336.4 302.6 266.5 208.6 2108.8 Total 13096.0 Fig. 99. — World's sugar import, three- year average, 1908-10^ land has caused the enactment of laws prohibiting the admission of the colored laborers (Hindoo, Chinese, or South Sea Islanders) who had been the planter's dependence. As white laborers will not go to the tropics, the Queensland sugar output is not increas- ing and that of New South Wales is small, and suffers from the same handicaps that interfere with cane growing in Louisiana. SUGAR 285 The Future of Cane-sugar Industry. — The growing of any large amounts of sugar outside the tropics has only succeeded where governments have shielded the industry from the compe- tition of the tropic cane, and if the time should come when the pressure of temperate-zone population upon land resources makes us need our sugar lands for other crops, an indefinite amount of tropic land is ready to grow sugar for our supply. It is in favor of cane-sugar that science has not been so fully applied to it as to beet-sugar growing. The latter started in scientific Germany, the other has always been in far away colonies and the cane has never been an important crop in the home land of any first-rate power. There appears to be much improvement possible in cane-sugar production in suitable localities. The By-products of Sugar Making. — There is a great difference between the sugar mill that suffices for making the sugar and molasses for local use in the interior of Venezuela, Guatemala, or Porto Rico and the modern mill for making export sugar. The local mill may have two or three small rollers turned by oxen, getting 50 or at most 75 per cent, of the juice. This is boiled in open vats, a primitive method which leaves much of the sugar in the form of molasses, but the molasses is one of four great staples in the nourishment of the masses in tropic America. (The others are corn cakes, beans, and cassava.) In great commercial sugar plants, however, enormous rollers with a pressure of many tons are driven by steam, 90 per cent, of the juice is extracted, and a washing of the crushed cane gets an additional 5 per cent. The juice is evaporated in vacuum pans, which save more, sugar and require much less skill, because the evaporation takes place in the vacuum at so much lower temperature that there is less danger of burning. The molasses that comes from this more scientific process has so little sugar left that it is not fit for human food or even for the distillation of rum, which has for centuries been the great by-product of the sugar plantations of the West Indies. But rum, like good molasses, is now a by-product only of a cast-off process used in the less efficient plants of small plantations or backward sugar regions. The tasteless molasses of the modern plant is fit only for the 286 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY distillation of industrial alcohol and the preparation of a cattle food which, under the name of molassquite, has of late become of increased importance. Molassquite is made by absorbing the sugar of the molasses in the spongy pulp that comes from the heart of the cane. When it is considered that but one- fourteenth of the possible sugar area of Cuba is in use and only one-thirtieth of the island under cultivation, we see here the possibility of an important trade with the live-stock producing countries of the temperate zone, for owing to the rising price of cattle foods, wheat bran and corn are now nearly as expensive as cane-sugar, which is as nutritious and as acceptable to the ruminants as to man. Ten pounds of mill (blackstrap) molasses are, with the addition of 2 pounds of cotton-seed meal, almost the exact equivalent as stock food for 10 pounds of corn. There is no natural reason why we may not in the near future have a very important commerce in sugar and sugar by-products from the tropic countries, which will help to make cheaper meat, milk, and wool in the temperate-zone countries. Crushed cane, from which the sap has been extracted, is called megasse, or bagasse, and is chiefly used for fuel in the boilers that run the engine of the sugar mill. A recent improvement permits it to pass directly from the crusher to the furnace, avoid- ing much labor in spreading it out to dry in the sun, as has been done for a century. Maple Sugar. — Maple sugar is produced by the evaporation of the sweet sap of several varieties of maple which will grow over large areas of eastern and northern United States, where it was a very important factor in the days before world commerce in sugar. The process of manufacture fits the frontiersman. A small hole is bored about an inch into the trunk of the tree when the sap is flowing in the first days of spring. The sap flows out through a tube into buckets, is carried to camps in the woods, boiled in large open kettles or pans until the proper degree of thickness is reached, then poured into molds and crystallized into the delicious maple sugar. Some of the product is sold in a more dilute form as maple syrup. This kind of sugar costs more than either beet- or cane-sugar and would have no place in the world market at all but for its peculiar flavor and fine quality, which make it something of a luxury and enable it to command a SUGAR 287 higher price. The sap only flows in quantities sufficient for satis- factory sugar making where the days are bright and sunny and the nights are cold. This climatic factor limits sugar or- chards to the region from Indiana east and north. It is par- ticularly important in the White Mountain region of Vermont and New Hampshire and the adjacent parts of Canada. The sugar maple tree that yields from the time it is twenty or twenty-five years old till it is seventy-five or a hundred certainly has all other sugar producers distanced for permanence, but the yield is at present low. Sugar from Sorghum. — Another sugar plant, sorghum, a member of the corn family and resembling both kaffir corn and broom corn, has long been grown in southern, central and south- western United States for the manufacture of syrup for local use. The juice is extracted and treated in the same way that sugar-cane juice is extracted. During the Civil War when the blockade between North and South stopped shipments of sugar and especially molasses from Louisiana to the North, sorghum was quite generally grown throughout the corn-growing parts of the North, and in the form of syrup used as a substitute for the product of the sugar cane. A century ago this plant exceeded beets in the sugar content of its juice, but progress in improving it has been slow. Experi- ments carried on for many years at Fort Scott, Kansas, have at last resulted in the making of satisfactory sugar from it. Now that the laws of plant breeding are better known, its sugar con- tent may be susceptible of as great improvement as has taken place in the beet. It is quite possible that a century hence it may rival, or even displace, beets in the United States, because like corn it can be cultivated with work animals and machines. REFERENCES See General References Suepace, G. T. The Story of Sugar. Appleton, New York. Bhbazear, J. F. The Influence of Environment on the Composition of the Sugar Beet. Bulletin, U. S. Department of Agriculture. Rutteh, F. R. The International Sugar Situation. Bulletin, U. S. Depart- ment of Agriculture, 1904. Wiley, Harvey W. Progress of the Beet-sugar Industry in the United States. Report, U. S. Department of Agriculture, usually issued annually. CHAPTER VIII CONDIMENTS AND TOBACCO i. COFFEE Distribution of Coffee. — Coffee is grown in many countries and has become a regular article of consumption in many parts of the world, but the estimated number of coffee planters in the world, 50,000, is less than the number of the corn growers of Illinois and the world's coffee crop, worth about $250,000,000, is not so valuable as the corn crop of that state. Several factors combine to restrict coffee-producing to limited but widely scattered areas. The plant cannot endure any frost and is therefore limited, with a few insignificant exceptions, to the region within the tropics, although the greatest coffee region, that of Brazil, is close to the edge of the temperate zone. The plant requires a hot climate, yet in many coffee regions the full blast of the sun is too hot for it, particularly for the young plants, and high shade trees are scattered over many plantations to cast some shade, while the young trees are grown with corn, bananas, beans or coarse varieties of peas to protect them from the full rays of the sun. The climate must be moist as well as hot, with a rainfall from 75 to 120 inches, yet the soil must be rich and also well drained, which practically limits coffee growing to hills and highlands where the streams have rapid fall to give the necessary drainage. These conditions, therefore, tend to locate the best coffee-producing districts upon plateaus and hilly regions. As the coffee is usually grown for export, it must, in addition, be reasonably near the seacoast, and a considerable population is necessary to perform the large amount of labor required in caring for the crop. History of the Industry. — Coffee, unlike wheat, corn, rice, and beans, is not a staple handed down from distant ages. The plant is probably a native of Abyssinia, whence it was taken to Arabia about the eleventh century. Its spread was slow and 288 CONDIMENTS AND TOBACCO 289 it was only in 1562 that the first coffee houses were opened in London. As an important article of commerce, coffee really belongs to the nineteenth century, the quantity consumed having practically doubled between 1855 and 1885 and again since that time and its use is rapidly increasing. The source of chief commercial supply has shifted much. At first, it was the product of Arabia, then the West Indies, then Java had the supremacy, and lastly Brazil has taken the lead with a production far distancing all competitors. The Growth and Preparation of Coffee. — The tree naturally grows to from 25 to 30 feet in height, but in the coffee orchard it is frequently pruned and kept down to from 5 to 8 feet in height to permit easy picking of the berries. The berry, which looks much like a cherry, usually encloses two coffee grains in its pulp. After picking, the berry is put through a number of mechanical processes the first of which takes off the outer pulp. After this, the berry is dried in the sun, a process requiring from six to eight days. Other machines then remove the two layers of inner husk, and various sortings and gradings separate the grains so that those comprising each kind of coffee are of the same appearance and size. Rather complicated machinery has been invented to do most of the coffee curing after it has once been picked by hand. Arabian Coffee Growing. — One of the best places for the growth of coffee is found on the slopes which face the lower plain along the Red Sea in Yemen, the southern part of the Arabian peninsula, and the home of Mocha coffee. Here the shade-loving coffee tree has the advantage of a mist which arises on the lower plain almost every morning in the year and toward noon envelops the coffee-planted slopes in a haze which keeps off the full rays of the sun and also gives the proper moisture for the good development of the plant and the production of its seeds. The fine quality of this Arabian coffee is due chiefly to the fact that it is carefully prepared, most of the crop being bought on the trees by Turkish and Egyptian merchants who personally superintend the harvest. The amount of coffee grown in Yemen is much smaller than that which is sold under that name, and it is much smaller than the demand. In Yemen coffee is purely 290 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY a money crop, and is not used by the natives, who drink a decoc- tion of the dried hulls. Only a small proportion of the Yemen land suitable for coffee is planted to that crop. Most of it is in dhurra, a grain resembling millet, which will give sixteen crops before the coffee trees are ready to bear. It is a long-time proposition for an Arab to wait for the coffee tree, especially as Yemen is rather an arid country with inadequate irrigation, poor roads, high taxes, and the bad government that has so long blighted the Turkish Empire. India and Ceylon and Dutch East Indies. — The British Govern- ment, which has done so much to encourage agriculture in its colonies, encouraged the establishment of the coffee industry in India and Ceylon. The chief Indian district is located on the eastern or interior slopes of the western Ghats Mountains in southern India, where elevation and climate suit it. The acreage in southern India is declining slightly because of low price of coffee for twelve years following 1897. In Ceylon, with its moist highlands, coffee growing quickly assumed an important place, and by 1880 was the chief export of the island, $15,000,000 worth being sold abroad annually. But a fungus disease produc- ing leaf rust broke out in Ceylonese coffee plantations, so injuring the trees that they could not produce much fruit, or killing them outright, bringing ruin to many coffee planters. Some sought substitutes in growing cinchona, but most turned to tea, which has almost replaced coffee as a crop upon the Ceylonese highlands. The only way to circumvent the blight which killed coffee of the Arabian species was to introduce the more hardy Liberian coffee, a native of west Africa, and even that is not entirely immune to the blight. This species of coffee is now grown in Java, a name under which not only the product of this island is sold, but also the small amount of coffee produced in Sumatra, Borneo, and Celebes and some from other places. The Java coffee has a good quality because it is grown at an elevation of from two to four thousand feet upon government plantations, where careful measures in harvesting the crop are rigidly enforced. The total coffee crop of Asia and the East Indies in 1910 (84 million pounds) was less than one-sixteenth that of Brazil. Coffee in Tropic America. — Coffee is one of the best money crops for the tropic highland, and for this reason is well suited to CONDIMENTS AND TOBACCO 291 Mexico, Central America, and western South America. In all these regions the ruggedness of the country makes transportation difficult, the roads are exceedingly bad, and the trail for pack animals is often the only means of access. Only valuable prod- ucts can pay for such transportation, and coffee, worth from six to twenty cents a pound, stands in a class alone. when compared with wheat worth possibly one and one-half cents a pound, or lumber with its low value and difficult form, or coal, sold at 4 or 5 pounds for a cent. Geographic and economic factors combine in an interesting way to influence coffee production in mountain districts. The elevation that produces the best coffee conditions of moisture, temperature and slope also makes a more endurable climate that has attracted the bulk of the population of nearly all tropic American countries. Into this natural labor situation, coffee fits well with its actual and relative ease of transporta- tion. The high prices prevailing in 1887-1896 made coffee growing very prosperous, and it became one of the chief money crops in Mexico, Central America, Columbia, Venezuela, and Brazil. Mexico and Central America. — In Mexico coffee does best in the middle one of the three topographic zones which comprise that varied country. The first division, the hot low plains along the sea coast, are considered too hot for coffee; the second, the high plateau enclosed between the eastern and western cordel- leras, is too dry and too cool, but the outer slopes of the plateau, the so-called warm land of the Mexicans, with its good rainfall and its succession of fertile, warm valleys and forest-clad slopes, is a natural coffee zone. Some of the plantations extend south as far as the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, which, however, is not high enough for best coffee growing. Southward the elevation increases and the plateau of Guate- mala and Salvador is an almost continuous coffee plantation from the boundary of Mexico to the boundary of Honduras. These two small states produce more coffee than all Asia and the East Indies, and it comprises over two-thirds of their total export. Many of the Guatemalan plantations are owned by German cap- italists and the Germans import much Guatemalan coffee. At harvest-time the coffee crop employs half of the population. In Costa Rica, the plateaus are even higher and the coffee tree upon 292 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY the hillside is the chief means by which the people of this cool plateau secure the European and American imports that are brought to them by the little railway that climbs up 5,000 feet from the Caribbean port of Limon to San Jose, the Capital. Venezuela, Colombia and the Andean Highlands. — Colombia and Venezuela, being in the hottest part of the torrid zone, have such high temperatures upon their lowlands that few persons live upon them except the few necessary to carry on the commerce between the seaports and the interior plateaus among the northern ranges of the Andes. Here again the valuable bag of coffee, upon the back of the mule as he climbs down to the seaport or the river steamboat landing, represents the best money crop that could be produced in these isolated plateau districts. Small quantities of coffee are also produced on the plateaus of Ecuador and on the eastern slopes of Peru, whence it must be carried by mule and railway over the forbidding mountain chain of the Andes. These Andean countries produce about as much, as Central America, but not one-tenth as much as Brazil. On the eastern slopes of the Bolivian Andes is the Province of Yungas, which claims to have the best coffee in the world, but there is not enough of it for export. The West Indies. — The coffee tree will grow in nearly all of the West Indian Islands, but the island of Hayti, occupied by the two states of Hayti and San Domingo, is the heaviest exporter of coffee, shipping from 2 to 3 million dollars' worth a year. In Jamaica the "Blue Mountain coffee," the highest priced coffee in the world, is produced. Its fine quality is due to the alternating rain and sunshine that here lasts throughout the year, but the crop only amounts to four or five thousand tons per year, and it is ceasing to be a plantation crop, and is passing into the hands of the small cultivator. Porto Rico is well fitted by climate, soil and labor supply to produce the good coffee that has for many years been an important export. Before this island was annexed to the United States, the chief market was in Spain, where the Porto Rican coffee with its peculiar flavor was in demand. When the Americans took possession, the Spanish imposed a tariff upon Porto Rican coffee, depressing its price, and pro- ducing hard times in Porto Rico, but the United States govern- ment has tried to improve the methods of coffee growing and CONDIMENTS AND TOBACCO 293 Percentage Brazil 71.5 Other South America 8.3 Central America 8.2 Mexico and K ft West Indies s -° Dutch East Indies All others 4.6 1.6 . . Million Pounds 1731,2 to introduce varieties that would be acceptable in the markets of the United States. Brazil. — Brazil is lord of the coffee world, overshadowing all other countries combined, exporting in 1910 four-sevenths of the 2,200,000,000 pounds entering com- merce. Three-fourths of the world's crop is produced there, yet the coffee region occupies but a small corner of this country, which is as large as the United States and Great Britain com- bined. Systems of railways thread the coffee zone and come down to the two great coffee ports of Rio de Janeiro and Santos. The large and prosperous city of San Paulo, the capital of the Province of San Paulo, is the chief city of the coffee- producing district, which slopes away from the Coast Range, toward the Parana River in the interior. On this plateau, between 600 and 2,500 feet above the sea, are thousands of square miles of a rich red soil capable of producing several times as much coffee as the world needs. The southeast trade winds bring from the south Atlantic an abundant rainfall, completing the natural conditions for coffee production. Partly because of this abundance of land the Brazilian coffee estates are often of enormous size. In times of prosper- ity their owners live luxuriously in the capitals of Europe, while the estates are cultivated by overseers who employ as laborers the incompe- tent negroes who were slaves until 1892. Of late Italian immi- grants have begun to replace the negroes, who are drifting to the coast settlements north of Rio Janeiro. Brazilian coffee does not bear as good a name in the world's market as does that of Mocha or Java, chiefly because of the inferior care bestowed upon 200.7 199.4 140.0 39.1 110.7 Total 2421.1 Fig. 100.— World's coffee production, three-year aver- age, 1908-10. 294 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY the harvesting in a country where efficient labor is so much more difficult to obtain than it is in Java and Yemen. In Java, the ripe coffee berries are picked off, while the green ones are allowed to remain upon the branch, but in Brazil it is not uncommon for green and ripe berries alike to be swept off the branch by a single motion of the hand, with the result that the unripe coffee makes Cents 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 IS 11 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 i 1 A .* i I \ l\ 1/ *- M 1 ! 1 ,' i ,s\ 1 \« Vl 'i V V i/\ ; i / V "il 1911 \t \ tf / i\ \ / 1 1 r- \ / / u i 1911 __,,*] Y> h 1 1 V l J i ^V 1 1 1 i i V> \ / / V- ±y Averag e Impoi t Prices for U.S per Pc und Wholes ale Prit e- New l'ork J arket - Brazil air to p rime • 1856 1860 1865 1870 1875 1880 1885 1890 1895 1900 1905 1910 1915 Fig. 101.— Cycles in price of coffee — a product capable of easy overproduction. (Idea from Chisholm.) a product of inferior character. Great efforts have been made in Brazil of late years to improve the quality of coffee, especially through the introduction of improved machinery. As this machinery is very expensive, large coffee-cleaning and grading establishments are to be found only in the large towns, and on a few of the largest plantations. Some of the plantations are so large that private railways run through them to carry the work- CONDIMENTS AND TOBACCO 295 men and coffee from one place to another. As the land is cheap, careless cultivation prevails, and the heavy rains do enormous damage to the resources of the country by the washing away of the fertile soil. Great Fluctuations in Price. — High prices prevailed in the coffee market from 1887 to 1896, and enormous numbers of coffee trees were planted in nearly all coffee-growing countries. The trees begin to bear in about six years and may yield for thirty or forty more. By 1897 the production was so large that the price fell while the yield kept on increasing until 1902. The chart of coffee prices shows most conclusively how this industry had been influenced by the heavy planting of trees in time of high price and the absence of planting which comes in periods of low price, making alternate booms and depressions. 1 The hard times fol- lowing the fall of prices in 1897 made great hardship in Brazil, as in all the other regions where coffee was the chief export. In an effort to restore prices, which were practically down to ■ the cost of production, the Brazilian government taxed new coffee plantations for several years and financed a great attempt to buy up the surplus of coffee and hold it for an advance in price. The Coffee Supply and the Decline of the Industry in New Coffee Regions. — The fall of coffee prices from the profitable level of 1895 to the unprofitable level that prevailed for more than a decade after 1897, being a world phenomenon, suddenly checked the spread of coffee growing in other countries where it had been recently introduced. In British Central Africa, coffee growing upon the Shire highlands had just been established, and led all other exports in value, but the low prices, aided by droughts, reduced the area under cultivation in less than ten years from 17,000 acres to 5,000, and the planters sought a more profitable substitute for the coffee upon which they had based their early hopes. A similar fate has overtaken the coffee in- dustry of Hawaii and Paraguay, in both of which countries, as in British East Africa, the industry was just springing up, but could not compete with Brazil, which is more than able to furnish the 25,000 square miles now needed to grow the world's coffee. 1 This tendency of industry can be seen in many industrial activities, but especially in that large class of agricultural products subject to over- production. 296 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY Although coffee was early introduced into England, its use there has been largely replaced by tea. The Dutch, owners of coffee-growing Java, are the leading coffee users, with a con- sumption of 20 pounds per capita per year. The Americans and Belgians use half as much as the Dutch, and the Germans and Swiss one-third as much. Coffee is the chief non-alcoholic beverage of France and other countries of west Europe, and Havre has become the greatest coffee market, millions of sacks sometimes being in her warehouses. 2. TEA Factors Affecting the Distribution of Tea Culture. — The usual tea of commerce is the dried leaf of a tree native in the hills of Assam, one of the eastern states of British India. In cultivation the tea tree is usually kept down by pruning to a height of from 5 to 6 feet so that the leaves can be picked by hand, but when allowed free growth the tree attains considerable size. Little, oil cells give the leaf its flavor, while the stimulating quality comes from a substance called theine which is almost exactly the same as the caffeine of the coffee and the stimulating principle in cocoa or chocolate. The tree is quite hardy, standing a frosty climate, thriving in central China and the cotton belt of the United States, and many places where no tea is produced. The distribution of the tea-growing industry gives us one of the best examples of the combined working of geographic and economic forces. The large amount of skillful hand labor required in packing and preparing tea makes it necessary that tea be grown in regions of dense population with its resultant low wage. The plucking of the leaves, especially the young leaves, is one of the hardest things a plant has to stand, hence the tea only produces adequately where an abundant moisture supply and a warm summer promote growth. Consumption of Tea. — The cultivation of tea began at a rather late date in Chinese history, about the ninth century A. D., and it was long the only Chinese export to the western world. Some of the leaf was introduced into England in 1657, and commanded in that country a price of $15 per pound in 1665, but at the end of that century, it was quite common and Britain CONDIMENTS AND TOBACCO 297 with this start became the leading tea-drinking nation. The distribution of the tea habit seems to show a clearly marked influence of national commerce. Britain began with tea at the very time that she triumphed over her great sea rival, Holland, and her shipping has given her a large part of the world's tea Percentage British India 33.2 China 27.9 Ceylon 25.1 Japan 4.9 Butch . _, East Indies *•' Formosa 3.2 All others 1.0 =t Million Pounds 244.7 184.8 35.9 34.8 23.8 7.4 Total 737.7 Fig. 102. — World's tea export, three- year average, 1908-10. Percen ited Kingdom tage " 38.4 Russia 23.4 United States 13.3 Canada 4.9 Austria 4.4 Netherlands 1.4: All others 14.4 Million Pounds 282.0 172.2 97.8 103.8 Total 735.0 Fig. 103. — World's tea import, three- year average, 1908-10. trade as well as its tea consumption. The English-speaking peoples consume nearly three-fourths of the commercial tea and Russia with her long-used caravan routes to China uses nearly all the rest. The consumption per capita shows it to be essen- tially the drink of Orientals and of the English peoples, the 298 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY average per person being 6 pounds per year in the United King- dom, 7 pounds among the Australasians who are thoroughly British and more able to buy than those of the United Kingdom itself. Canada averages 4 pounds per capita, Holland 1.75, the United States 1.4, and Russia 1.25. The Russians are generally described as being great tea drinkers, and this is true for the wealthier classes, but the vast masses of the Russian population are too poor to buy it. The Germans consume less than one-seventh of a pound per capita, and the French (wine growers and coffee drinkers) but an ounce per year. Its use is very common throughout Siberia, the Trans-Caspian Prov- inces, and Persia, as it has for some centuries been a commodity in the caravan trade across the heart of Asia. Chinese Tea Industry. — It is impossible to say how much tea is used in China. It is widely grown in that country in family gardens for home use, 1 and although it is all grown in the tea gardens of the small land holders, chiefly in central China, that country was for a long time the leading country in supplying it for export. Chinese tea is usually picked three times a year, the first growth in March, the second in May, and the third in August. The choicest first pickings are so highly prized at home that they are practically never exported; the later pickings of an inferior grade are for the use of foreigners. After the picking, which is usually done by women and children, the leaves are wilted in pans over a fire. They are next rolled into balls by hand to squeeze out the sap, and dried upon screens, care being taken not to let the hot sun burn them. After this, they are further dried by "firing" in copper pans over a fire, being stirred the while, it is said, with bare hands, although the pans are white hot. Inferior teas are stirred with sticks. After this, the leaves are hung up in sacks for a day, then picked over, sifted, assorted, and packed by aid of bare feet into tea chests for export. In some grades of tea, each leaf is rolled by human fingers. The difference between black and green tea is merely a question of curing, although the two kinds are rarely grown in the same 1 The tea habit of the Chinese and Japanese seems to be an attempt to make pleasant the habit of drinking boiled water — a necessity recognized long ago by these peoples living on a land laden with germs resulting from the density of population and habits of fertilization. CONDIMENTS AND TOBACCO 299 locality. If the tea is to be black, rather than green, it is, early in the curing process, piled up in heaps half cured and allowed to ferment, which drives off half of the tannin, of which tea has 10-12 per cent. This changes the flavor and gives a quality that is much desired in many markets. In the Province of Szechuen, one of the western provinces on the headwaters of the Yang Tse Kiang, is a very large popula- tion, estimated at over 16 million, a number about equal to the population of Brazil. They have supported themselves in that inland location for generations by household industries and agriculture, most of their few exports going down the rapids of the Yang Tse Kiang to Hankow and Shanghai, but they also send into Tibet some of the worst tea in the world. It is made by cutting off 12-inch twigs of a tea tree, roughly drying them in the sun, chopping them up, twigs and all, sticking all together with rice paste and then compressing the mass into hard bricks for shipment over the fearful passes of Tibet upon the backs of coolies, mules and camels. The greater ease of carrying this compressed form of tea accounts for its shipment by caravan into Russia at an early date. The chief seat of brick tea shipment is Hankow on the Yang Tse Kiang in central China, and while the tea has generally been considered of very poor quality there has been great improve- ment of late years, and some of the brick tea is now made in that Chinese city under Russian management, and great care is exercised to see that the quality is good. Japan. — Tea requires fertile but well-drained soil along with much moisture, a combination of conditions usually furnished best upon hillsides. This fact, in combination with the large amount of labor required, makes it a crop admirably suited for Japan, where the vast demands for food cause the level land to be prized for rice and grain crops, and makes tea growing in terraces upon the steep hillsides fit in admirably with the Japanese economy. For home use they still prepare it by hand in the old- fashioned way, but for export it is almost entirely cured by ma- chinery, the standard Japanese teas being green teas and the United States their principal market. Thousands of boxes are sent directly to Chicago, St. Louis and other interior points by way of the Trans-Pacific steamers which sail from Yokohama to 300 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY Vancouver, Seattle, Portland, and San Francisco, at which points they connect with the Trans-Continental American Rail- way lines. Formosa. — The best tea in the world is grown by Chinese people in the island of Formosa, which has belonged to Japan since the Chino-Japanese War of 1894. The eastern half of this tropic island is still possessed by head-hunting savages, and tea growing by the Chinese emigrants of the west half is a com- paratively recent industry. Most of the 18 or 20 million pounds per year is cured by American and English firms for sale in their home countries. Introduction of Tea in British Colonies. — The world's tea trade has been revolutionized during the last fifty years as a result of activities of the British government in introducing tea growing into India and Ceylon. In the year 1888 the British import of this commodity from China fell below that from the British Colonies of India and Ceylon. Between 1881 and 1900 the Chinese export fell from 300 million to 215 million pounds, and in the year 1905 we had the remarkable spectacle of a commission of Chinese experts sent out from the tea-growing Province of Nanking to study condition of tea growing in British India. China had fallen so far behind because her unprogressive tea growers clung to the old hand methods of their remote ancestors, while the rivals under the British flag and the British teacher had attacked the problem in the scientific spirit and with un- biassed minds and had been using many labor-saving machines. Another result of this growth of tea in new regions has been a steadily decreasing price since 1885, so that at the present time tea growing is not a very prosperous industry. About a half million acres are grown in India, four-fifths of it being in the northeastern part in east Bengal and Assam, regions tributary to the port of Calcutta. It is grown upon the hills sloping down from the great plateau of Tibet and is grown to some extent in many other places along the southern slopes of the Himalaya Mountains, a district receiving tremendous sum- mer rains. In southern India on the Nilgiri hills is the most important tea district outside of Assam and Bengal. Owing to its low latitude this district produces best at an elevation of from 4,800 to 5,600 feet above sea level, while upon the slopes CONDIMENTS AND TOBACCO 301 of the Himalayas the plantations find the temperature that best suits tea at 3,500 feet or less. European Tea Industry of Ceylon. — In contrast to the three large pickings of the temperate zone, the tea of India is gathered every ten days during the period of the monsoon rains in summer, and orchards of Assam like those of Japan average 450 to 500 pounds of tea per acre. On the still more humid hills of Ceylon we find probably the best tea-growing region of the world. There it can be plucked every two weeks throughout the year and has yielded 1,000 pounds of dry tea per acre, a quantity 20 per cent, greater in actual weight than the average wheat yield of the United States. Tea growing is a new industry in Ceylon, having been taken up very suddenly by the coffee planters after the blights had destroyed the coffee trees. In 1867 there were 10 acres of tea, in 1887, 2,700; in 1897, 170,000; in 1904 there were 338,000, but the prices were so low that no new tea orchards were then being set out. The export of tea from this island reached a million pounds in 1883, 148 million pounds in 1900, and 182 million in 1910. The Ceylonese method of tea growing is typical of the most successful method of prosecuting tropical industries. More than half of the plantations are owned by corporations, and prac- tically all are managed by English superintendents. By this means the average size of the plantation is raised to 300 acres, while in China it is probably a small fraction of an acre. The Ceylon tea plantation work is done by coolies, men, women and children, many of them being Tamils from southern India, and they usually return to their homes across the straits after a period of work gives them a little money. The intensity of the tea industry and its dependence upon a dense population is shown by the fact that less than 600 square miles of tea plantations employ about 400,000 coolies. This is one person to the acre, strong contrast to the American corn belt farm of 160 acres, on which the proprietor often has but one hired man to help him grow and harvest 40 acres of corn, 40 acres of hay, 40 acres of oats, and fatten 40 cattle and grow 60 hogs, besides rais- ing enough horses for his own use with an occasional pair to sell. The Labor Factor and United States Tea Growing. — The vast amount of hand labor in pruning and caring for tea trees and 302 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY picking and curing the tea shows why the tea industry has not been developed in the United States, although it has long been known that the tea tree thrives well over an area 100 times greater than all the tea plantations in India and Ceylon. A little tea of good quality has for some years been produced near Charleston, chiefly by the labor of negro children, but naturally the industry does not expand in this region of relatively high wages. It costs fifteen cents a pound to pick tea in South ' Carolina and the laborers there have been unable to learn a certain dexterous move that pulls a leaf without destroying the bud in the axis of its stem. To avoid this they pinch it off leaving about one-third of the weight of the leaf. Tea Districts of Minor Importance. — Tea growing has been carried on to a small extent in a number of places throughout a rather large part of the world in which the tree would naturally thrive. Among them may be mentioned Johore in the Straits Settlements upon the Malay Peninsula, French Tonquin, Southern Burmah, Jamaica, the Fiji Islands, Madagascar, Brazil, the Rus- sian province of Trans-Caucasia. In none of these regions has it been an important success, chiefly for labor reasons, but in Trans- Caucasia it seems doomed to failure because the resemblance of the climate to the Mediterranean type with its dry summer, will not permit sufficient growth of the leaves. Java has the best combination of conditions to rival the four great tea-growing countries of China, Japan, India and Ceylon, but the low prices have caused a decline of tea acreage even there. The coffee planters of Natal with their fertile slopes facing the Indian Ocean moistened by the southeastern trade winds, turned, like those of Ceylon, to tea when the blights of the Seventies desolated their coffee plantations. In 1905, they had about 4,000 acres of tea growing at an elevation of about 4,000 feet along the Tugela River and were supplying about 2 million of the 6 million pounds of tea used in Africa. In this district the con- ditions of management are quite like those of Ceylon, the man- agers being British with coolie laborers imported from India. The most that Natal can hope for is to supply the South African market. Other Teas. — The leaves of a number of other plants are locally used as tea in various places throughout the world. In CONDIMENTS AND TOBACCO 303 southeastern United States the Cherokees and other Indians dried the leaves of a holly plant from which they made yupon, or "black drink." In Australia the eucalyptus leaf is used. South Africa has a so-called Bushman tea, a grass called lemon grass is used in India, while in the Island of Bourbon or Reunion in the Indian Ocean, the so-called "bourbon tea" is made from a dry orchid. Of all the minor teas the mate" or Paraguay tea is the nearest to being a rival of the ordinary tea of commerce. This plant, which is a member of the holly family, grows wild in southern Brazil and in Paraguay, in which latter country it is also grown in plantations. The leaf is dried, but less carefully than the tea of the Orient. It is widely used by the people of Paraguay, and several million pounds are exported to Argentine Republic, Uruguay, and Brazil, together with smaller quantities to some other parts of South America. A little is even sent to Europe and the amount is rapidly increasing, the total export from Paraguay passed a half million dollars in 1909, and some is now being exported from Brazil. The summer rains of the mate belt favor the rapid leaf growth necessary for a leaf-yielding crop like tea. 3. CACAO The Confusion of Names. — The chocolate and cocoa of com- merce are prepared from the seeds of the cacao tree which, be- cause of its name, often gets confused with the coco palm which gives us the large, hard-shelled coconut (often spelled cocoanut). It is also confused with the coca tree, the leaves of which are sent to market from the east slopes of the Andes in Peru and Bolivia by way of the Amazon River or the Pacific ports for the preparation of the drug, cocaine. The word cacao here refers to the dried bean. Origin and Introduction. — The cacao tree is a native of tropical America, growing wild in the Amazon and Orinoco River Valley forests up to an elevation of 400 feet. At the time of the discovery of America, it was grown from Panama to Guate- mala and Yucatan, and to some extent in the lowlands of Mexico, in which country it was so prized that the dry seeds passed as 304 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY money among the Aztecs of the plateau. The Spaniards carried it from Acapulco to the Philippines and the early exportation of the beans to Spain and Portugal has caused its use to become so general in these countries that no other European people eat more than one-sixth as much per capita. The use of cacao is spreading rapidly, being a table drink, a much prized material for candy, and an acceptable, very nutritious food for travellers and explorers. Exacting Climatic Requirements. — The climatic requirements of cacao are exacting. The tree, which is 15 to 30 feet high, requires more heat than coffee and yet cannot stand the full blaze of the tropic sun, and so is grown under the shade of taller trees, the young plantation being sometimes shaded by bananas. It requires much moisture with soil rich and deep so that it is almost always grown upon low plains. The valuable seeds or beans, to the number of 30 to 60, are produced in a green- ish or reddish pod, 3 or 4 inches in diameter and 6 to 10 inches long. As this heavy, melon-like fruit is attached in clusters to the trunk and larger branches of the tree, and since a strong wind beats the immature pods about until they fall useless to the earth, the area over which cacao can be a profitable crop is greatly limited. Where strong winds blow, as occurs occasionally in the Philippines when the furious tropic typhoons (hurricanes) come, the cacao tree cannot be depended upon as a source of financial income. The same trouble affects most of the West Indies where cacao can be grown only in sheltered valleys protected from the wind, as in rugged parts of Trinidad, Jamaica, Grenada, St. Lucia, and Dominica. A level island, like Barbados, exposed to the steady trade winds, cannot produce it. The tree begins to bear at the age of three years, but does not reach its maturity until it is ten or twelve and may bear for thirty or forty years more. Importance of the Doldrums or Zone of Calms. — Near the equator in all continents is a zone of calms, called Doldrums, lying between the two trade wind zones and drenched with fre- quent and heavy rains. In this belt, at no place more than 13° north or south of the equator, are found the most important cacao districts. Ecuador. — Ecuador was long the greatest cacao-shipping CONDIMENTS AND TOBACCO 305 country. The low plain upon the western coast of that country- is crossed by the equator, where the doldrum rains and ever- Fig. 104. — The heavy fruits of the cacao tree cannot mature in windy location. (Photo Walter Baker & Co.) green forests make it a striking contrast to the trade wind deserts upon the same coastal plain in the adjacent country of Peru. 306 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY Cacao is the chief money crop of the Pacific Plain of Ecuador. The trees here find every condition suited to them and the jungle easily becomes the cacao orchard. As with the banana, plowing is not necessary, the only care being enough chopping to prevent the smothering of the young trees. Ecuador and Brazil Compared. — In the year 1900 it was estimated that 600 square miles of land yielded all the 67,000 tons of cacao grown in the world, yet Ecuador alone boasts of having several thousand square miles of good cacao land. But this in turn is as nothing in comparison to the hundreds of thousands of square miles of equally good cacao land in the Ama- zon valley of Brazil and neighboring countries. But cacao grow- ing is not a comfortable business and it takes large profits to tempt men to do it. The Ecuadorean growers all desire to live elsewhere. The climate of the cacao forest is unwholesome to the white man, the jungles swarm with dangerous animals, poison- ous serpents and pestiferous insects. Fevers are common, and labor naturally is scarce. Although sparsely settled, the low plain of Ecuador is populous in comparison to the empty jungles of the Amazon Valley of which Ecuador, Peru, Colombia, and Bolivia each own an area greater than the Pacific Plain of Ecua- dor. However, the scattered settlements along the Amazon have recently produced as much cacao as Ecuador. In the Amazon Valley the cacao export is second to the great forest product of rubber. In Ecuador it is first not only for the low plain but even for the whole country which is composed of two widely differing districts — the steamy low cacao-growing plain and the Andean plateau nearly two miles above it, so cool that the temperate zone crops of corn, beans, and wheat are the chief crops and food of the people and hides are the chief export. Trinidad and the West Indies. — The British colony of Trinidad lying below the hurricane belt and with many protected hollows is the third American cacao-exporting country, while Venezuela and San Domingo are close rivals for fourth place. A little cacao is grown in many West Indian Islands and throughout Central America, but it is chiefly for local use, al- though Guatemala and the adjacent parts of Mexico claim to produce the best cacao in the world. Old World Cacao Growing. — Cacao, being a native of America CONDIMENTS AND TOBACCO 307 and only recently of importance in commerce, has not been grown long in the Old World but the greater labor supply of the Old World tropics bids fair to make those regions outstrip America in the export of the precious beans. The tropic islands of Sao Thome (or St. Thomas) and Principe (or Prince's Island) lie under the equator in the Gulf of Guinea, and while they have less than 45,000 people (of whom 96 per cent, are negroes), and have an area of but 360 square miles, they have the cacao climate and a fertile volcanic soil. In the year 1905, this tiny Portugese Colony outstripped Ecuador and all other cacao-producing countries. This is not a measure of superiority of resources. It is because slavery still exists there and the task master can make the native work. The recent introduction of cacao growing into Ceylon has led to its rapid 'increase there, and it may possibly repeat the experi- ence of the tea industry which succeeded coffee, and has itself become unprofitable after making the island take first place among tea exporters. In Java also the climate and the labor supply are suitable and cacao cultivation has been established in a small way, as it has also in the island of Reunion. Its growth has been begun in Samoa and other Pacific Isles, but the population there is insufficient for the production of a large surplus. Method of Preparation and Use as Food. — When the cacao pods are carefully gathered, they are cut open, and the seeds, which are covered with a slimy pulp, are put in piles to ferment, a process which in the course of a week disposes of the pulpy covering of the seeds and cures them ready for drying and ship- ment. When carefully fermented the seeds are twice as valuable as when carelessly done. Cacao differs from tea and coffee in the manner of its use. They are used as decoctions made by steeping or boiling the tea leaf and coffee berry in water, after which the leaf and berry are thrown away. Cacao, containing the same stimulating principles as tea and coffee, has in addition many food elements and is, therefore, a food as well as a drink. All processes of manufacture merely grind up the beans, which we eat as solid chocolate, as candy, or drink as a thick, brown liquid when mixed with milk or water. This grinding may be done in the kitchen as do the Chinese cooks in the Philippines who pound the 308 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY beans in mortars and flavor them with spices to suit individual tastes. In the western world the beans are taken to the great factories of Holland, England, France, Germany, Switzerland, or the United States, where expensive machinery pulverizes the beans to great fineness, mixes the powder with sugar and some- times also with milk. This use of milk requires many chocolate factories to be near dairy centers and it even causes the location of some plants in the country towns of dairy districts, as in eastern United States and Switzerland. The so-called breakfast cocoa differs from chocolate by having the nourishing fat, or cocoa butter, removed to make it more easily digestible. This fat comprises about 50 per cent, of the bean, whose great richness helps to explain the necessity of fertile soil for the growth of the tree. The fat is valuable in medicine and has the peculiarity of never becoming rancid no matter how long it is kept. Examination of the table of food values and the comparison of chocolate with our staple articles of diet will show its great value as food. It is several times as nutritious as eggs and about two and one-half times as nutritious as beef. These are significant facts when taken in connection with the relatively declining quantity of beef, the increasing quantity of cacao (50 per cent, in five years, 1906-10) and the indefinite room for expansion in its production. As the cost of cacao production is estimated at four cents a pound in Ecuador and the price is several times that, there is good reason to expect the production to increase in response to demand — quite different is the meat situation. The great cacao markets are first, Hamburg (Germany is a great cocoa user), second, Havre, third, London, and fourth, New York, from which cities it is distributed all over the western world. 4. SPICES Despite their non-nutritious character spices are so generally prized as an article of diet as to be of nearly world-wide interest. In the history of commerce they are of especial interest because the trade in spices long dominated the commerce between the East and the West. They were for centuries the only food CONDIMENTS AND TOBACCO 309 products that could be transported far and they were of greater relative importance in the diet of ancient and mediaeval peoples because the small variety and poor flavor of their food made a greater necessity for something to improve its palatability. Spices the Product of Tropic Garden Spots and Hives of Population. — Practically all the spices with the exception of mustard are limited in their production to the tropics. The trees and fruits from which they are produced have been widely disseminated throughout the hot countries, their growth is usually common, but the commercial production of the spice rarely follows the mere introduction of the plant for local use. This is due to the fact that nearly all the spices are like tea in requiring tedious and painstaking labor in their production. As a result their export is limited to centers of dense population and good labor supply. It was the spice trade that Columbus sought, and spice trees were among the early introductions to the New World. While the New World took the Old World grains and cattle and now dominates in the export of these products of sparse populations, our export of spices yet remains insignificant. Pepper. — This is the most important of all spices. It is prized alike by rich and poor in both tropic and temperate latitudes. In quantity it equals all of the others combined. Singapore is the greatest pepper-exporting port. Most of this export is assembled from Malacca, Sumatra, Borneo and Siam, but much is also grown about Singapore. It is significant to note in this connection that the population of this island of 206 square miles is 230,000 people, a large proportion of whom are Chinese coolies, the best laborers in all the tropical world. With them are many Europeans — a combination providing both workers and supervisors. Siam also has at least 200,000 Chinese in the vicinity of Bangkok. The Chinese coolies are also respon- ible for most of the pepper and other exports of Sumatra. The Malabar coast of India is another pepper country and a little is also produced in the West Indies. Black pepper is the dried, unripe seed of a climbing vine and the white pepper is the same seed riper and with the skin peeled off. The common method of growing this plant is to sow the seeds in fields of rice, castor beans and other temporary crops. At the same time the seeds of rapidly growing trees are sown. In 310 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY two years these trees are cut and stuck in the ground as poles, making a permanent support for the climbing pepper vine, which yields its crop in about two years. Cayenne pepper or Chillies is an entirely different plant, yielding a small fruit something like the peppers commonly seen in temperate-zone- markets. It is widely grown for local use throughout tropic Asia and Africa and in South America, and properly takes its name from the city in French Guiana. Ginger. — This, the second spice in the order of demand in the market, is the underground stem of a reed-like plant growing wild in the warm parts of Asia. It is one of the most widely cul- tivated spices. It is planted like any common crop, dug in ten months, and like most spices, dried in the sun. The best pre- served ginger is exported from South America, west Africa, Bengal, Cochin China, and to a small extent, from north Queensland. Cinnamon and Cassia. — Cinnamon is the bark from young shoots of a small evergreen tree native to Ceylon and the adjacent coasts of India. It was a government monopoly in Ceylon until 1833. Since that time it has been introduced in Java, Cape Verde, Brazil, West Indies and east Africa, but almost the entire supply is still produced in certain districts of southeastern Ceylon where 40,000 acres are under cultivation. This island has the necessary warmth, moisture and light sandy soil, and over most of its territory a population ranging in density from 200 to 600 per square mile, thus furnishing the labor supply necessary to keep the cinnamon trees trimmed to a low bush-like form, to gather the long shoots, peel the bark from them and dry it ready for market. The flavor of cinnamon, like most of the spices, is due to an essential oil. Cassia, the bark of a somewhat similar plant, is much like cinnamon, is gathered in the same way but is of inferior quality, and is largely used to adulterate the Ceylon article. Most of the cassia is produced in the tropic part of south China and the exports, amounting to a million dollars a year, are all sent out through Hong Kong. Nutmegs and Mace. — Mace is the husk around the nutmeg, the fruit of a tree growing wild in the Banda Islands in the East Indies. This spice tree, with the clove, was long a monopoly of the Dutch government in the Moluccas or Spice Islands, where CONDIMENTS AND TOBACCO 311 the Dutch traders in the days of their commercial supremacy- preserved their spice monopoly by sailing the eastern archipela- goes and cutting down spice trees wherever they found them. Nutmegs are now chiefly grown for export in Singapore and the islands of Penang, East Indies (107 square miles, 906 people per square mile), and Granada, West Indies (270 square miles, 500 people per square mile). The population of Penang is largely Chinese, which conduces to production. In addition to nut- megs, the little West Indian isle of Granada exports cacao and some minor spices. Cloves. — This hot spice is the dried, unopened flower bud of a tree grown to some extent in Penang but most largely in the Island of Zanzibar (640 square miles) on the eastern coast of Africa, where the population of 270 per square mile has a con- siderable sprinkling of East Indians, Europeans and Arabs, who are the employers of labor. The oil of cloves is often extracted from the spice and sold as a separate product. Vanilla. — Vanilla differs from the other important spices in being a native of America-Mexico. It is cultivated to a small extent on the eastern coast of that country, but this cultivation is practically captured by the Oriental labor supply, situated in the Indian Ocean islands of Reunion, Mauritius and Seychelles. These islands resemble other spice districts in population. Reunion (200 people per square mile) has a considerable sprink- ling of Hindoo, while Mauritius (500 per square mile) has an important element of Chinese. The growth of vanilla is very exacting. It is an orchid-like vine and must grow in the shady and humid forests. Owing to a peculiarity of the blossom, each one must be fertilized by means of a small splinter of wood in the hand of the attendant. After the beans are ripe, they must be most carefully dried to maintain the perfect flavor. The manufacture of vanillin, a substitute produced from sugar by electrolysis, threatens this industry. Pimento or Allspice. — This fragrant spice is the small dried and wrinkled fruit of a beautiful tree which grows to 30 feet in height, is a native of tropical America, and cultivated chiefly in the island of Jamaica (population over 150 per square mile in a mountainous territory). The pimento trees commonly grow in pastures and at picking time small boys climb the tree 312 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY and break off the fruiting twigs. Women pick them up from the ground and attend to the work of drying and preparing the fruits for market. Mustard. — Mustard is the most popular and extensively used spice in Great Britain, and is quite generally used in other coun- tries. It is the finely powdered seed of a plant belonging to the same family as the turnip and beet. The production of this seed is quite widely scattered, and seems to be centered in localities possessing the necessary foggy climate that favors its best development; thus certain foggy districts in western Russia have developed a relatively large mustard industry, the product being exported through the adjacent German port of Konigsburg. In Essex and Cambridgeshire, England, and in Holland are other mustard-growing districts. The United States has one successful mustard district near Lompac, in Santa Barbara County, California, in a valley opening directly to the Pacific, whence come the necessary fogs at the ripening time. The attempt to develop mustard production in sunny districts east of the California Coast Range has resulted in lamentable failure, although the crop was promising to within two weeks of harvest. An inferior quality of mustard is also exported from Bombay, India, where the climate renders the seed too hot to be generally acceptable. 5. TOBACCO The Use, Spread, and Consumption of Tobacco. — No text-book for use in Europe or America need tell of the uses of tobacco, except to refer to some of the newer ones, such as the utilization of tobacco waste as fertilizer and insecticide. The dust made of stems is a fertilizer rich in potash and is also used to kill the aphis on the roots of fruit trees. The nicotine, which is the cause of opposition to it, has of late given rise to the manufacture of poisonous fluids for use as sprays in exterminating insects. Columbus and his fellow discoverers found tobacco in use among the American Indians. When carried back to Europe, its use was opposed by priest, pope, king, and emperor, and the czar of Russia once laid even the death penalty upon its use. Medical and athletic professors oppose it, but none the less its use has CONDIMENTS AND TOBACCO 313 spread faster than any language or religion, and is found through- out the realms of civilization and barbarism. The Dutch and Belgians, consuming respectively 7.5 and 6.2 pounds per year per capita, use it more than any other peoples, probably because of their early acquaintance with it as traders. The United States is next, credited with 5.7 pounds per head; Germany 3 1/2 pounds; while England has less than 2. The increase in its use has been surprising. PER CAPITA CONSUMPTION OF TOBACCO, POUNDS United States Germany France Great Britain 1861-5 1886-90 1906-10 1.6 4.6 5.1 2.8 3.3 3.6 1.7 2.0 2.4 1.2 1.4 2.1 Few commercial plants grow over so wide a range of the earth's surface. It is injured by frost, but it grows in a comparatively short season, so that profitable crops ripen as far north as Wis- consin, southern Canada and England, while it is at home throughout the tropics. Probably no other commercial product possesses more grades and commercial varieties. One field of Sumatra tobacco may be classified into as many as seventy-two different market kinds. The quality of the soil affects it in a remarkable degree, as does temperature, humidity, and especially the fermentation and chemical changes that take place in the process of curing the leaf. The resulting strength or weakness of flavor, the kind of flavor, the thickness, brittleness, elasticity, texture, color, size, perfection and relative weight of leaf, its specks, its dustiness, gumminess and ripeness are some of the factors that decide whether the tobacco will bring two cents or $2 per pound. Tobacco's Commercial Service. — The commercial service of tobacco has been great. The Jamestown Colony in Virginia was about to fail in its early days because the settlers could find no money crop, nothing to sell to the mother country in return for 314 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY the imports that they must have. England, being then essen- tially an agricultural land, had an abundance of wheat, oats, barley, rye, and all agricultural staples as well as manufactures. The company that founded Jamestown imported Italian experts and tried to grow silk, but failed. The grape also failed, and Percentage ■United „„ „ States <)7 " { India 17.3 Russia 7.3 Hungary 7.2 Dutch East Indies 5- 1 Japan 3.6 Germany 2.2 All others 20.1 Million Founds 450.0 187.3 131.8 92.6 67.2 505.2 Total 2604.4 Fig. 105. — World's tobacco produc- tion, three-year average, 1908-10. Percentage " Kentucky 36.5 North Carolina 13.1 Virginia 13.1 Ohio 8.4 Tennessee 6.4 Pennsylvania 5.2 "Wisconsin 4.3 Connecticut Indiana South Carolina 2.6 ~ 2.3 8.1. All others 6.0 345.1 124.3 124.3 79.9 60.1 40.1 24.3 21.8 20.0 57.5 Total 946.3 Fig. 106. — United States tobacco pro- duction, three-year average, 1909-11, with it went their hopes of a wine industry and the colonists had been depending on those two luxuries, for which there was a good market in England. Despair ruled in Jamestown and talk of returning to England was rife. Then a trial shipment of tobacco which the Indians had shown the colonists how to grow CONDIMENTS AND TOBACCO 315 brought a good price in England and spread industrial hope in Virginia where there was unlimited land suitable for tobacco. It promptly became the great staple of trade, remained so through- out the whole Colonial period and to a very considerable extent down to the present time. It was so important as to become a standard of currency in the Colony of Maryland in 1722 and the clergy and all other public officials received their pay in tobacco. As late as 1810 it was one of the few crops that could be sold by the people of Kentucky and Tennessee, whose export market was New Orleans reached by flat boats down the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers. At the founding of our government its export of over 100 million pounds was one-third as great as it is now. Tobacco Injury to American Soils. — The ready market for tobacco in Europe has resulted in great injury to the soil resources of most American tobacco-growing districts. For centuries it had been the custom of European planters to raise wheat or other winter grain, such as rye, one year, followed the next year by spring-sown grain, like oats or barley, and the third year the land was plowed and let lie idle or fallow, before entering again on the three-year rotation. But in America the crop of tobacco took the place of the fallow year and, because of the good profits, tobacco was even grown year after year until its great demands for potash exhausted the soil for a time and the field was often abandoned because land was so cheap that more could be had by cutting down and burning the forest. Then the heavy down- pours of the summer thunder showers reduced the abandoned tobacco field to useless gulleys before the old field pine could again make a forest there. This wasteful policy brought great poverty to southern Maryland and middle Virginia, and from these sections the people emigrated in such large numbers shortly after the Civil War when western farm lands were opened up, that there was a general loss of population throughout the old Colonial tobacco district, which to-day has less land in cultivation than it had a century ago. Although it takes unusual quantities of potash from the soil, the destruction of soil fertility does not necessarily attend the growing of tobacco if proper crop rotation is practised. This has been proved in many places, notably by the farmers of Lancaster County, Pa., and other parts of that state, where splendid crops of tobacco are grown on small farms pro- 316 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY ducing wheat, corn, hay, and cattle, the tobacco being grown on the same land only once in a period of six or seven years. For the three years 1909-11 the average yield per acre in Pennsylvania was 1,300 pounds; in Virginia but 785 pounds. But the report of the Secretary of Agriculture for 1907 (p. 77) states that "In Virginia by the proper handling of the soil through modern methods of culture and of fertilization, the lands have been left in so much better condition after the tobacco crop has been removed, that without further special treatment the yield of subsequent crops of wheat has been increased three fold and the lands have produced heavy crops of hay where formerly this crop was not even considered a possibility." This unfortunately was the description of a few scientifically operated farms, not the description of a state. Tobacco an Intensive Crop. — Because of the great labor in its production and the small yield, a pound of tobacco is worth many times as much as a pound of hay or grain. It belongs to intensive agriculture. The tiny black seeds, three or four hundred thousand to the ounce, are sown in seed beds, and the little plants were, until the recent introduction of a new machine, transplanted by hand to their place in the field, where constant attention and hand labor are necessary to protect them from the cut worm which cuts off the young plant, the leaf worm which eats holes in the leaves, the stalk worm which destroys the central stalk of the plant. The blooms must be picked off, so that the energy may go to leaf rather than seed. For the same reason, the suckers or side shoots must be pulled off, while the process of picking, curing, sorting, grading, and packing, is laborious and requires skill. The farm value per acre in 1910 was $74, that of wheat $12.63, and that of hay $16.30. The United States crop of 1911 was worth $85,000,000 — more than one-seventh the value of the wheat crop, but grown on one-forty- eighth the area. The entire American crop of approximately a billion pounds in 1910, nearly 40 per cent, of the world's crop, is grown on 1 1/4 million acres (2,000 square miles) — slightly more than 1 per cent, of the corn area. As much of the labor of tobacco growing requires watchfulness and care rather than strength, it can be done by women and children as well as by men, and as a result it is rarely grown on an extensive scale and is usually grown by CONDIMENTS AND TOBACCO 317 the members of the farmer's family, who care for a small field. The tobacco farmer of Virginia and Kentucky usually raises enough corn to feed the horses that work his lands, the pigs that make his meat, and the cow and chickens that help feed the family. He sometimes also raises some other supply crops, but all his money he usually expects to get through the sale of tobacco. The Leading Tobacco Belts of the United States. — For a long time the Virginia-Carolina tobacco belt running from southern Maryland through the middle part of Virginia and North Carolina was the leading tobacco belt of the United States, but Kentucky has now become the first state, producing in 1911 over three- fourths as much as all of the states east of the Appalachians. The limestone lands of Kentucky are the chief seats of tobacco production, and Louisville, their natural commercial center, is the greatest tobacco market in the world. Much Kentucky tobacco is exported to European countries, for the United States is by far the greatest exporter as well as the greatest tobacco grower in the world. Large amounts of tobacco are also manu- factured in Louisville. In the eastern field, Richmond is the greatest center, while Petersburg, and the Carolina towns of Winston-Salem and Durham have enormous tobacco factories where, by very complicated machinery, cigarettes, smoking and chewing tobacco, and snuff are manufactured for shipment to all parts of the United States and for export. The Minor Tobacco Belts of the United States. — The growing of tobacco is widely scattered in this country, small but important tobacco-growing districts being found in the Connecticut River Valley of Connecticut and Massachusetts, in southern Wisconsin, in Louisiana where the famous "perique" is grown, and since 1884 in Florida. Experiments with the seed of the high-priced Sumatra tobacco showed that with shade it would grow well, so fields are so planted that thin cotton sheets can be placed over them to soften the rays of the sun and make a more even tempera- ture and more uniform humidity. Despite this great expense the business has proved profitable in Connecticut and Florida. Cuban tobacco as well as the Sumatra has been grown in Florida and the artificial shade method has been copied in Cuba and Porto Rico. The effect of these innovations is shown in an acre- 318 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY age value in Connecticut of $333 in 1911, while the great crop of Kentucky averaged but $68 per acre. Tobacco in Cuba and the West Indies. — Cuban tobacco is famed throughout the world for its fine flavor, being much prized for cigars, and chiefly used in the manufacture of the famous Havana cigars. The amount produced is about half as great as that of Virginia. The Havana tobacco is the peculiar product of the south slope of the Sierra de Los Organos, a mountain range running from east to west throughout the whole length of the Province of Pinar Del Rio in the west end of Cuba. Tobacco is . , Fig. 107. — Plantation of cigar wrapper tobacco grown under artificial shade in Norfolk, fine sandy loam, Florida. (U. S. Dept. Agr.) the one means by which the people of this district, called the Vuelta Abajo, are now able to buy products of the entire world. Innumerable attempts to grow the same tobacco in other parts of Cuba and other countries have resulted in failure, the nearest approach to success having been the shade-grown Florida product. The secret of its high quality is not known. It may be the pro- tection from northern winds or some quality of soil or some effect of fermentation in curing. Most of the Cuban tobacco is used for cigars and Havana is a great cigar-manufacturing center. The American tariff on imported cigars and tobacco has CONDIMENTS AND TOBACCO 319 caused the building, largely by Cubans, of the cigar-manufactur- ing city of Key West on a little coral reef, 90 miles from Havana, the nearest spot in the United States to which the Cubans could move and take advantage of our tariff conditions. Tobacco is exported from Porto Rico, but San Domingo on the east half of Hayti is, after Cuba, the largest exporter of tobacco in the West Indies. Tobacco in Sumatra and the Orient. — Sumatra tobacco is like the Cuban in being of high value. Its thinness and elasticity give it great excellence as cigar wrappers, while the Cuban excels as cigar filler. The growth of Sumatra wrapper tobacco is comparatively new, being due entirely to the enterprise of Dutch financiers and managers, a single company of Dutch capitalists having employed in the island of Sumatra as many as 16,000 Chinese with 200 skilled European overseers. This Sumatra tobacco belt lies on the eastern plain extending 5 or 10 miles inland from the Straits of Malacca. Practically all the labor is done by Chinamen, who, under the supervision of the Dutch managers, have cleared the virgin forests and have taken such splendid crops of tobacco from the rich volcanic soil that some of the companies have paid as much as 75 per cent, dividends per year. A small amount of tobacco is grown upon the plains of Java, but the export is small. British India produces about half as much tobacco as the United States but it only amounts to 1 1/2 pounds per capita and but little of it is exported. Japan grows about 100 million pounds, 2 1/2 pounds per capita, but it is all kept at home and some is imported. Its growth for local use is quite general throughout western and southern Asia. The Philippine tobacco bears the same reputation in the eastern world that the Cuban tobacco does in the western world and the export (20 million pounds) is about half as great. The best of it is grown in the northern Province of Luzon in the valley of the Cagayan River, which keeps the tobacco lands perpetually fertile by the layer of mud deposited in the annual overflow. This tobacco is shipped from the port of Aparri to Manila, where many persons are employed in making it into the well-known Manila cigars. The poorer tobacco from the southern Philippines is sent to Spain. 320 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY European Tobacco Production. — Tobacco is grown in many parts of the continent of Europe, but on account of large popula- tion the quantity is insufficient for local use. Even Russia (crop 200 million pounds), the leading tobacco-growing country of Europe, and Germany, the third tobacco grower with a crop of about 65 million pounds, import nearly three-fourths of the amount used. Tobacco has been a fruitful source of taxation. In Britain the tax is eighty cents per pound, and, to make the taxation easy through collection of imports at the Custom House, England for centuries forbade its growth, but its cultivation now seems likely to be encouraged. France to-day taxes it heavily, and will only permit it to be grown in certain localities where large amounts can be produced and the collection of taxes made easy. Spain gets most of her tobacco from the United States and the Spanish Government raises revenue from it by selling the monopoly of the sale of it to one company, which by its pay-roll supports 50,000 families. Turkey is the only European tobacco exporter of importance, although the crop of the whole empire is only half of Russia and a tenth that of the United States. The mild flavor of the Turkish product, like that of Asia Minor, makes it desirable for Turkish cigarettes. The so-called Egyptian cigarettes are made by Greek women in Cairo partly of Turkish and partly of Egyptian tobacco. A small amount of tobacco is exported from Algeria to France. South American Tobacco. — Brazil grows enough tobacco along her eastern coasts for her own large home consumption, and an export (75 million pounds) that makes her the third tobacco exporter of the world, the Dutch East Indies being second. Ninety-five per cent, of the export is shipped from Bahia, where the foreign commission houses advance the money to the growers, who are always in debt, and take the crop in payment for the loans. It is not grown on plantations, as in Sumatra, but by the families of small farmers who get but 300 pounds per acre — a very low yield (Pennsylvania 1,420 pounds). Tobacco grow- ing has declined in San Paulo from the competition of coffee, but its growth is increasing in the south of Brazil in the state of Rio Grande do Sul. Practically all of the Brazilian tobacco export goes to Bremen, one of the great tobacco markets. CONDIMENTS AND TOBACCO 321 Ecuador and Colombia have a small tobacco export which is an interesting illustration of the commercial service of the plant. In some districts in Colombia, tobacco, wrapped in bales covered by one or two layers of raw ox hide, survives the humidity of the climate, the downpours of frequent rains and the hardships and costs incident to weeks of ox-cart and mule-back transporta- tion. Such hair-covered bales are a common sight in the tobacco markets of Europe. The people of Paraguay, men and women alike, are among the greatest smokers in the world; they also have a surplus of tobacco which partially supplies the Argentine Republic. Some tobacco is grown in Argentina, but its increase is very slow owing to the demands for labor in other production. From Chile to Central America and Mexico tobacco growing for local use is common. European Tobacco Markets. — The British tobacco market is supplied almost entirely from the United States. Germany handles most of the South American product and much from the United States, distributing it from Bremen throughout Germany, Russia, Norway, Sweden, and Switzerland. Amsterdam is the headquarters for the companies owning the Sumatra plantations and also for the sale of Sumatra tobacco. Tobacco Manufacturing. — Plug tobacco and smoking tobaccos (the unperishable forms) tend to be prepared in large factories near the centers of production. Cigar making, on the contrary, tends to follow the market for several reasons. Cigars are difficult to keep, bulky to transport and require more labor than other forms of tobacco manufacture. Cigar making is one of the industries in which so much indi- viduality is required that machines have not succeeded in re- placing human labor. The very simple apparatus commonly used consists of a chair, table, and knife. Hence cigar making usually takes place in towns in populous country districts like parts of eastern Pennsylvania or in great cities like New York, Philadelphia, and Chicago, where labor is abundant and the prod- uct can also be near the centers of consumption and distribution. REFERENCES See General References Gibbs, W. M. Spices and How to Know Them. London. Ridley, Heney N. Spices. London. 322 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY Jacobstbin, H. N. The Tobacco Industry of the United States. Columbia University, New York. Freeman and Chandler. Spice Mill and Trade Journal. The World's Commercial Products. Ginn & Co., Boston. Mathewson, E. H. Intensive Methods and Systematic Rotation of Crops in Tobacco Culture. Yearbook, U. S. Department of Agriculture, 1908. CHAPTER IX FISHERIES Fish and Marine Plants. — Unless we value it for transportation and source of rainfall, the sea is very barren. It covers three- fourth of the world's surface, and furnishes but a small propor- tion of our food supply through fish, which derive their support from the vegetable life of the waters. Even the clear water of the sea has countless millions of minute plant organisms which are eaten by many small animal organisms, they in turn are eaten by each other and by the smaller fish, and they in turn by the larger fish, but the support of the whole pyramid of marine animal life, like the life of land animals, is based upon vegetation. The word fishery is applied to the catching of practically any animal that is taken in the water, as oysters, lobsters, whales, and even seals, which are often taken on shore. Relation of Fisheries to Sea Faring. — Sea fishery is considered the cause that first led man to sail upon the ocean, and from this beginning, all maritime nations have had their rise. Such was the origin of the fleets of the Phoenecians and the Greeks who laid the foundations of Italian cities. The Norseman on the inhos- pitable shores of Scandinavia developed fleets where man must fish or starve. The Dutchmen who wrested the commercial su- premacy of the world seas from the Portuguese had had centuries of maritime training on the herring banks of the North Sea. In recognition of the importance of fisheries to Dutch welfare there was each year for centuries a national celebration in which one of the most important ceremonies was the public eating of a salt herring by the Dutch ruler. The fleets of England had their origin on these same fishing banks of the North Sea, and later the New Englanders became the pioneer seamen of America because good fishing banks were near them. The schooner, the fastest of all sailing vessels, was invented and is yet used by the fisher- men of Gloucester, Mass., and in recognition of the importance 323 324 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY of the sea industry to the state, a dried codfish has, since colonial days, hung over the desk now occupied by the speaker of the Massachusetts Senate. The fishing industry, through its connection with sea power and the romance and charm of the ocean, tends to be over- estimated in its real importance. All the fish that are caught by American fishermen ($54,000,000, 1908) are less valuable than the tobacco crop, not one-third as valuable as the pork, not one- fifth as valuable as the butter, not one-tenth as valuable as the poultry and eggs annually produced in the United States. The fish of all the world are only two-thirds as valuable as the poultry and eggs of the United States. The Locating Factor of Fisheries. — Most of the world's fishing industry depends upon two habits of fish which enable us to catch near the land those that may have passed most of their lives hundreds of miles away at sea. The first is the spawning habit of many species which lay their eggs only in rivers or in the shallow waters near the shore. The second is the congregation of fish to feed upon the bottoms, in shallow waters, commonly called "banks." The occurrence of such banks near the shores of northeastern Asia, northeastern North America and north- western Europe is responsible for the three greatest fishing regions. North Atlantic Fisheries of America. — The fisheries of north- eastern North America are based on a rich combination of rivers, bays and shallow off-shore banks. Especially important are the grand banks of Newfoundland and smaller banks off Labrador, New England and New Jersey. The newfoundland banks were known to the fishermen of the French province of Normandy and Brittany within a dozen years after Columbus had returned to Spain from his first voyage. Unquestionably the knowledge of these fishing banks made a greater sensation in Europe than the mere fact of the discovery of the new continent, because at that date Europe was poorer than now, and a new food supply was important. In that day the fishing industry was relatively more important than at the present time. Practically the whole of Europe was Catholic, and even to those who could afford it, there were many fast days upon which fish must be eaten in place of meat. Scores of vessels sailed back and forth from France to FISHERIES 325 these Newfoundland banks each year for a century before the French made settlements in the St. Lawrence valley. The Cod Fisheries. — The most important fish on these and other northern banks is the cod, a fish which feeds along the bottom and is commonly caught on a "trawl" which consists of baited hooks attached to short lines that are fastened at intervals of 4 feet to a longer line sometimes 3,000 feet in length. These trawls are attended to by fishermen in rowboats called dories that put out from the schooners. The men in the dory take up one end of the trawl, which is anchored and marked by a float, Fig. 108. — Map showing (by broken lines) principal fishing grounds off the coasts of New England, Nova Scotia, and Newfoundland. (After MacFarland.) (From W. S. Tower.) pass the boat along under it, and let it down in the water again after the fish have been taken off and the bait replenished. Fishing on the Grand Banks is an exceedingly dangerous calling, as the banks are one of the foggiest places in the world and the schooners often collide with each other and with the icebergs, the men in the dories often lose their bearings and drift away to death, while a single fearful storm sometimes drowns scores or even hundreds of fishermen. To complete the chapter of dangers .the fishing banks are in the path of transatlantic vessels which run down the small fishing craft in the fogs. These banks have enabled New Englanders to catch fish of as 326 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY great value as all the rest of the United States together. Massa- chusetts and Maine are the leading states, and Gloucester, Mass., was long the greatest fish port in America, nearly the whole population being engaged in the catching, curing, buying and selling of fish. Boston with its better, marketing facilities has recently surpassed Gloucester as a fishing port. The cod fisherman also catches halibut and hake. The American catch of these fish is actually greater in quantity, though less valuable, than the catch of cod. The cod is at its best in cold waters and is taken in greater quantity by the Canadians than by the New Englanders, and the people of Newfoundland and Labrador catch more codfish than all the rest of the people of America. Dried cod makes nearly two- thirds of the exports of this northern dependency of Great Britain. Newfoundland and Labrador offer one of the best modern examples of a people living from one resource — so great is their dependence upon fish. There is a little iron mining, a little lumbering, and paper making, but eight-ninths of the exports are fish products and nine-tenths of the workers are busy with fish. The climate is so cold and damp that there is practically no agriculture, a garden even being a rarity in Newfoundland. The people who are not at sea catching cod, or herring, are busy curing them. Some of the cod are sold fresh, but most of them are cleaned and salted as soon as they are brought to the schooner by the dories, but when the schooner reaches its port they are dried in the sun upon sheds which stretch conspicuously along the coasts. The herring is salted or cured by smoking over a slow fire after being salted. The Nova Scotia fishing industry with a catch of $7,000,000 per year, equals that of Massachusetts, the leading state of the United States, and the total Canadian catch ($25,000,000, 1907) is slightly greater than that of New England. Nova Scotia with her many good harbors partakes somewhat of the character of Newfoundland but, though she catches nearly one-third of the fish of Canada, the warmer climate of this Province enables the people to engage, to a considerable extent, in agriculture, and they ship sheep, cattle and horses across the straits to the people of Newfoundland. FISHERIES 327 Percentage f Million Dollars Japan 17.0 United Kingdom 13.0 United States 12.3 China,Korea,Siberia and Indo-Cbina 7.7 (less Burma) European Fishing Fleets in American Waters. — Fishing fleets from Europe still visit the Grand Banks, and although New- foundland belongs to Great Britain, the French fishermen may by treaty right fish along the shore of the greater part of New- foundland. They may also land and dry their fish, although no permanent French settlements may be made. France also owns two islands, Miquelon and St. Pierre, situated just south of Newfoundland, with a population of a few thousand dependent entirely upon the fishing industry. This single prod- uct serves to give these islanders a per capita trade exceedingly heavy, many times as heavy as that of the United States. North European Fisheries. — The North Sea is the greatest fishing ground in the world. It is very shallow and abounds in fishing banks. It is sur- rounded by populous lands, being within easy reach of the British, French, Belgian, Dutch, German, Danish, Swedish, and Norwegian fish- ermen, and belongs alike to all of them, since by the custom of nations, the sea three miles and more from shore is free to all mankind. These peoples having access to the North Sea catch about $80,000,000 worth of fish per year, and the greater part of them come from the North Sea. Britain with a catch of $50,000,000 per year is the second fishing nation of the world, and close rival of the United States. A hundred thousand men are engaged, and fleets of vessels, mostly steamers, have their headquarters at Aberdeen, Hull, Grimsby, Lowestoft, Yarmouth, and at London, which is the greatest fish market in the world. The Dutch, by their location more dependent upon the North Sea than are the British, fish Canada 6.8 France 6.5 All others 29.9 75.0 57.2 54.0 34.0 30.0 30.0 28.4 J FlQ. Total 439.8 109.— World's fishery products. 328 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY nearly as much per capita as the British and have a fishing fleet with 20,000 men. The French, having no fishing banks along their coast, sail as far away as Newfoundland and Iceland. In Iceland, Faroe and other islands west and north of Scotland, fishing is an important industry, but Norway is of all the nations the most dependent upon fish. With its cool climate, its moun- tainous rocky land, and its coast full of bays, it duplicates in many respects Nova Scotia, Canada and Labrador, and like them has great fisheries of cod and herring. The cod are caught near the Lofoten Islands and the herring in the bays about Bergen in southern Norway. The catch of fish is about five times as great per capita as in Great Britain. Fish and fish products make up more than a third of Norway's export, and Norwegian codfish, codfish oil, and herring are known in many lands. Fisheries of Japan. — The third fishing region of importance is on the coasts of northeastern Asia, where again we have a cool climate and rough shores, such as prevail in the same latitudes in eastern North America. The Japanese are credited with eating more fish than any other people in the world. Two reasons account for this. One is the almost entire absence of the meat animals in Japan, and the other is the abundance of fish in the waters surrounding the country, which happens to be composed entirely of islands, thus tempting its people to go to sea. Yezo, the northernmost of the four large islands of Japan, is too cold for rice growing, much of it is too rough for any other kind of agriculture, so, its people like those of Norway and Newfoundland, have depended almost entirely upon the catch of cod, herring, and other fish of north temperate latitudes. The only other industries of Yezo are the coal, which does not depend upon climate, and the lumber, which grows upon the cool mountains as it does in Norway, Sweden, and Newfoundland. Of late, the scientific agriculturalists are discovering • possibilities of wheat growing which will aid rather than hinder the develop- ment of fishing industry, by giving a bread supply at home. Japanese fishermen scour the coasts of Asia, especially those of Korea, the Kurile Islands to the north, and Sakhalien, a barren and almost uninhabitable island on the Siberian coast, near the mouth of the Amur River. Half of this island the Japanese FISHERIES 329 were careful to secure by treaty at the close of the recent Russian War. Thus they guaranteed their fisheries, which furnish not only the chief animal food of 50 million people, but also an im- portant fertilizer, made of dried fish refuse and non-edible fish, and extensively used in the well-tilled garden-like farms of Japan. The Fisheries of the Open Sea. — Mackerel, unlike the cod, are surface swimmers, and are caught in nets swinging in the open sea. They are caught off the coasts of Europe and the United States, and immediately salted. Another surface fish caught by nets as he swims near the sur- face is the menhaden, fished for chiefly off the northeast coast of the United States within a hundred miles of New York. The fish is not considered good for food, but a valuable oil is extracted from its flesh and the dry remains bring high prices as a fertilizer rich in nitrogen and phosphoric acid. Floating fertilizer factories steam up and down the coast manufacturing this oil and fertilizer from the menhaden brought in by the fishing tugs that operate the nets. The sardine, deriving its name from Sardinia, is a small pil- chard, dried, packed in oil, and sold in sealed cans. It is exported largely from France, the sardines of the Mediterranean being packed for shipment at Beauclaire on the Rhone, while Bordeaux and Lemans are two great centers upon the Bay of Biscay. Sar- dines are also caught along the coasts of Spain, Portugal, and Italy, but a kind of sprat is often sold under the name of sardine. Sardine fisheries reach their greatest importance in Brittany, the northwest province of France, where the failure of the sardines to appear in the neighboring seas for a season has caused as many as 80,000 persons to be in a starving condition, dependent for their lives upon the donations of the French government. Along the coast of New England, especially in Maine, there has long been an important industry in the so-called "American sardines" which are really small herring, a fish closely allied to the pilchard. Although the Maine sardine canners have to dry their herring with artificial heat while the Frenchmen can do it in the sun, the American product is much cheaper, and is shipped to all parts of the United States and South America. Of late years the canners of both Europe and America have discovered that the cheaper cottonseed oil can be used in the place of olive oil in fish canning. 330 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY Whaling is of all fishing enterprises the least connected with home ports of ships and particular shores. It is also essentially an industry of the past. It was of very great importance in the first half of the nineteenth century, when whale oil supplied the family lamp. In those days New Bedford and Nantucket in Massachusetts and New London, Connecticut, were the great outfitting centers of an industry that was prosecuted in all oceans of the world so persistently that the whale was nearly extermi- nated by 1860, when the discovery of petroleum lessened the de- mand for whale oil. Some whale fishing is still carried on, but the whalers of Nantucket have changed their base to San Fran- cisco, so that they may be nearer the home of the whale, now chiefly caught in the Arctic Ocean near Behring Straits. There is still some fishing in tropic waters for the sperm whale which has in his head a white mass called spermaceti, useful in the prepa- ration of sperm candles and certain ointments. Dundee, Scot- land, is, after San Francisco, the only other important whaling port. Sealing. — The seal gets its living (fish) in the sea, rears its young upon the rocky shores and is the prey of man on both sea and land. It is such a valuable quarry that extinction seems to be its fate where not protected by strictly enforced legislation. The great center of fur seal fishing is the Pribylov Islands, an American possession in the Behring Sea. Here each year many thousands of seals gather from distant seas, and remain for a few weeks during which time the seal pups are born and grow large enough to swim away with their mothers. Each year a certain proportion of the young males, two- to four-year old seals were killed according to strict regulations by a licensee who paid for the privilege. Most of the valuable skins have been shipped to the London market. Unfortunately for the seals no country has in past years had any jurisdiction more than three miles from its coasts, and the seal at sea was like the whale, beyond the protection of government. While the United States could and did protect the seals during their stay on the rocks of the Pribylov Islands, the mother seals daily swim to the open sea for fish, and during many months the whole herd is scattered widely over the Pacific Ocean. When more than three miles from shore they fell a prey to the rifles of the pilagic sealers from Canada, Japan or FISHERIES 331 the United States, who sailed these as in search of them. As a result the mothers of many little seals were shot while gathering food, leaving the young to starve on the rocks. Thus the num- bers of seals in the Pribylov herds rapidly declined and extinction seemed only a matter of years. To make conditions still more unfortunate, five-sixths of the seals shot at sea sink and are never recovered. Unchecked and uncontrolled sealing practically exterminated, many decades ago, the countless thousands of seals that lived on several uninhabited rocks in the Antarctic, but a recent treaty (1911) between the United States, Japan, and Canada has prob- ably averted repetition of such an economic insanity in the Behr- ing Sea. This treaty protects the seals because the three nations agree to stop pilagic sealing and the United States agrees to divide the proceeds of the monopoly which she holds because she owns the seal rookeries. As the seals are polygamous, a certain pro- portion of the young males can be captured each year without in any way lessening the rate of increase of the herd. A less valuable seal sought for its oil and leathery skin is common in Labrador and Arctic America, and a fleet of steam sealers sails from St. Johns, N. F., on an annual fishing voyage. Single vessels have been known to bring back 30,000 skins. Shore and River Fisheries. — A number of marine animals such as the oyster, clam, lobster, and sponge live in shallow waters where they can easily be caught. Many rivers and bays have a fishing value out of proportion to their area because of the sea fish that annually enter the stream for spawning and become the rich harvest of the fishermen. The sturgeon, the largest of these visitors, is a fish that grows as much as 10 feet long and is found to some extent in the Ameri- can Great Lakes 1 and the rivers of the Atlantic, especially the Delaware, but in greatest quantity in the Caspian Sea, whence years ago it ran up the Volga River in such quantities that at times they crowded each other out of the water in narrow places. The fish are caught for their eggs, which are sold as Russian caviar, and the industry has been prosecuted so vigorously that 1 This marine fish, like the seals of the Caspian Sea, seems to have survived from the time when these inland bodies of water were connected with the 332 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY this valuable fish is about to become extinct. The industry has practically disappeared from the Atlantic rivers of America and has greatly diminished throughout the world, but the rising price of caviar makes sturgeon containing eggs more and more valuable, and the quest more fierce — another example of the wanton waste perpetrated by men. The salmon, of which there are several species, is easily the king of all river running fish. It is said to ascend only streams having their sources in lakes in which the females deposit their eggs. Salmon are found to some extent in northwestern Europe, New England and Canada, but the rivers of the north Pacific, between San Francisco and Japan, are the chief source of world's supply. In Alaska they have for an unknown period been almost the only food supply of the natives, who at the time of the annual run put away the year's supply of smoked salmon in little houses on high poles, out of the reach of wolves and dogs. For many years salmon canning has been an important industry, first established in California, Oregon and Washington, then in British Columbia and finally in Alaska, where in almost every river, especially the great Yukon, salmon are exceedingly abun- dant. They run in great numbers and a common method of catching them for the cannery is by the fish wheel, a large water wheel revolving in the swift current and having wire buckets which catch the salmon and throw them into a boat below the wheel. Large salmon canneries have been built at the mouths of various streams in Alaska along coasts so rocky and cold as to be undesirable for human habitation throughout most of the year. As the season for the salmon running approaches, sailing vessels loaded with empty cans and carrying many workmen, usually Chinese, leave San Francisco, Portland or Seattle for the cannery. In a few weeks hundreds of thousands of pounds of salmon are canned, loaded into the sailing vessels, and brought back to the home port for distribution throughout the United States, the United Kingdom, Australasia, and to a lesser extent to many other countries. Salmon is the chief fish export of the United States (1911, 40 million pounds, $4,000,000). The shad, probably the most highly prized of American food fish, ascends each spring the rivers from Florida to. the St. Law- rence. North of the Delaware this fish is unimportant and the FISHERIES 333 Percentage f Million Dollars estuaries of the Chesapeake furnish about one-half of the total catch. The herring also ascends these same rivers in such num- bers that at times their scaly backs make the surface of the water to shine almost like a mirror. These herring are easily caught, and crowd the small streams in such numbers that they squeeze into the water wheels that lift water from an arm of the Chesapeake into the Chesa- peake and Delaware Canal, where, un- able to escape, they perish by the thou- sands, creating a nuisance by their de- caying bodies. Shell Fish.— The oyster, of which the United States has from five-sixths to nine-tenths of the world's catch, is the most valuable fish product in America, furnishing about one-third of the total value of all fisheries of the United States. This delicious shell fish lives on the sandy and gravelly bottom of shallow bays and estuaries. It is found to some extent in the English Channel and the Bay of Biscay and on the Pacific coast of the United States, but the numerous bays between Cape Cod and Galveston, with their large expanses of shallow water of suitable temperature seem to be the best place in the world for oysters. The oysters of best repute are produced be- tween Cape Cod and Cape Hatteras, and the Chesapeake Bay, an old river valley into which the sea has flowed, is the most important oystering district of all, while Long Island Sound is second. The mid- dle Atlantic states have two-thirds of the total American oyster product. The oyster, after being hatched from the egg, swims around for a time and then attaches itself to some firm substance, such as gravel, an old oyster shell or sunken wood. For two or three years he eats whatever the tide brings him, and is then scooped up with long- Massachusetts 13.1 Virginia 8.7 New York 8.5 Washington 6.5 Florida 6.3 Maryland 6.1 Maine 6.0 New Jersey 5.7 Connecticut 5.5 All others 33.5 7.1 4.7 3.5 3.4 3.1 3.0 18.1 Total 54. Fig. 110.— United States fishery products by states, 1908. 334 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY handled tongs in the hands of an oysterman or by a steam-drawn dredge. During the seven or eight months of the oyster season they are shipped in barrels and sacks to many parts of the United States and even Europe, while at Baltimore there is a large can- ning industry for shipment to small interior towns and foreign countries. The natural supply having been found inadequate, oyster culture has been established. Beds of young oysters are sometimes planted, that is, put down to grow large; another method is to lay old oyster shells and the bushy tops of trees upon the bottoms of the bays so that there may be something to which the floating spawn may attach themselves and grow. One great trouble with oyster planting is the ease with which a thief may carry off the product during a fog or at night, but the possibilities of the extension of the oyster industry in Long Island Sound, and in Delaware, Chesapeake and other bays are very great. Clams and Lobsters yield greater cash return to the American fisherman than the codfish. The clam is a cousin of the oyster but possesses power of locomotion and is caught by being dug out of the mud. It is especially important along the New Eng- land and middle Atlantic coast. The much-prized lobster, a great crayfish and cousin to the crab, lives along the seashore and, from the mouth of the St. Lawrence River to the mouth of the Delaware, is caught in a baited box trap called a lobster pot. The high esteem of the lobster causes it to bring about four times as much per pound as the codfish. The consequent keen prosecution of the lobster fishing has caused the passage of severe laws to prevent its extermination along the shores of the United States. Most of the present supply comes from Canada, the Newfoundland export of canned lobster being important. The Sponge. — The sponge of commerce is the skeleton remains of a group or colony of animals whose fleshy bodies are washed out before the sponge is dried for shipment. The sponge grows at the bottom of warm shallow waters, the finest sponges coming from the Mediterranean coast of north Africa between Morocco and Tunis, and the Adriatic Sea. They are commonly found here to a depth of 150 to 200 feet and are brought up by divers. In the still, shallow water around the coral Bahama Islands and off the southwest coast of Florida near Key West they are FISHERIES 335 torn from the bottom by a fork attached to a pole 10 to 20 feet long. Sponge fishing, combined with cigar making, is the chief support of the city of Key West. Nassau in the Bahamas is an important sponge-fishing center. The growing scarcity and high price of sponges are causing them, like the oyster, to be added to the list of animals that grow under man's care — a piece of living sponge being tied to a weight and put upon the sea bottom to grow. Pearl Fishing is a shore fishery not possessed by the United States, since the pearl is found in the shell of certain inedible oysters that inhabit tropic waters. The pearl is a product of accident, being deposited around some foreign substance that gets inside the oyster shell. The output of pearls is, therefore, uncertain and often the fisheries are non-productive. The finest pearls and most important fisheries are upon the southern shore of Persia in the Persian Gulf, where for ages this industry has been important. The shores of Ceylon also have a pearl fishery. America has two pearl fishing centers, one in some small islands along the coast of Venezuela, where 1,600 people are getting $800,000 worth of pearls per year. The other American pearl fishery is in the Gulf of California. In addition to pearls, the mother-of-pearl, the pearl-like covering of the inside of the shells of the pearl oysters, is a product of the pearl fishery. A similar pearly shell used for button making is yielded to the extent of 40,000 tons per year, by certain mussels inhabit- ing the upper Mississippi River and tributaries. The Importance of Fish to the Atlantic Plain of the United States. — In the central part of the Atlantic Plain of the United States, unusual fish resources combine with many other resources, to make the peninsula between the Chesapeake Bay and the Atlantic Ocean one of the most favored places in the United States or the world for the easy support of the human race under physical conditions that place no serious handicap on man. The climate is wholesome, the varied soil, abundant, well-distributed rainfall and satisfactory temperature permit the commercial production of an unusual variety of grains, fruits, and vegetables, while fish products reach their maximum of abundance. It is the greatest oyster, shad and herring locality and many minor fish are caught. Herring are so abundant that the laboring 336 INDUSTRIAL, GEOGRAPHY man may in the spring time buy a thousand for from $2 to $5, and with a sack of salt and a barrel they can be preserved for the entire year. As herring and corn bread make a sustaining meal (materials costing two cents) for a working man, living is exceedingly cheap. The shores of these waters are in many places marshy, making excellent feeding grounds for wild ducks as they pass in fall and spring between the wilds of Canada and the swamps of the tropics, so that along the Chesapeake in addition to its resource of land and water, hunting is still an important source of support of the population because they can get ducks that, like the fish, are the emigrating product of another locality. This peninsula differs but little from the tidewater region on the west of the bay and its advantages are in the main typical of the whole Atlantic coastal plain that extends from the fall line on the Atlantic rivers, to the ocean, and includes Long Island and Florida. Fish In Southern Waters. — It is a fact that southern waters contain more fish than the colder waters of the north, but the heat causes fish to spoil quickly, rendering difficult the marketing of the product. Recent improvements in means of artificial refrigeration make it possible to catch fish in the teeming waters of Florida or the West Indies, freeze them at once, and market them weeks later in New York and Europe, in the same way that fish are now marketed in the winter season in those markets from the waters off Vancouver Island and other distant places. We may, therefore, anticipate a development of the fishing industry in southern waters. Fish Culture. — Many centuries ago the Chinese and Japanese found out that fish growing in ponds and rivers is one of the easiest ways of getting meat in a densely peopled country. Oyster culture was an art among the Japanese a century before the Declaration of American Independence. The German people are also systematic fish growers, devoting themselves chiefly to the carp, a fish that can be fed in a pond like poultry in a yard. There are many fish growers' associations in the empire and the total area of fish ponds approaches 200,000 acres. In Saxony one-half of 1 per cent, of the area is covered with fish ponds. (Compare with the 3 per cent, under cultivation in FISHERIES 337 Cuba.) The fish are fed upon corn, vetches, potatoes, malt, snails, slaughter-house refuse and many other foods. The average yield is about 100 pounds of fish per acre per year and much higher yields are sometimes made. The threatened extermination of many valuable species of fish has led to systematic fish culture which has thus far been chiefly devoted to fish hatching and caring for the fry for a short time. The United States government has a fish commission Fig. 111.- -A new conquest of pisciculture. Bits of sponge wired fast to cement frames have grown nicely in Florida waters. which hatches billions of fish eggs and releases the fry in streams and lakes to replenish the supply. There are several salmon hatcheries in Oregon and Washington, shad hatcheries in the eastern rivers, lobster hatcheries upon the New England coast, and the Great Lakes fisheries receive more aid in this respect than any other locality. The governments of Canada, Norway, Switzerland and Germany are also aiding the industry by the same means. Fish in Commerce. — Foreign commerce in fish is not important in the countries having the greatest industry. The United States and Great Britain consume about as many fish as they catch, Canadian fish coming into the United States to replace the sal- mon and sardines exported. The United Kingdom exports 338 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY herring to Germany and Russia and imports American salmon and French sardines in their stead. Labrador, Newfoundland, Nova Scotia and Norway, lands of small population, export the greater part of the fish they catch, chiefly cod, with herring second in importance. The great fish-importing countries are Italy, Spain and Portugal, where the Catholic church lays certain Fig. 112. — The codfish, dry as a bone and hard as wood is admirably fitted for the tropic market. A Porto Rico grocery. (Photo by Miss Helen Fogg.) restrictions upon the use of meat and the poverty of the masses of the people limits them to a food that is cheaper than meat. The Latin-American countries and Brazil are also important fish importers for the same reasons that exist in south Europe and the added one that in such hot climates fresh meat and fresh fish spoil very quickly while the dried cod, resembling a piece of wood in hardness, appearance and durability keeps indefinitely even in hot climates. The dried cod or stock fish is, in combina- FISHERIES 339 tion with corn bread or corn-meal mush, a staple article of diet alike in Venice and Valparaiso, Lisbon and Yucatan. REFERENCES See General References Publications of U. S. Bureau of Fisheries, Washington, D. C, give much valuable information as to the conditions of the industry and the attempts now being made to improve it. Tower, W. S. The Passing of the Sturgeon. Popular Science Monthly, October, 1908. Keik, R. M. Fisheries in Relation to Conservation. Bulletin American Geographical Society, 1912. Tower, W. S. History of American Whale Fishery. Ginn, Boston. History of the Seal of the United States. U. S. State Department. Stiles, George W., Jr. The Value of the Shellfish Industry and the Pro- tection of Oysters from Sewage Contamination. Yearbook, Department of Agriculture, 1910. CHAPTER X THE FUNDAMENTALS OF MANUFACTURE The manufacturing industries result from a combination of conditions largely geographic in their origin and covered by the terms raw material, power, labor, and capital. The ease of financial and commercial transfer make capital so mobile that it can go wherever the other conditions demand it, but the loca- tion of raw materials, power, and labor is more fixed because of factors most of which are geographic. The discussion of particular manufacturing industries should follow the presentation of some elements common to all manu- facturing industries. The first of these is the human element, labor, and especially the relative abundance of labor and nat- ural resources, a relationship exercising strong control over manufacturing. i. RELATION OF LAND AND POPULATION TO MANUFACTURE Cheap Land Opposes Manufacturing. — Where the population is scanty there is much land for every inhabitant, but where the population is dense there is little land for each individual. We all get our living directly or indirectly from the land. Land is, therefore, man's great opportunity, and where there is little of it per person, there is less opportunity to work; therefore, other things being equal, less return for labor, lower wages, and a neces- sarily lower standard of life. This is usually the most important fact in explaining the industrial history and industrial condition of a nation. Manufacturing is chiefly carried on by people who work for others, but in America, from the date of earliest settlement to the present, there has been, because of our scanty population and abundant land (cheap land), much greater opportunity to work for one's self and less necessity to work for others than there has been in Europe. 340 THE FUNDAMENTALS OF MANUFACTURE 341 Cheap Land Makes Industrial Problems and also Social Problems.— When the first English settlers established them- selves at Jamestown in Virginia, and discovered the profit of tobacco growing, enterprising and capable men. seeing the abun- dant land, said to themselves, "Here is a fine chance to grow to- bacco to export to England and make money. ' ' The one remaining requisite was labor. But each of his fellow settlers had the same opportunity to take up free land and each preferred to work for himself rather than to work for his neighbor. If newcomers were brought from England they too could work for themselves, and thus every energetic man wanted many laborers and could get few or none. Out of this labor scarcity, slavery arose, whereby the Englishman could control his labor. Similar situations produce somewhat similar problems wherever they arise. At the present time in Queensland, the northern state of Australia, there is a large extent of country where it is too hot for white laborers to work in the fields and there are few colored men there. There- fore labor is as scarce as it was in the Virginia Colony. Similarly the white men who own the lands could superintend large num- bers of East Indian, Polynesian, or Chinese laborers if they could get them. But this would result in Queensland becoming essentially an African or Chinese or Polynesian community, with but a small percentage of white people. This the other Austra- lians do not wish, and, therefore, they will not permit the Queens- landers to import a single coolie, although the population is less than one person per square mile. The North and South problem is there also a bitter one, as it was in America in 1861 when the South wanted slaves and the North did not. In South Africa the great gold mines of Johannesburg and the diamond mines of Kimberly require large amounts of labor in a country where nine-tenths of the native population are Kaffirs. These natives are too lazy and too few to do the work regularly, and the white men who make a small minority of the total popu- lation are also too few. The difficulty has been met by recent importations of large numbers of Chinese workmen. These coolies were brought by the mining companies at their own ex- pense under government supervision, and they will be deported at the expiration of their terms of service, because the British 342 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY government does not want an Asiatic population permanently in the colonies. Cheap Land Checked Manufacturing in American Colonies. — All through the eighteenth century and down to the year 1815, while manufactures were developing in England and manu- facturing towns were arising, the young man of America could choose between manufacturing or taking a pair of oxen, a wagon and a few implements and going into the forests of western Mas- sachusetts, New York, Pennsylvania, Virginia, or across the Alleghenies. Here by felling trees, building a log house and clear- ing a field, he could make a farm. The forest was to be had for the taking, and the young men built frontier settlements rather than go to factories and cities. The Free Land of the Nineteenth Century. — With the means of transportation then in use, our resources were relatively used up by 1810. Good farming depended upon good transportation and good transportation in the United States depended on natu- ral waterways. Since farm products could only be shipped from near the banks of navigable streams such desirable land was comparatively limited in amount, and very valuable and profitable during the period of high-priced grain produced by the European import during the Napoleonic Wars. The cessa- tion of these wars lessened the demand for American grain and meat. This lowered the profits of farming, the value of farms, the amount of employment, and the rate of wages, which became lower in the eastern United States than they have ever been since. The low wages were produced by the removal of the European market, but they quickly vanished with the coming of the steam- boat and the railroad, which placed new resources within the reach of the people along the Atlantic seaboard. The American people who had been clustered along the seaboard and navigable rivers suddenly found themselves able to take possession of the whole continent, and the vast flat prairies of the Mississippi Valley at once became available for settlement. For decades the land was given away by the government to the home- steaders and three generations of Americans triumphantly and truthfully said that "Uncle Sam has a farm for every one of us." From 1816 to 1890 people went from the east to the new west by tens of thousands each year. The records of this population THE FUNDAMENTALS OF MANUFACTURE 343 movement exceed anything that has previously occurred in the history of the world. The population of Indiana went from 157,000 in 1820 to 476,000 in 1840, to 851,000 in 1850, to 1,711,- 000 in 1860. Illinois went from 53,000 (1820) to 155,000 (1830), to 472,000 (1840) to 846,000 (1850), to 1,704,000 (1860) and to 2,511,000 (1870). The tide of emigration crossed the upper Mississippi about the middle of the century and the population of Iowa increased from 192,000 to 674,000 in the decade 1850 to 1860. The population wave reached Kansas the next decade and a population of 107,000 in 1860 reached 364,000 (1870), 996,000 (1880), 1,428,000 (1890), and then the increase suddenly ceased, 1,470,000 (1900). As our. facility in land conquest increased the filling of states became more sudden. Nebraska rose from 122,000 (1870) to 452,000 (1880) and 1,062,000 (1890), and in the next ten years it remained practically stationary because the waves of emigration had rolled on to a newer empty frontier, and Oklahoma, for example, newly opened to settlement, increased from 258,000 to 790,000 people. So excellent were the opportunities to go west and get fine land for nothing that in many parts of the east people actually abandoned their farms. Because of this western emigration the population of Virginia was practically stationary between 1820 and 1840, that of Maine and New Hampshire actually declined between 1860 and 1870, while the practically stationary figures for Vermont 314,000 (1850), 315,000 (1860), 330,000 (1870), 332,200 (1880), 332,400 (1890), 343,000 (1900), 355,000 (1910), are typical of what has happened in many agricultural districts throughout the east in the same period. Eastern farm lands, often as productive as ever, declined in selling value because of the competition of the western land, and the man who wished to farm could begin easily either east or west. Owing to the influence of these forces it is plain that the factory that succeeded in getting workmen had to pay high wages to make them stay, and for that reason American wages became high and remain high. Immigrants came from Europe often by hundreds of thousands a year and although they landed at New York and other eastern ports many of them went to the west where land was free and wages high. Thus the Germans, the Swedes, the Norwegians and the Danes settled 344 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY county after county in the states of Wisconsin, Minnesota, and the Dakotas. Since 1895 the irrigation settlements in the region beyond the 100th meridian have kept before the American people the opportunity to go west and since 1900 there has been an enormous opening up of Canada, where new railroads have been built across the open level plains and where, in the attempt to attract Fig. 113. — Map showing, by black cross, the counties in four corn-belt states that lost population between 1900 and 1910. settlers, the Canadian government has advertised in Europe and even in the United States the fact that it was giving good land away. History has quickly repeated itself. The Mis- sissippi Valley that was filling so rapidly in 1850 has for a time begun to empty itself into other frontiers. So rapid has been the emigration to Canada that the young man of the corn belt has been able to choose between taking up a free farm in Canada or working for high wages in Iowa. So many went to Canada THE FUNDAMENTALS OF MANUFACTURE 345 between 1900 and 1910, that the population of the splendid, fertile state of Iowa declined as it also did in other parts of the corn belt. 1 During the decade laborers were very scarce in the corn belt, and crops were sometimes ruined because there were no men to harvest them. Thus farm laborers in the northern Mississippi Valley near to free land get nearly twice as much wages as those in the valley of the Potomac, who are far from free land. Because of these high wages, manufacturers have made small progress in the upper Mississippi Valley. Free lands in Canada, through their influence on Iowa and other parts of the United States have actually made higher wages for the street sweeper or factory worker in New York. City, for only by increase in wages could the laborers be kept in the east. New Resources Have Same Effect as New Land. — The effect of abundant natural resources and especially of newly discovered or newly utilized resources upon wages and industry has been sharply illustrated many times in the settlement of this continent. When gold was first discovered in California, there was an enormous rush of miners from every state of the Union and every country of the world to dig up this gold from the sands of the California rivers. These thousands in a frontier devoid of farms and food producers had to be fed, and enterprising persons loaded sailing vessels with flour and provisions and sailed to San Francisco to sell at fabulous prices. But as any man could go out to the hills and dig for gold, the rate of wages rose to 110 or $15 per day. This was too strong a temptation for the sailors on the flour ships and they like the soldiers of the United States garrison at San Francisco regularly deserted until at one time there were 100 idle ships lying in San Francisco bay because the crews had been tempted away by the higher returns of working for themselves. At Cape Nome, Alaska, on the shore of the Arctic Sea, report of gold discovery a few. years ago brought a rush of thousands of men who when they got there strove for the chance to work for $3 a day in the few claims that made up the one gold-yielding creek. Suddenly it was discovered that the sands of the seashore were full of gold where each man could wash out $10 worth per 1 Sixty carloads of emigrant goods left one Iowa town in one day in March, 1911. 346 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY day, and that sum promptly became the rate of wages in all the settlement. The opposite influence has been lately shown in southern California, whither thousands of people have gone from the east to benefit their health in the gentle climate of the south Pacific coast with its warm and even tempered winters and dry summers. The sudden influx of persons attracted by health rather than resources has caused an overcrowding of many occupations and the compensation has, therefore, become surprisingly low in comparison with the general level of wages in the western country. The Ease of Living in a Sparsely Peopled Country. — Where population is scarce and the climate favors vegetation, many things grow naturally and are to be had for the taking — free goods. These conditions prevail to a greater or less extent throughout many parts of the United States, but especially south of Pennsylvania and the Ohio and Missouri Rivers and west to the limit of the eastern forest area. This whole region was originally forest covered, and more than half of it is yet covered by some kind of forest growth. Logs and timber are still abun- dant for the building of houses and the winter, milder than that of the north, permits a cheap house to suffice. The same climatic conditions make less demand for fuel and this the abundant woods still furnish in most rural communities. While natural conditions, therefore, make houses and fuel cheap, custom permits cheap clothing. A large part of the expen- diture of city people for clothes is for style rather than for protection, and the inexpensive cotton suit is about as durable as a woolen suit costing several times as much. Free Food In Southern States and Its Influence on Manu- facture. — It is in the matter of foods that the free goods are most abundant and most helpful in cheap living. From the Rio Grande to the Delaware Bay the first bright days of spring bring a run of fish upward from the sea in thousands of creeks and rivers, and in these regions a family can eat fish as surely by sitting on the stream bank and catching them as can the family that sends to a city market and pays money for them. The herring which can at this season be caught in nets by the millions is sold so cheaply that $5 will buy enough to fill a barrel and supply a family with salt fish for the rest of the year. Before the frosts THE FUNDAMENTALS OF MANUFACTURE 347 are over the spinach and lettuce of the city market are duplicated by various spring greens which are to be had for the cutting throughout the fields of the southland. In many parts of the south a law permits every man to pasture one cow along the Fig. 114. — Mazzard cherry tree on campus of Swarthmore College. This variety, often very productive, grows wild in much of the east and south. (Photo Geo. F. Hoadley.) roadsides, and in other districts pasture for a cow can be had at from $1 to $2 per month. This family cow, giving from 4 to 12 quarts of milk per day, is a cheaper source of supply than the city milkman, charging from six to fifteen cents per quart. In 348 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY May and June, wild strawberries are to be had for the picking, as are also the black heart and red heart cherries. These cherry- trees grow naturally along the fences and open woods on thou- sands of roomy farms from Pennsylvania southward, yields of 10 bushels per tree are not uncommon, and the fruit is often wasted because there are none to use it. After the strawberries and cherries come raspberries and the raspberry season merges into the blackberry season. These two productive briars are re- garded as weeds over a territory covering a million square miles in the United States and in most of this region it is com- mon custom for anyone to pick the wild berries wherever they may be found away from the immediate vicinity of a farm house. The blackberry season merges into that of the huckle- berry which grows in such abundance in swamps and on mountain sides that they have no sale value whatever until they are picked. After huckleberries come peaches, which grow wild like the cherries along the fence rows in some localities. In autumn comes the persimmon, sweetened by freezing, to hang upon the trees all winter waiting to be eaten. Throughout the lowlands and upon the moist hillsides the black walnut, which is nearly as nutritious as the high-priced English walnut (Persian walnut) is so common that it often lies ungathered on the ground. Before the first frost the chestnut burrs are opened and this sweet nut is not only an important food supply, but it also becomes a money crop of no mean importance and the people roam at will through the woods picking them up for ship- ment to all the great cities of the northern and central part of the country. The generosities of nature do not end here. The natural meat supply does not stop with fish. In late August and September the young squirrels are full grown and a good hunter can at times get five or ten in a morning. With frost the opossum is fat and colored men in the south sometimes report the catching of sixty opossums in a single season, thus getting a meat supply which was quite as abundant as could have been bought with the wages earned by arduously working on a trolley track on a noisy street. Moreover, opossum hunting is generally considered more fun. With the falling leaves the oak trees shower down their acorns, the natural food of the hog. Often allowed to run at large in THE FUNDAMENTALS OF MANUFACTURE 349 the forests, by December these hogs are fat enough to slaughter for the year's supply of ham and bacon. In addition to these free offerings of nature there is a garden to almost every house in the country districts and small towns of this part of the United States where, if a man desires, tobacco can be grown, while the sweet potato and a few hills of peanuts supply his needs in these directions and the "roasting ear," the partly ripened ear of corn, is a great standby of summer diet. The working man in this region has two alternatives. He may work regularly, get wages and buy food, or he may work occa- sionally at the spasmodic labor of the farm and get an equal amount of food by going hunting, fishing or berrying— facts of profound influence in checking the development of manufacture. The Exacting Demands of Manufacturing. — Manufactured goods are produced in a factory that should start Monday morn- ing at the blow of the whistle and work on a schedule until Satur- day afternoon. This is an exacting demand upon labor. Through- out the sparsely peopled district, with the abundant free goods above mentioned, most of the laboring population think they are just as well off if they occasionally stop work and go fishing or berrying or hunting, and they go. If they want to go to farming, land is cheap in comparison to the prices in the North Central States or Europe. There are some counties in the tide water region of the Atlantic Plain where almost the entire laboring population is negro and when August comes most of the crops have been cultivated, the plowing of corn is over, wages are in hand, and roasting ears, garden produce and blackberries are to be had, and it is the un- written custom that nobody works in August. These conditions help to explain the absence of large manufacture in these terri- tories, which are the superiors of busy New England in the manu- facturing resources of raw materials, power, and natural ease of transport. In the colder north nature demands more of man. On the treeless prairies of the Mississippi Valley, there is no free house material, no free fuel, the fertile level prairie is all cultivated, so that the fence corner crops of fruits and berries are not so abundant. While the returns of industry are probably greater the temptations of free goods are distinctly less and manufactures 350 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY are therefore a greater dependence of the people in the north central and northeastern states, where man must depend more upon his own efforts than is necessary in the south. This is one of the reasons why manufacture has developed more in northern districts. The European Labor Supply. — The chief difference between the life of the people in America and in Europe is explained by the factors already mentioned in this chapter. In Europe the result of density of population is clearly brought out. While Fig. 115.- -In densely peopled Saxony the peasant woman and the dog are draft animals. Factory labor is abundant. the average population of the United States is less than 50 per square mile, that of Germany is 290; in Holland it is 454; and in Belgium it is 645, or more than one person to each acre. This denser population makes great demands for food, which in turn makes necessary the careful cultivation of land and the conse- quent high yields give the land a high price, often several hundred dollars an acre. It often costs as much to rent a field for a single year as it does to buy land in the southern or eastern part of the United States. Over large parts of the territory there are no fence rows with berry bushes, fruit and nut trees because there are no THE FUNDAMENTALS OF MANUFACTURE 351 fences. All the land is tilled, and one man's grain field touches his neighbor's as do two connecting lawns that have no fence between. The roadsides are often lined with fruit trees, but they are not the free gifts of nature to be taken by any one in the neighborhood, but a crop grown by the farmer or even by the local government and sold like any other crop. It is a region of little land (per man). He who eats the product of the land must either produce it with much labor or buy it. Food prices are high, and wages are low. Under these conditions people must work, and work regularly, and a great difficulty is to get a chance to labor. Thus the factories can get laborers and north- eastern Europe with its dense population is a veritable hive of manufacturing industries. The emigration of many million people from the crowded section of Europe to the cheap lands of America, Argentine Republic, South Africa, and Australia has to some extent raised European wages in the same way that higher wages resulted from the similar emigration of people from the eastern to the western states. The Industry of the Chinamen. — In the more densely peopled Orient these relations of mere resources and wages are still more pronounced. China proper, which does not differ greatly in size and resources from that part of the United States east of the Missis- sippi River, has five or six times as many people. For many gen- erations their numbers have been so great that they could support themselves only by diligent labor, in agriculture and in household industries. As a result the work habit is so thoroughly estab- lished among them that they are among the most industrious people of the world, the best of laborers, and, by their thrift and energy and ability to live on little, so able to crowd out the white races in economic competition that for mere self protection they are excluded by all white nations to whose lands they have attempted to emigrate in large numbers. 2. IRON AND STEEL So great is the dependence of our modern civilization on iron that an abundance of this metal is generally considered an essen- tial part of a nation's wealth. The present is often spoken of as an age of steel and steel is merely a kind of iron. Iron and steel 352 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY are especially important in the manufacturing industries. With- out their extensive use no nation can develop great manufac- tures. This dependence of manufacture upon iron causes this chapter to be a proper place for the discussion of this fundamental metal, although its use is by no means restricted to manufacturing industries. Distribution and Uses of Iron. — Iron, the most useful, is also one of the most universal of metals. It exists practically every- where throughout the earth's crust and is responsible for the red Pounds VOO 600 500 400 300 800 100 c y / ' / / / / 1840 1860 1860 1870 1880 1890 1900 1905 1910 Fig. 116. — Per capita production of pig iron in United States, 1830-1910. color of clay banks and even of our own blood. Man has found it in many parts of the world and used it since before the dawn of history, but we have of late turned to the earth's stores of iron with renewed eagerness and within a few decades increased our use of it by many fold. So rapid has been this increase that the iron production of the United States during the last ten years was as great as that of all our past history. Iron is a twin of coal in the production of the new world commerce, because this com- merce is carried in vehicles made of iron, driven by power derived from coal. Our ever-increasing list of manufactures is almost universally produced by machines of iron and steel, while the THE FUNDAMENTALS OF MANUFACTURE 353 same material is entering in increasing quantities as a raw mater- ial for the equipment of factories, farms, and homes, and all kinds of industrial equipment. Iron was an industrial luxury a century ago. Now it is an industrial commonplace, since recent improvements in produc- tion have reduced the cost and permitted a great increase in production. A century ago the chief users were the black- smith and the machinist, now it is the construction engineer. The demand used to be for nails, now it is for beams. The Formation of Iron Ores. — Iron ores are plentiful, but the metal is never found even in a reasonably pure state except in recently fallen meteorites. It is dissolved from almost every hillside by the leaching rain waters, and where a stream of water with iron in solution enters a stream of water with lime in solution, iron ore is deposited. For this reason we have a string of iron deposits in the United States from northern Ver- mont to central Alabama. They are scattered along the edges of the limestones which are so common throughout this whole region, especially in the Great Valley from Lebanon, Pennsyl- vania, to Chattanooga, Tennessee, which has many deposits of limestone throughout its extent. Sometimes iron streams flow into small lakes, where lime or certain organisms cause the deposit of the ore in a powder upon the bottom, the so-called bog ore which has at times been quite an important source of the world's iron industry. Bog ore is sometimes collected at inter- vals as a kind of harvest on lake bottoms in Sweden, but the yield from such sources is insignificant. Where the conditions suitable for the deposit of iron ore continue undisturbed for great periods of time, we have large deposits, veritable moun- tains of ore, such as exist in the rough country south and west of Lake Superior, in the iron mountains of Mexico, the moun- tains near Santiago, Cuba, near the Cantabrians of northern Spain, in northern Sweden, and in many other parts of the world. Magnetic iron ores such as are found in the northern part of New Jersey and elsewhere are now considered to be the result of igneous- action. This ore differs from all others by being attracted to the magnet, a quality of great value in utilizing low-grade ores. 354 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY Short Life of Mining Industries. — The iron industry is typical of the mining industries, which are, in contrast to agriculture, always temporary. At best, the digging of a mineral is the removal of the accumulation of ages, which when once removed is gone forever. The Germans call it "The Robber Industry." The life of a mining town is therefore temporary and uncertain. Such towns rise and fall, or change the source of their support, while an agricultural community may live on undisturbed, tilling the same fields for three or four thousand years, as in parts of China, and the field may even be the better for it. The iron industry especially has roamed from place to place as changed conditions in manufacture, industry, and commerce have made it profitable or unprofitable. It does not depend on ore alone. There must be fuel, labor, and markets, a com- bination of factors. A change in any one factor may upset this industry as it does so many other industries. History of Iron Making. — Iron is extracted from the ores by burning off the impurities, the chief of which is oxygen. No ordinary fire will make sufficient heat, but prehistoric man learned how to make a super-heated fire probably by the means still in use very recently in so many parts of the world by peoples with primitive industry, as in interior China or central Africa. A hearth or forge was made with an artificial draught worked by bellows driven by hand or foot or occasionally by the force of a prevailing wind focussed through a funnel so that the fire got hot enough to reduce the iron to a sticky mass in the bottom of the fire. This was purified by pounding and it made a metal the quality of which has never been excelled. These forges were pretty much alike the world over, and commonly bear the name of Catalan Forge, after the Spanish province of Catalonia. The universal fuel for this forge was wood charcoal. Only the best ores could be used and this industry was naturally dependent upon the combination of ore and forest in the same place. This type of apparatus made the world's iron for at least 2,000 years and probably much longer. While good, it was costly, so costly that mediaeval builders climbed up and dug out of the solid rock of the Coliseum at Rome, the links of iron with which the Romans had fastened the stones together. The refuse of THE FUNDAMENTALS OF MANUFACTURE 355 mediaeval and Roman iron makers was long ago used up as good ore by later British manufacturers. Toward the end of the mediaeval period the forges were made taller, and the draught was made stronger, until finally it was given the name of blast and we had the blast furnace, first used in Belgium about 1340. This new device melted the iron into a liquid which absorbed impurities and was poorer iron than the more expensive product of the old forges, but it could be run off into moulds for cooling in convenient forms. This "cast iron" has to be purified before it has qualities other than weight and brittle strength. The blast furnace, like many modern inven- tions, sacrifices quality for quantity and cheapness. The fuel of the early blast furnace, like the forge it succeeded, was charcoal, and the iron industry in England came into dis- repute in Queen Elizabeth's time and was subjected to restric- tive legislation because it devoured so much wood that, to keep itself going, it followed the vanishing forests of England from place to place. In the eighteenth century it seemed that the English iron industry was doomed because of the limitation of the fuel. There was large iron import from the pine forest districts of Germany and imports from the American colonies across the Atlantic had begun and the basis for a great trade was visible between the forested colonies with abundant char- coal material and the bare mother country. But this trade was shattered and even reversed by a single invention, when in 1740 an Englishman named Darby learned how to make iron by use of coal in the form of coke. This gave the English iron industry a new lease of life and it prospered greatly through the period of the establishment of the factory system and the early nine- teenth century when no other country had industrial access to such resources of fuel, ore, and labor. In the middle of the nineteenth century, the railroad, the steamship, the modern factory with its great use of machinery, caused a rapid increase in the use of iron, and Britain with her good resources of coal and iron ore lying side by side became the leading iron-making country in the world. The location of the iron and coal fields on the west coast of England, southwest coasts of Scotland and of Wales and the east coast of England gave easy access to the sea for export, and later, when the ore 356 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY supplies ran low in England, it was easy for the English iron industry to turn to a supply of imported ore from the mountains near the north coasts of Spain and from northern Sweden, where in recent years large developments of the iron industry have taken place. Iron Making in Ameriea. — The United States is the twentieth- century leader in iron making, as was England during the nine- teenth century. This leadership has come as the result of a number of rapid transformations of the industry in this country. In George Washington's time the little forges or small blast ^^y^Tr-— . 1 ~ ' / ^~~/ \ ■ ' J Tf^>Aiy 1**1 * J*~~ i * W \ "I ' •' '/ ^— ^J— i-T-4^JL^^^ " *\)'^y&&^> *"v .* " ■ V , / / ( I n % \ A y Fig. 117.- -Map showing general distribution of iron ore in the United States. (From W. S. Tower.) furnaces with a draft forced by a water wheel were scattered from New England to Georgia and from the sea coast to Appala- chian valleys in what now seem to be remote and isolated loca- tions. Iron was made wherever the local blacksmiths needed iron, and a good ore bank, water fall, and the American forest, almost universal in the East, furnished the necessary raw materials. While England was at that time using coke, American coal lay far back in the forests of Pennsylvania and West Virginia, remote from all the paths of easy commerce. Fortunately for the American iron industry, the first coal field to be developed was the anthracite, which, by its purity and THE FUNDAMENTALS OF MANUFACTURE 357 hardness, served well for smelting purposes without being made into coke. Here was a factor that gave one region a heavy advantage over all others and after 1840 we had a rapid concen- tration of the iron industry in the Schuylkill Valley and other regions adjacent to the anthracite coal mines of eastern Penn- Percentage United States i Million Long Tons 46.3 TTnited Kingdom 12.0 France 8.4 15.2 I 10.7 Spain 7.5 9.5 Russia 4.4 5.6 All others 10.9 Total 126.9 Fig. 118. — World's iron-ore produc- tion, three-year average, 1908-10. Percentage Lake Superior District Alabama 9.0 New York 2.1 All others 8.1 Million Long Tons 4.3 1.0 3.9 Total 48. Fig. 119. — Iron-ore production of the United States, three-year average, 1908-10. sylvania. The charcoal forges and charcoal furnaces gradually went out of use, and most of them have long been picturesque and often vine-covered ruins in localities that show plainly the mark of a passed prosperity. The forge was a part of an indus- trial unit rather than an industry. The farmers of the commu- 358 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY nity worked at charcoal burning and ore digging when not busy with their crops and the much hauling of the materials gave employment for farm teams when there was nothing else for them to do. The old forges survived longest in locations remote from the places of superior manufacture and in the isolated mountains of western North Carolina and other parts of the southern Appalachians, where some of them were running for purely local supply as late as the year 1900. Fig. 120. — Grab buckets of Hewlett automatic ore unloader lifting cargo from the hold of one of the Great Lake boats with its continuously open decks. (Wellman Seaver Morgan Co., Cleveland.) Pittsburg and the Upper Ohio Valley. — The supremacy of the eastern iron districts was short because the building of railroads through the soft coal regions of western Pennsylvania caused the introduction there of coke making, for which the coals of the Connellsville Basin were particularly adapted. The iron industry promptly rose in that region and in the year 1875, the 900,000 tons of coke-made iron in that region exceeded in quan- THE FUNDAMENTALS OF MANUFACTURE 359 tity that made with the much more expensive anthracite coal. The enormous development of railroad building after the Civil War made rapid increase in the demand for iron. Pittsburg, with good local ores and abundant coke and coal, was a natural point for the assembling of the raw materials. Being at the head of the Ohio Valley, and the junction of the navigable streams, it was an excellent point for the shipment of both raw and finished products and rose rapidly to be the center, first of the American and then of the world's iron industry. The importa- tion of richer iron ore from the Lake Superior district began in 1884, but in America, as in England, the old English adage holds true in most cases that the ore goes to the fuel, so that Pittsburg held the leadership, although the source of ore supply suddenly shifted from the valleys of Appalachia to the pine woods along the shores of Lake Superior. To bring these ores from the distant mine there have been evolved wonderful mechanisms which load, unload, and carry the ore with aston- ishing cheapness. Changes in the Location of the Industry. — Fuel has been the dynamo that moved the iron industry, as from England to the forests of Germany for charcoal, and back to England for coke; from the forests of New Jersey, Carolina and Maryland to the anthracite of the Schuylkill Valley and thence to the upper Ohio basin for Connellsville coke. The efficient railroad now carries this coke to very considerable distances, but a more potent decentralizing force is now in operation. It is the new processes of coke making which enables the iron maker to get good coke in many coal fields, thus destroying the regional monopoly that existed when all coke was made in the old bee hive oven (see section on coal) and that from Connellsville coal was without a rival. The making of iron is again spreading in response to this widened fuel supply. There is, at present, a tendency for the making of iron and steel from Lake Superior ores to shift slowly from Pittsburg to Lake Shore points, such as Buffalo, Cleveland, Chicago and Gary. The whole of the triangular region between Pittsburg, Chicago, and Buffalo is dotted with towns having some of the iron industries, such as bridge plants, nail mills, wire fence works, steel car plants, and other varieties of iron work. The 360 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY tendency of the industry to shift to the Lake Shore points is due to the economy that results from having the blast furnace located beside the ore dock where the lake steamer unloads, as they may at any point on the shores of the lakes from Buffalo to Chicago. Manufacture under such conditions requires one less handling of the ore than is necessary at an inland point like Pittsburg, or Youngstown (Ohio). This economy has been instrumental in causing the removal of the Lackawanna Steel Company's main plant from Scranton, Pa., to Buffalo, and it was also an important factor in causing the United States Steel Corporation to locate at Gary, Ind., on the lake shore near Chicago, its latest plant which is, when finished, to be the largest and most complete in the world. Several minor producing districts exist in the United States. In northern Alabama, Birmingham, named from the iron city of England, possesses iron-making facilities that are probably unrivalled anywhere in the world. No other locality has such a natural assemblage of raw materials. On one side of the valley is an open ledge of iron ore, on the other side is the limestone necessary for fluxing the furnaces, while coal mines are but a few miles away. The iron industry is here of growing impor- tance and costs of production are lower than at any other place in America. At the head of Lake Superior other iron plants are arising, using the local ores and coal brought from Pennsylvania by the vessels that have carried ore eastward to the Pennsylvania furnaces. This is a case where the fuel goes to the ore, in viola- tion of the old adage that "the ore goes to the fuel." The reason is to be found in the location of the market, which is in the region west of Duluth. Under such circumstances it is cheaper to make the iron at Duluth with Pennsylvania coal than it is to carry the ore down the lakes to the coal and then carry the iron back again. The same reasoning explains the carrying of western Penn- sylvania coke to the iron ore beds and the iron plants east of the Alleghanies, as those of Lake Champlain, northern New Jersey, Baltimore, and eastern Pennsylvania. Although many of the furnaces east of the Alleghanies have ceased to be used, there is still some iron made in Pottstown and THE FUNDAMENTALS OF MANUFACTURE 361 Bethlehem, Lebanon, and Steelton, Pa. The eastern Penn- sylvania plants are mixing local ores with some ore from Lake Superior and some imported from Cuba, Spain, Newfoundland, and other foreign countries. The recent importation of ores indicates a revival of eastern iron making. Despite our great riches in iron ore there is an advantage in iron quality resulting from mixing ores. Our chief import is from the district of Santiago, Cuba, whence several ships a week sail for Baltimore Fig. 121. — Birmingham District, Alabama, showing a relation of iron, ore, coal and limestone which permits the cheapest iron manufacture in the world, about l/3 per cent, of a cent per pound. (Map after Brigham.) and Philadelphia, while lesser quantities are brought from New- foundland, from Sweden, from Spain, from the Island of Elba in the Mediterranean Sea, and scattering cargoes from the coasts of the Black Sea, South Africa, and South America. Americans have recently purchased ore lands in Chile. The location of the plants within 100 miles of the Atlantic Seaboard gives them an advantage over Pittsburg and Lake Shore points for the supply of the eastern markets and the export trade. The increase of their prosperity is indicated by the building in Philadelphia by one railroad of a new ore dock with a capacity of 1 million tons per year. In Colorado, which has local coal and ore, is another new iron center, and, being a thousand miles from any other iron- 362 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY producing district, is of great importance in the Rocky Moun- tain region, but the output is only about 1 per cent, of the total product of the country. The Pacific Coast, with its scarcity of fuel, high wages, and convenient access to water-borne cargoes from eastern plants, has developed only a very small iron-smelting industry. Its shipyards and foundries import most of their material from the eastern States and from Europe, a process that will be made easier by the opening of the Panama Canal. Steel Making. — Steel is merely a kind of iron which is hardened by an admixture of definite amounts of alloys, mostly carbon. There are three processes of making it. An old and excellent process called cementation begins by taking cast iron, putting it into a puddling furnace, which is a sort of basin with flames beating over it. The puddler stirs the molten iron in the basin with a rake while the flames burn the carbon out of the iron. When the coarse carbon of the casting is nearly all burned out, the iron, then called wrought iron, is very tough, malleable, and ductile. In the cementation process the wrought iron, cut into one-pound chunks, is packed in air-tight boxes with charcoal (carbon) and the whole box kept red hot for a few days, during which the carbon in right amounts and quality is slowly absorbed by the iron. This ancient method has not been improved upon when the object is the best of high quality steel, such as is needed for cutlery, firearms, and instruments of precision. But the railway and the steamship require a cheaper metal; the great development of world commerce could not come until after the invention by an Englishman, Sir Henry Bessemer, of the so-called Bessemer process, by which 20 tons of steel are made in a few minutes by putting molten iron in a large retort through which a current of air is blown violently. The oxygen of the air unites with the carbon in the iron and burns it out. The product is then virtually wrought iron, which is changed to steel by the addition of the proper amount of carbon in the form of high carbon iron called " spiegel-eisen. " The quick method of making Bessemer steel is cheap. The cost is but a small fraction of that of making cementation steel, and it has been of great service for 50 years in making steel rails for railway tracks, and beams for bridges, buildings, and elevated railways. THE FUNDAMENTALS OF MANUFACTURE 363 But the great weight of the present day locomotive requires a better rail than the Bessemer, which breaks without warning. This new demand is met by a newer, slightly more expensive metal called open-hearth steel. This is made by putting molten iron in a basin over which flames from a gas-fed fire beat for 8 or 10 hours until the carbon content is reduced to just the right amount, which can be determined by testing. This stronger and more uniform open-hearth steel is used for boiler plates, ship plates, and the best steel rails now used, and is rapidly displacing Bessemer steel as the chart clearly shows. U. S. STEEL OUTPUT, MILLION TONS Bessemer Open Hearth 1900 1901 1902 1903 1904 1905 1906 1907 1908 1909 1910 6.6 8.7 9.1 8.5 7.8 10.9 12.2 11.6 6.1 9.3 9.4 3.3 4.6 5.6 5.8 5.9 8.9 10.9 11.5 7.8 14.4 16.5 Steel is really an alloy of iron, a mixture of iron and carbon. Various special steels, made by alloying iron with other sub- stances than carbon, are produced in small quantity. Their importance is not measured by their quantity but by their high usefulness for special purposes, such as the very hard nickel steel for armor plate for battle ships and industrial uses where great hardness is important. Chrome steel and tungsten steel have the quality of holding their cutting power better than carbon steel does in a metal working lathe. By this means a few hundred tons of tool steel have multiplied several fold the effi- ciency of thousands of machines and machinists. Vanadium steel is far superior to carbon steel in its lessened tendency to 364 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY break without warning — a quality of especial value in automobiles and other vehicles where the continuous jarring of motion causes crystallization and fracture without warning. Iron as a World Industry. — Extensive iron making is an industry of countries advanced in manufacturing. It requires excellent transportation facilities, much capital for the enormous plants, large number of laborers, and the large market which only many- people can give. It is very distinctly not a frontier industry, and this is just as true in the new states of the United States as it is in Australasia or South America. As a result, six countries dominate the iron making of the world, and three of these are of distinctly minor importance. The United States, Great Britain, and Germany make four-fifths of the world's supply, Belgium, France, and Russia are the next group and after they have been named, there is little left of the world's iron industry. South America, Africa, Asia, Australia, the East Indies, all the islands of the sea, and all the countries of the Mediterranean do not together make as much iron as a single Pittsburg company. There are a few furnaces in Mexico, but, owing to lack of fuel, Central America and South America are devoid of iron making save for some charcoal furnaces at Corral, Chile, with a capacity of 200 tons per day. (Single furnaces at Pittsburg make 600 tons per day.) All of Africa is without iron making, as is practically all Asia, except a small quantity in China and Japan. The lack of an iron industry in these countries is no index whatever of the lack of an ore supply, for most of the countries mentioned have large quantities of it. Australia, with both coal and ore and ability to borrow English capital, has virtually failed through the lack of the necessary labor supply. The German Iron Industry. — Germany is the second iron manu- facturing country of the world, having passed England in output about the end of the nineteenth century, but the German iron district is economically part of a district which extends through northern France, Belgium, and the lower Rhine Valley, where local ores, coal, and the dense population give the necessary conditions for modern iron making. The navigable Rhine, with cheap transportation by barge, makes possible the import of Swedish and Spanish ores through Rotterdam, Amsterdam and via canal from Antwerp, and the export through these same THE FUNDAMENTALS OF MANUFACTURE 365 ports whose steamship lines take the finished products at cheap rates to all the world. The town of Essen on the navigable Ruhr, a river reaching the Rhine below Cologne, is the center of the world- famous German iron industry owned by the Krupps. Some iron is made on the coal fields of central and eastern Germany, but the Rhine valley district (Westphalia) is to Germany what the Chicago-Pittsburg-Buffalo triangle is to the United States. Westphalia with its Rhine boat connection with the world shipping lines has a location from which export is easier than from Pittsburg. Germany has not exceeded Great Britain as an iron maker because of superior advantages. They are inferior, but both government and science have fostered the industry. By her protective tariff she has restricted the home market to the German furnaces and the population exceeds that of the United Kingdom by a third and the demand for iron has been keen. The Germans have been late in the development of manufacturing and mining industries and the Empire has for three decades been equipping herself as England did in an earlier period. A vigorous policy of government assistance has fostered the export trade and in the year 1910 German steel exports exceeded those of Britain. The importance of the foreign trade to British manufacturers is shown by the fact that in 1910 nearly one-half of the 9 1/2 million tons of iron was exported in some form. Other European Iron Production. — Austria is an insignificant iron maker because her ore and coal fields are separated and the land transport necessary to assemble material of only moderate richness is too costly. Her iron industry is located in the populous and manufacturing state of Bohemia and the coal in districts to the southwest of Vienna. • The whole Mediterranean basin is barren alike of coal and consequently of iron making until the Azoff basin of south Russia is reached. There the demands of an empire with a population greater than the United States, and undeveloped industries are causing a rapid increase in iron making, but the total Russian production for 1910 was but 2.9 million tons or 30 per cent, of that of the United Kingdom (10.3 million tons) and 11 per cent, of that of the United States in 1910 (27.3 million tons). 366 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY At Bilbao, a Spanish port on the Bay of Biscay, there is arising an iron industry (less than half a million tons) with an explana- tion similar to that of the Duluth furnaces. Bilbao exports several million tons of iron ore annually to England and the returning ore vessels carry fuel to Bilbao for the operation of furnaces there built by British capital. Sweden, with a large percentage (52.2) of her area in forest, has had the wood to keep on making charcoal iron which is superior in quality to that of the coke-fed furnace, and is much sought by blacksmiths and machinists in many countries. For example, Sheffield (England) cutlery is made of Swedish iron, and the Swedish production of charcoal iron is now giving rise to the manufacture of high-grade machinery in Sweden. Iron in Japan and China. — Japan, the last of the nations to gain recognition as a world power and to enter diligently among the world's manufacturers, is a country comparatively poor in coal and much poorer in good iron ore. Her first modern ship- yards used European iron. It is only within a few years that iron works there have been established, using ore brought down the Yang Tse Kiang River from central China. China is as conspicuous for her iron riches as is Japan for their poverty. In addition to possessing, next to the United States, the most abundant supply of coal in the world, there is much evidence to show that iron ore exists in great quantities and good quality. A little iron has been manufactured in the primitive ways for ages, and now that China is adopting modern methods the possibilities of the future iron industry are a matter of interesting speculation. Both the great raw materials are there and also a labor supply exceeding in amount that of any three western countries. Already in a period of great prosperity and tem- porary shortage in the American iron market, the product of a modern blast furnace located at Hankow at the junction of the Han and Yang Tse Kiang Rivers has sent its product to the port of New York, where it had to pay a heavy tariff in addition to a freight charge for transportation half way round the world. In 1910 a steel company operating on the Pacific coast of the United States contracted with the Ta Yeh iron mine on the Yangtse to take annually for the next five years 36,000 tons of pig iron and 36,000 tons of iron ore, both to be made into finished products THE FUNDAMENTALS OF MANUFACTURE 367 in the United States. It is quite possible that there are more shif tings and readjustments in store for the. world's iron industry, and there is little question that China possesses the possibility of dominance in open markets. World Commerce in Iron. — While the large production of iron is localized in a few districts of eastern America and western Europe, its commerce is world wide. All peoples who trade use it in many forms, so that from England, Germany, France and the United States the manufactured products go to every country. The European countries with their older industries and their cheaper labor produce the more highly manufactured forms such as cutlery, tools, instruments, and the finest machinery. From the United States, which excels in raw materials and labor- saving machinery, the heavier products are shipped, such as railroad rails, bridges, girders and plates. Pittsburg rails and bridges are to be found upon the railways of Mexico, Man- churia, on the upper Nile at Khartum, upon the African lakes in Uganda, in Australia, Japan, and in Ecuador. The steel mills of Europe and America will continue for many decades to equip with steel the new countries of the world. The Future of the Iron Industry. — Despite the many shiftings of the iron industry it has as yet used but a small fraction of the total ore supply. The amount of ore throughout the world is very great, some of it being of good quality, but much the greater quantity is of relatively low grade such as we have not as yet been compelled to use. The iron industry, being comparatively young, has thus far drawn only upon the best ores. The distance of carriage has rarely exceeded 500 miles, except where the ores have been so located that they could be water borne nearly all the way fron the mine to the furnace, as for example, between the iron port of Bilbao in northern Spain and the furnaces of Barrow in Furness, on the west coast of England. The Swedish ore is water borne to England and to the German plants upon the Rhine navigation, while the great American movement of iron ores is made possible only because of the astonishing cheap- ness of carriage by the very large and fast steamboats of the American Great Lakes, which leaves but short distances for the railroads to carry the great bulk of the ore. The ocean steamer now renders such cheap service that the 368 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY a wV:\^vvri\fr : V:i-'^ a i^'^JAUJrojanipTO^jca.AAij 5:::::::;::::::::::::::!i !>±tffF :::::::4 i^^r'-'lR--:;-'- ^Hffr ■ ;-■ -!S; i ■ - - - j M-|- --* - h II' ' !-■■- ! x . __ __!;, — l . — — h j j j j 1 f-j-j- J ! L l-'lLi-l4 ■;|^'^ ! -"""" HI I 4 4 ^nErm Bffffflfflm «- . . _l _|_|_i r tti r 1 :•■■ .-I 1 I L - ■ J ""1i11T + 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 -1 !! 'M b»4j-t ~~ jM 1 1 j~ 1 1 1 1 1 1 H - — ^WBBi . n :s 44- — H i 1 1 1 11 — "T XrlT " " 1 ' ' ' ' ■- 4- 4-J-J j- 1 1 1 1 1 [ 1 1 »■■-__. .---—" n !■■ — TTti T --r-R-F* 1 ": \~ 111 2 S"-IiL!.!L:j!::.Sji!"! L= f" — *- ^^ — : >--»■. i. T .a -; = — | -fttf-t" 4 = + 4J+ ; - - L fJtKttff 00 o ffT -LL ttt m 1 H 11 1 1 " ;!=::: „ | p z!::::::::::::::::::: *| E F- as E ■■■■■■■k^="H^^ » o j:s;::::::::::::::::: || § J::::::::::::::::::: = 3 5 s Jt x:: J: :::::::: :2 = --£ TB BUI £ s : -E x._± !:^:ss:_!! IK. ->«- j j| ?f "j B --;;- - ii; 1 1- 'E±t X__X -___^L.^,L igi!l'>r-rJ :: --:: I E -1 1 L..Sl«, s; ' ""■•"' • _ ' r — 1 h'p |::i"-"-"----5---- = -- " :: ' = S i \\"'"'-" ::: - :z '- : T i x . ... lap^^Huat jH««s=dB --------\ — j — i . . — i 4~p ~T~ ~r~j~ Sr--T-> s g !B +-i a gSag \i g g |gj 1? htla 1 J .rVil-'^Bw. J- 5 '-; . I i- J rr' sw THE FUNDAMENTALS OF MANUFACTURE 369 ores near the coast of distant lands such as Central America, Brazil, South Africa, and Sweden are in terms of freight rate much nearer to the furnaces of Pittsburg, Glasgow, and Essen than the ores of Colorado or central Russia. This gives a world supply of iron ore and indicates that the increasing American import of Swedish and Spanish ores is not an exception but part of a world movement. The United States Steel Corporation has purchased the famous iron mountain of Durango, Mexico, said to contain 300 million tons of iron. American companies are reported to be investigating similar deposits in Honduras with the idea of building railroads to export the ore. The Brazilian government has started improvements of the port of Victoria (latitude 20° south) to make possible the export of from 2 to 6 million tons of ore per year. The import of Chilean ores by British iron makers is under consideration. (U. S. Con. Rep., June 10, 1911; Sep. 4, 1911; Feb. 2, 1911; and Dun's International Review.) Six thousand miles by steamer and 1,000 miles by rail is not an unreasonable haul and it is one that will Fig. 122. — Babson Chart of American Business Conditions. (Copyright, 1913, by Roger W. Babson.) "The large black areas are formed by combining and plotting the published figures for the past nine years on New Building, Crops, Clearings, Iron Production, Money, Failures, Idle Cars, etc., in order to give a Composite Plot of actual business conditions, in the United States. The line XY represents the normal growth of the country's business, the slope being changed whenever there is sufficient evidence of a change in the trend of conditions. Based on the economic theory that "action and reaction are equal" when the two factors of time and intensity are multiplied to form an area, the sums of the areas above and below said line of normal growth XY must, over a sufficiently long period of time, be equal, pro- vided the line XY is properly located and enough subjects are herewith included, with all properly weighed and combined. Moreover, owing to the law of averages, and certain psychological laws, these separate areas tend to be equal in area, although not necessarily in shape. Thus, in our opinion, business should enter a depression which will cause another area to be formed below the line X Y when the area D has expanded to approximately the size of the average of areas " A " " B " and " 0," it being improbable that business should keep close to the line XY long enough to start a new series of areas. It, however, should be remembered that this next period (which will be called "E") may be of an entirely different shape from anything heretofore witnessed and still contain a similar area. Knowing that the areas tend to be equal, one can always estimate the length of any period by watching each week its height, or "rate of flow," which shows how rapidly it is being consumed. The light solid line represents the average price of stocks, the dotted line the average yield of bonds, and the heavy black line represents the average interest rate for prime paper. A study of these lines shows that the high point of the stock market has come when the pros- perity area is about one-fifth consumed and the low point has come when the depression area is about one-fifth consumed, that low money rates and high bond prices have come at the very beginning of a prosperity area and high money rates and low bond prices at the beginning of a degression area. Owing to the increased study of fundamental conditions these areas should slowly decrease in size, " E" being smaller than "D." The figures printed under 1909 refer to the light solid line, which shows the average price of the thirty- two stocks. The figures under 1911 refer to the dotted line and show the average yield of ten bonds. The figures printed under 1905 refer to prime commercial rates." 370 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY make nearly all the earth accessible to one or the other of our great iron regions — Orient or North Atlantic. The electric smelting of iron ore has long been experimented with and seems to have passed the experimental stage in Sweden at least. Successful operation in 1911 reached a profitable stage, making a ton of iron per year horse-power of electric en- ergy and at Jorpland, Norway, this power costs but $6 at the water-power plant. It is calculated that ores of only 40 per cent, can be utilized. (U. S. Con. Rep., Jan. 23, 1911, and July 19, 1911. Tons 3,000,000 2,000,000 1,000,000 -J fa * •* 1907 8 Hi a 2, h * 1908 ••'SS^MftJI-'* e.,2 S "3 a 5* o o 1909 1910 ti-iii ■'■■-■ & O 1 \ 1 \ 1 \ \ / \ ' \ / i s \ / v, \ V / v t s L i Fig. 123. — Production of pig iron in United States by months, 1907-10. (Iron Trade Review.) The iron industry is called the Industrial Barometer. Any idea that the United States has great advantages over Europe in the making of iron is scarcely founded upon a close examination of the basal facts of industry. The best of the Lake Superior ores are richer than those of Europe, but the average quality is already declining and the cost of mining is increasing. The carriage by rail to upper Lake port, by steamer to lower Lake port, and again by rail to Pittsburg is a laborious journey over a distance but little greater than that from New Castle to the Swedish ore beds via the Norwegian port of Narvilk and it is greater than the 700 mile open-sea journey from Bilbao, THE FUNDAMENTALS OF MANUFACTURE 371 Spain, to Cardiff, and the English iron masters operate their Spanish mines with laborers receiving fifty to sixty cents per day (U. S. Con. Rep., Oct. 10, 1910). The comparison of distances is not to England's disadvantage and it should be noted that the American Great Lakes are closed a part of the year by ice, while all European ore districts, includ- ing the Great Gellivare deposits of Sweden within the Arctic circle, are able to ship continuously over the open sea. The wonderful ore-handling equipment of the United States, much the best in the world, is the means by which we have overcome handicaps. Germany is but little worse off than England and is building special ore-carrying roads to the enormous iron deposits of French Lorraine. There was never a time when many countries were on such equality with regard to a supply of iron. Manganese. — The mining of manganese ore is (like much quarrying of limestone) an adjunct of the iron industry which would, if it stood alone, command considerable attention. We manufacture no metallic manganese, the entire supply being used in iron manufacture to produce iron of particular grades. The world's production of 1 1/2 million tons is practically all used in the iron industry, and is supplied chiefly by Russia (40 per cent, of total), India, and Brazil. About 400,000 tons of ore per year are exported from the Russian Caucasus by way of the Black Sea ports. Twenty-five freight steamer loads of this ore came to us from India in 1911, 131,000 tons, 60 per cent, of our supply. Brazil furnishes most of the remainder from the mines of Curo Preto in the state of Minas Geraes. The American production, chiefly from Virginia, has declined to insignificance (6,000 tons) because of the competition from India and Brazil. 3. COAL In the development of manufactures iron is important, but the possession of some source of mechanical power is a much more potent factor in deciding a nation's r61e in manufacturing and in civilization. We depend upon mechanical power in a way not unlike the dependence of young children upon their parents. 372 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY Our Absolute Dependence on Coal. — If some wizard should, upon the first moment of some incoming year, banish all coal from the world, instant darkness would settle over the streets in most of the world's great cities and their inhabitants would rise the next morning to find their houses cold, nearly all their factory wheels would be motionless, and the starvation that immediately faced them could kill millions of people before another January first had come. England would be the worst sufferer, because coal-driven steamships and railroads bring to that country much of the food and raw materials upon which her people depend for sustenance and industry. There would be no escape from the panic-stricken island because the coal-driven steamships of the world would lie helpless, sailing vessels and oil burners would be grossly inadequate, and to build more vessels would require iron and wood, neither of which could be had without the use of coal. The people of Germany, Holland, and Belgium, New England, and New York City (this city used over 15 million tons of coal in 1909) would be in nearly as bad a plight as those of England. The only possible escape would be through the conversion of coal-burning steamships and locomotives into petroleum-using ones, and even if we had enough petroleum, this change probably could not come fast enough to avert the catastrophe, for world commerce is now coal-driven commerce, and world manufacture is chiefly in the steam-driven factory. Coal is thus back of both factors which have enabled man in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to separate so widely his home space from his sustenance space. All the modern nations have at their disposal mechanical power, chiefly coal driven, which far outranks the combined muscular force of all the men and all their beasts and the increase in its use is very rapid (see table, Page 373). If all the coal used in the United States were used to generate power in moderately efficient plants of large size in which 2 pounds of coal generate 1 horse-power for one hour, the resultant energy for 300 working days in the year would be at the rate of about 750 man-power for each living man in the United States. This is on the basis of ten men per engine horse-power, which is actually lower than the facts would be. Early Use of Power In Holland and England. — Holland with her THE FUNDAMENTALS OF MANUFACTURE 373 wind mills was the first extensive user of artificial power. She used wind because she had no waterfalls such as have long been used to some extent in other countries. For the same reason wind mills were used to grind the breadstuffs in the early days in Rhode Island, Eastern Long Island and on the flat prairies of Illinois. England, already a coal user when the steam engine was invented, quickly took from Holland the leadership in power development, and then in manufactures, because she has enormous 1 good coal fields near to the sea and near to the iron, which is necessary for the harnessing of power derived from coal. England had, in addition to power, an adequate labor supply, a stable government, and peace. With these advantages the modern factory system quickly originated. It came after a number of mechanical inventions in the latter part of the eighteenth century made it possible to assemble many workers in one building where their machines could be run by a common engine. Previously, the English manufacturing had been done by hand machines in the cottages of people who lived in populous POWER CONSUMPTION OF XT. S., 1870-1905 Power used for manufacturing Total Horae-powcr 1870 1905 Horse-power per wage earner 1870 1905 Horse-power used per $1,000 of output 1870 1905 Agricultural implements Boots and shoes Cotton goods Flour and grist mill products Hosiery and knit goods Iron and steel Lumber and timber Paper and pulp Silk goods Woolen goods Worsted goods All other factories Thousands 26 3 146 576 6,500 170 641 54 2 85 8 626 Thousands 106 62 1,040 780 84 2,725 1,500 1,125 79 164 130 6,850 1.0 0.1 1.1 9.9 0.4 2.2 4.3 3.0 0.3 1.1 1.6 2.2 0.4 3.3 19.9 0.8 11.2 3.7 17.0 1.0 2.3 1.9 0.5 0.1 0.8 1.3 0.4 0.6 3.1 1.1 0.2 0.5 0.4 1.0 2.0 2.3 1.1 0.6 3.0 2.6 5.9 0.6 1.2 0.8 Increase (Power consumption, 300 per cent. Power rates to population, 100 per cent. 1 Power rates to wage earner, 164 per cent, ( Power rates to $1,000 of product, 137 per cent. 1 Estimated to last six centuries at present rate of consumption. 374 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY country districts and tilled some land. But coal and steam made easy the establishment of the factory system, and con- densed these people into cities usually to their physical injury, changed Britain from an agricultural to a manufacturing country and transferred the center of population and power from the agricultural southeastern plains to the rougher, more moun- tainous north-northwest and west with their coal and iron. Here people live in towns and get almost all agricultural products by trading, and the many manufacturing cities that have been developed give England a higher proportion of city population than any other country in the world. The British Coal Fields. — The location of British coal fields favored this early development. The coal is good, although it is all bituminous, and the fields are well distributed, some on the east coast, at Newcastle, some on the west coast, in Cumber- land, some in Scotland, near Glasgow, some in Wales, near Cardiff, and some inland near Sheffield and Birmingham and Manchester, making possible a varied development of industry. Each coal field has developed an industrial district. The southern inland coal fields support the great iron and steel manufactories of Sheffield and Birmingham, the northern give power for the cotton mills of Manchester and the other towns of Lancashire and the wool manufactures of Bradford, Leeds and Huddersfield in Yorkshire. The Cumberland field in northwest England, has an iron center at Barrow-in-Furness, and the fields of southwest Scotland make Glasgow a great port and iron center and the Clyde a great ship-building river. The coals of Newcastle near good harbors have for three centuries been carried in ships to London and across the North Sea to con- tinental points, while the neighboring cities of Shields, Middle- borough and Sunderland have of late become great ship-building and iron-manufacturing centers. The southwestern fields in Wales have led to a great smelting industry and export of coal, a branch of the foreign trade in which England exceeds all other countries of the world combined. Some of her publicists have urged the stopping of the coal export because she is thereby hastening the day when she will have none for her own use. British Coal Exports. — The grain ship brings bread for the British people to eat, the refrigerator ship the meat, the lumber THE FUNDAMENTALS OF MANUFACTURE 375 ship the planks from which they build their houses, the cotton and wool ships the fibers with which to clothe themselves and other ships yet other materials for their factories. The exports of manufactures are much less bulky than these imports, and the ships that would otherwise go away empty carry the coal of Britain into every sea and to most of the world's coalless lands. It is from England that the coalless Dutch, Danes, Norwegians, and Portuguese get their supply, while empty steam- ships outward bound to the Danube and Black Sea ports carry the coal burned by the Italians, Greeks, Spaniards, and Arabs u|pon the shores of the coal-barren Mediterranean. For the same reason British coal goes in hundreds of thousands of tons to the Argentine Republic, to Uruguay and to South Africa. A steamship out of fuel gets British coal when she drops into such coaling stations as Maderia, the Azores, Rio Janeiro, Malta, or Port Said at the Suez Canal. Late and Rapid Development of American Coal Mining. — During the first two-thirds of the nineteenth century, while England was busy manufacturing with coal, the people of the United States were chiefly employed in farming and settling the free lands of the Mississippi Valley which the United States Government was giving away to settlers, who rarely needed coal for the family stove. Our manufacturing industries started, before the improvement of the steam engine, in New England, where many streams tumbling down from the highlands made abundant waterfalls and good water power, of which we can see the evidence in the names of old New England mill towns, such as Fall River, Chicopee Falls, Rumford Falls, Bellow Falls, and many others. For domestic fuel the American people for two centuries burned wood, while England, old and rela- tively populous, had been short of forests in Queen Elizabeth's time and was using coal. In 1660 the British consumption was two-fifths of a ton per capita, a quantity not equalled in the United States until after 1850. A small coal field near Richmond, Virginia, was but a few miles from tide water at that city and because of that fact was, in the days before railroads and canals, the most accessible to eastern markets, because it could be carried to them over the natural waterways. The northward movement of the coal began in 376 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY Fig. 124.— Production of coal in United States, 1846-1910. THE FUNDAMENTALS OF MANUFACTURE 377 1789, and this trade was used as an argument for the building of the Chesapeake-Delaware canal. This Richmond coal field, now entirely abandoned because of the competition of its su- periors, was yielding 54,000 tons a year in 1822, while the Penn- sylvania anthracite, of which the first shipments were made by wagon in 1807, had reached a production of a ton a day by 1820. The Pennsylvania anthracite deposits served as a magnet to attract the pioneers at both canal and railroad building, a high- way of each type being built up the Schuylkill River from Phila- delphia to the southern edge of the coal fields. Our production only reached a million tons in 1837, 10 million in 1853, and 20 million in 1863, but the rapid development since the Civil War is shown by its having reached 50 million tons in 1872, 100 million in 1882, 200 million in 1897, 300 million in 1902, 400 million in 1906, and now, for every man, woman, and child in this country, we use annually over five tons of coal or over 25 pounds per day. The rate of increase in per capita consumption has been stupendous. The amounts with dates have been (1850) 0.287 tons, (1860) 0.514 tons, (1870) 0.96 tons, (1880) 1.52 tons, (1890) 2.52 tons, (1900) 3.53 tons, (1910) 5.1 tons. The con- tinuance of such a rate of increase is unthinkable. The Influence of Coal on Settlement of America. — It was coal and steam that enabled the American people to finish the con- quest of the American continent. In the two centuries between the founding of Jamestown and the marketing of coal in Penn- sylvania, the colonists had slowly struggled westward through the forests and mountains and settled the river districts of western Pennsylvania, Kentucky, and Ohio, but the conditions of transportation in the west were such that no populous common- wealth could arise. Exports of grain and meat and a little lumber went to New Orleans down the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers in flat boats which were knocked to pieces because they could not be pushed up stream against the swift current. Im- ports were brought in wagons over the Allegheny mountains to Pittsburg and thence down stream to the points where they were consumed. Economic and social progress was difficult under such conditions. In 1812 the steamboat changed all this by ascending the Mississippi River and making a two-sided commerce. It enabled American people emigrating by the power of 378 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY steam to attack the heart of the continent in a hundred places on the great navigable system of the Mississippi between Pitts- burg, Kansas City, Minneapolis, and up-stream points on many smaller rivers. Two decades later the steam-driven locomotive broke the shackles that had for ages held civilized man by the river bank and seashore, so that in half a century the American people spread five times as far as they had in the two preceding centuries. Pennsylvania Anthracite. — The first coal field to be extensively developed in response to the steam demand was the anthracite field of eastern Pennsylvania, which has the best coal in America and is also nearest to the cities of the Atlantic Seaboard. The canal built up the Schuylkill from Philadelphia to this field was followed by some of the earliest railroads in America. Every railroad system anywhere near the district has reached out for a share of the coal freight until now a dozen railroads carry this coal in all directions, to Philadelphia, New York, and New England, on the east, to the Great Lakes on the north, and to the west, and the south. This coal, being the nearest to New England, is very important there, but is a luxury on the Great Lakes and in the west, because there is so much bituminous coal near at hand in Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois. At Port Richmond, a terminus of the Reading Railroad in Philadelphia, are extensive coal piers from which 2 millions of tons of anthracite are shipped to New England in barges towed by sea tugs, while 14 million tons are shipped from piers of the Lehigh Valley, Delaware, Lackawanna and Western, the Pennsylvania and other railroads from their docks on Raritan Bay and Hudson River near New York. The United States has a production of nearly 1 ton of this valuable coal per capita per year, all pro- duced in the small coal region of eastern Pennsylvania. Here the scattering remnants of a deposit once of greater area are divided into three fields covering an area of but 475 square miles with the cities of Scranton, Wilkesbarre, Pottsville, and Shamokin as the chief mining centers. The improvements in methods of burning small sizes of anthracite coal have caused the closer utilization of the output and led to the re-working of the culm banks left by the mining operators of past decades. These reclaiming plants, called washeries, sent 4 million tons of coal to the markets in 1909. THE FUNDAMENTALS OF MANUFACTURE 379 The Appalachian Bituminous Coal Field. — The Ohio River opened the finest bituminous coal field in the world— the Appa- lachian coal field, reaching almost without a break from northern Pennsylvania into northern Alabama. In western Pennsylvania alone the coal area is larger than Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Delaware combined, and Pittsburg, standing where the navigable Ohio was formed by two navigable branches, was the most convenient point of access to this coal field and the natural place for its earliest development. All routes gathered at Pitts- burg, and the so-called smoky city, depending entirely upon / ( * IK — ' J(\j) ^O—j/5 Vk5 L • V \ / t^*7t!1 < fc , % 1 * * SEi|(X ^^■B KNOWN COAL 1 HCLDS Wfflfc DOuarruL . COAL FIELDS \ V 1 COAL UNDLtk \ DEEP COVER Fig. 125. — Map showing general distribution of coal fields in the United States. (U. S. Geol. Surv.) (From W. S. Tower.) Appalachian coal for its manufacturing power, grew rapidly. The service of these streams in the formation of Pittsburg is more than that of a mere converger of highways through the mountains and plateaus. In 1909, the Monongahela River brought 10 million tons of coal to the city out of a total shipment of 14 million tons. In these Appalachian plateau districts the opening of a coal mine in a practically unsettled forest, or a farming district, neces- sitates the building of a new town in the wilderness for the support of the mine workers. The coal mining company usually builds the houses as well as the branch railway to get to its mine. Each year acres and acres of barges of Pennsylvania coal 380 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY float down the Ohio and Mississippi carrying millions of tons to Cincinnati, New Orleans and other cities along the great waterway. A dozen railroad tracks deliver it with great ease to the steamships upon the Great Lakes or carry it over the Alleghanies to the cities of the east where it is much used in Percentage Pennsylvania 47.5 West Virginia 11.8 Illinois 10.5 Ohio 6.4 Indiana 3.3 Alabama 3.0 Kentucky 8.6 Colorado 2.3 All others 13.0 Million Tons 218.2 51.8 48.2 15.2 13.8 11.9 10.8 60.0 Total 459.4 Fig. 126. — United States coal produc- tion by states, three-year average, 1908-10. Percentage Appalachia 55.1 Anthracite 18.1 Eastern 15.3 Eocky 5 5 Mountain "West and g g Southwest ' All others . . Million Tons 252.0 70.0 25.2 23.9 Total 459.4 Fig. 1 27. — United States coal produc- tion by fields, three-year average, 1908-10. factories and engines because it is cheaper than the clean but expensive anthracite which is so much prized for heating houses. In 1909 Philadelphia used 4 million tons of anthracite and 2 1/4 million tons of bituminous, New York 11 million anthracite and 4 million bituminous. THE FUNDAMENTALS OF MANUFACTURE 381 The southern extension of this Appalachian coal field in West Virginia, eastern Kentucky, Tennessee and part of Virginia was not so early developed because more difficult of access. At the present time there is in eastern Kentucky 10,000 square miles of this Allegheny plateau underlaid with coal where the sharp gorges of the many streams which cut it are so difficult to travel that there is no railroad, and no coal mining, and the people thus isolated are living the life of the pioneers and back- woodsmen of the Revolutionary period. West Virginia, not so inaccessible as Kentucky, but less accessible than the Pitts- burg district, now has, as a result of recent railroad building, a rapidly increasing coal output. The West Virginia coal fields are difficult for railroads to cross and the valleys are so narrow that the houses of the mining towns are perched row after row upon the steep slopes that rise directly from the streams. The southernmost of these eastern coal fields is in Alabama near Birmingham. It is very accessible to adjacent markets and has greater development than any field south of West Virginia. The recent building of locks and dams in the Warrior River has enabled the carriage of this coal in boats to Mobile for the supply of steamships and for export to Gulf and Carib- bean ports. The Distribution of Eastern Coals. — The Appalachian coals have a very central location for that part of the continent east of the Mississippi River and the whole region is reached to some extent by the Appalachian product. Considerable quantities of West Virginia coal are shipped by rail to Baltimore and thence by water to northern points. The coal shipments by water from Hampton Roads (over 7 million tons, 1909) are nearly three times as great as those from Philadelphia and rapidly growing. The coal freights as they exist in the United States are a proper cause of wonderment and leave much for the social economist to explain. To carry anthracite from the Schuylkill region to Philadelphia, a distance of about 100 miles, the rate by rail in 1909 was respectively $1.70, $1.40, and $1.25 per ton according to the size of the pieces. From New York bay to New England by boat it varied from fifty-five to seventy-five cents per ton. From Hampton Roads to Boston it was sixty 382 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY cents per ton (in steamers carrying 6,000 tons), and the year before it had been forty cents. From Lake Erie ports to Duluth, the rate on Pittsburg coal is thirty cents and to Mil- waukee thirty-five cents, so that New England, Minnesota, and Wisconsin have a surprising evening of opportunity with the coal-producing states. With Pennsylvania bituminous worth $2.50 at New York Harbor (1909) and Virginia Pocohontas (used by the United States navy because it is one of the best coals in the world) at $2.15 per ton at Hampton Roads it is plain that, in connection with the very cheap freight rates mentioned above, New England coast and points have a very cheap fuel supply in the cheap Virginia coal brought to tide water by the Virginian railway. This new and specially constructed coal road has somewhat disarranged the coal trade by displacing some Pennsylvania coal and some Nova Scotia coal in New England ports. The Interior Coal Fields of America. — The eastern interior field, southern Illinois, southern Indiana and western Kentucky, is second in importance only to that at the headwaters of the Ohio. The coal, bituminous, is not so good a variety as that of the Appalachian fields, but its nearness to Chicago, St. Louis and the manufacturing centers of Illinois and Indiana makes it the chief dependence of those regions and the output is greater than that of Pennsylvania anthracite. It is an interesting fact that the quality of American coal declines as we go west until the Rocky Mountains are reached, so that the large western interior and southwestern fields extend- ing from central Iowa to central Texas are inferior to those of Illinois and Indiana and are not so extensively mined. Beyond these the yet inferior lignites that underlie vast areas of the plains of Dakota, Montana and Wyoming are mined only for local use. The Rocky Mountains, which with their adjacent plateaus embrace almost one-fourth of the United States, are a region of such sparse population and vast extent that their coal resources are not fully explored. Each year the scientists of the Geological Survey find thousands of square miles of addi- tional coal and it is already known to exist in every state from New Mexico to the Canadian boundary. The total quantity will doubtless be very great and some of it is anthracite Percentage * "United States 37.5 Great Britain 24.1 Germany 19.6 Austria- Hungary 4.4 France 3.4" Russia Belgium Japan 2.2" 2.1 1.3 : All others 5.4 . Million Tons 469.4 294.8 THE FUNDAMENTALS OF MANUFACTURE 383 of good quality. Much of this western coal land still belongs to the United States Government and is being held as a reserve for the future needs of the nation. It is hoped that it will make comfort for the many rather than colossal fortunes for a few and misery for many. Pacific Coast and Alaska. — The Pacific coast is the only part of the United States which suffers for lack of coal, the total product being less than 1 per cent, of that produced in this country, and the resources are meager. The aver- age price of coal per ton at the mines of Oregon and Washington in 1909 was $2.61. In West Virginia it was $1,086. California is even worse off than Oregon and Washington because it has an amount of available coal so small as to be practically negligible. For this reason the development of manufactures was greatly hampered in California and the railroads even had to pay $11 and $12 per ton for coal for their locomotives. The discovery of petroleum in large quantities in 1901 ended this fuel scarcity. Our incomplete knowledge of Alaska is being rapidly extended, and one of the surprises of this erstwhile little esteemed region is its valuable deposits of coal and copper. The coal veins are of astonish- ing thickness and small parts of them are already estimated to be worth scores of millions of dollars and their disposi- tion has been the subject of fierce political controversy. Canadian Coal. — Canada is richer in coal than any two nations of Europe, but her production at the present time is small in comparison to that of the United States, which leads the world. In Nova Scotia there is a coal field near the sea, and water trans- portation which enables it to be marketed in New England. 240.7 54.5 42.0 26.7 25.8 16.4 65.4 Total 1225.57 Fig. 128.— World's coal production, three -year average, 1908-10. 384 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY Thus it happens that New England desires free trade in coal and Pennsylvania desires a tariff on coal. The most populous parts of Canada in Ontario and Quebec are without coal and import several million tons across the Great Lakes and the St. Lawrence from the nearby fields of Pennsylvania and. Ohio. The coal fields of Montana and the Rocky Mountain region are continued in Canada where a little coal is mined for local use in the Rocky Mountains. Fortunately, Vancouver Island and the adjacent mainland of British Columbia have coal, much more coal than the adjacent parts of the United States to which for many years some of the coal has been exported by sea. American Commerce in Coal. — Despite our enormous coal resources and world-surpassing production, the coal export of the United States is relatively insignificant. Nearly all of it goes to Canada, but small amounts are sent to Mexico, Cuba, and the West Indies. Regular lines of vessels have long carried coal from Norfolk to Tampico for the supply of the Mexican railroads and mines. The small export should not for an instant cause any one to lose sight of the enormous part that coal plays in American railroad traffic. The entire wheat crop of the United States does not weigh as much as half the coal produced in Illinois or West Virginia. The entire cotton crop of the United States only weighs a quarter as much as the coal product of Alabama and only an eighth as much as the coal imports of New England. AMERICA COMPARED WITH FOREIGN COAL PRODUCERS (Coal Production in Million Tons) u. s. Gt. Bri. Germany Austria- Hungary France Belgium Russia Japan World 1869. 32 115 36 7 14 13 1 230 1889. 141 190 93 27 26 21 6 2 530 1909. 460 295 239 53 41 25 26 16 1,227 Most of this coal carriage is entirely unnecessary. Central power plants at the mine mouth could generate power quite as cheaply as in more expensive town locations. Experience has shown that it can be transmitted at least 200 miles by THE FUNDAMENTALS OF MANUFACTURE 385 electricity. Most of the people and most of the cities of the United States are now within that distance of coal mines. We need transmission wires to replace freight trains. Of coal lands the United States has over 496,000 square miles now being mined in twenty-nine states and with an estimated available supply as follows: Anthracite 21,000,000,000 tons Bituminous 1,661,000,000,000 tons Sub-bituminous or black lignite 650,000,000,000 tons Lignite 743,000,000,000 tons Total 3,076,000,000,000 tons Of this amount 1,922,000,000,000 is easily accessible and 1,153,- 000,000,000 is accessible with difficulty. We have still on hand over 99 per cent, of the total original supply, but we are wasting, in the process of mining, one ton for every two we' get. The resources of the United States are much greater than those of Europe. While coal underlies nearly one-sixth of the area of this entire country, Russia has only 20,000 square miles and the United Kingdom but 11,900. Germany, with less than 2,000 square miles, is next to England the greatest European producer, because Germany has within the last forty years had an enormous development of manufacturing that depends upon and demands coal. France is very poor in coal, her chief fields being near the northern boundary and extending across into Belgium, which country, like France, is an importer of British coal. This inadequacy of the French coal supply is doubtless a chief explanation of the small number of factories in com- parison to England, Germany or the United States. France can scarcely be called a manufacturing nation and unlike her neighbors still virtually feeds herself. The Russian coal fields are largely undeveloped. The poverty of European as compared to American coal fields is well shown in the comparative prices and produc- tivity of miners. Despite the introduction of machinery in European mines the output per man is declining and the cost is increasing. We have here one of the reasons why the Germans lead the world in the scientific utilization of coal and coal products. 386 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY Yearly output per miner in tons 1899 1908 311 279 264 246 211 189 173 160 433 478 713 644 Cost per ton at mine England Germany France Belgium United States Anthracite . Bituminous 1909 05 45 08 11 1.84 1.07 Coal in Tropics. — There is a great scarcity of coal throughout the torrid zone. The whole continent of South America is practically barren of coal save for a few small deposits upon the Andean plateau in Peru and Bolivia, and a small field in Chile which does not supply the needs of that country. In 1910 the production was a million tons and the import a million and a quarter. There is none in Central America, but little in Mexico, and the whole continent of Africa seems to be poor in coal, there being no production at the present time save a little in Natal which by no means suffices for the supply of South Africa. India also has but few coal fields, and the quality is not good. The East Indian Islands are equally barren, a small amount of inferior coal being found in Borneo and the Philippines. Australia, Japan, New Zealand. — Australia and New Zealand have enough for their own needs, but their resources are not great and the production, like that of Japan, is about that of a fourth-rate American state. The Japanese coal resources are limited and the product is of rather inferior quality, but is of very great importance to that country which is rapidly developing manufactures. The Resources of China. — The Chinese Empire is credited with having coal resources several times as great as those of all Europe, but not equal to those of the United States. Our Pennsylvania anthracite underlies less than 500 square miles, the veins are twisted and broken, but a German geologist reports that the province of Shansi in the valley of the Hoang-Ho west THE FUNDAMENTALS OF MANUFACTURE 387 of Pekin, contains a single deposit of 18,000 square miles of coal like Pennsylvania anthracite, lying in thick seams, level and undisturbed, and outcropping on hillsides so that' trains can run right into them. Extensive deposits of good bituminous coal are found in practically every one of the eighteen provinces of China proper and reach far into the interior as well. At the present time. the production is just beginning, the millions of Fig. 129. — Coal tipple, coke ovens and miners' village in bituminous field, West Virginia. (Philadelphia Museum.) China having left their coal untouched during the forty centuries of their activity in that country. But coal mining has begun in earnest. A new viceroy at Canton recently announced that hereafter only Chinese coal would be used by the governments of the two Kwang provinces lying opposite Hong Kong. New coal mines are being opened in that vicinity (U. S. Con. Rep., April 11, 1911). Railroad building is now in rapid progress, and some predict that in the next twenty-five years China will build more railroads than the rest of the world combined. Her coal resources will unquestionably be utilized, for they are very accessible as well as rich and vast. The possibilities of manufacturing in 388 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY such a nation with such resources of fuel and labor are enormous. Methods of Mining Coal. — The methods of mining coal vary- greatly. In western Pennsylvania and West Virginia the coal lies in a high plateau through which the streams have cut valleys so that the coal outcrops on the hillsides, making the entrance to the mines exceedingly easy. Near Pittsburg the railroads must climb up two or three hundred feet from the rivers to get to the mine mouth. In many parts of the Rocky Mountains and Fig. 130. — The little mine ear brings the coal to the wasteful beehive ovens and the box oar carries away the coke. the Great Plains the coal outcrops are so abundant that the scanty population can be supplied by going to the cliffs, bluffs, or river banks and digging it down with the pick and shovel and hauling it away in the farm wagons. These conditions of easy access are very different from those existing in Europe and in the anthracite fields of Pennsylvania. Pennsylvania anthracite lies in the folded and bent strata of mountains, the pressure of mountains making having turned the coal to anthracite. It may outcrop THE FUNDAMENTALS OF MANUFACTURE 389 in some places, as at Hazleton, so that it can be quarried from the surface. Nearby it is buried 3,000 feet in the ground, requiring deep shafts which go below the level of the sea and involve much moving of rock, pumping of water and lifting of coal. Then the anthracite requires much sorting, cleaning, and preparing to get it clear of the shale so that 10 per cent, of the coal is used in the Fig. 131.- -A large building is required to prepare anthracite coal for market and the earth is encumbered with refuse. mining, while in bituminous mining in United States but 2 to 3 per cent, is so used. The mines of Europe are almost universally deep, some of the shafts descending nearly a mile into the earth. New Methods In The Utilization of Coal. — The greatest uses of coal are for engines — factory, locomotive, or steamship — for the domestic fire, for the smelter that extracts metals from ores, 390 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY for the electric power house and gas works. The locomotive is a tremendous user and a tremendous waster of coal. In the year 1910 the American railroads spent $213,000,000 for locomotive fuel and only 45 per cent, of the fuel was utilized for effective work (Railway Age Gazette, Nov., 1911). The locomotive is much harder to use economically than the engine of a large Fig. 132. — Man standing in front of coal seam outcrop in banks of Yellow- stone River, Montana. Blocks of fallen coal in foreground. In many parts of the West farmers go to such banks and load their wagons. (Campbell, U. S. Geol. Surv.) power plant. At some large power plants the handling of the coal from the time it drops through the bottom of the car along- side the boiler house until it passes over the grates and finally, as ashes, gets back into freight car outside the building is done en- tirely by machinery, so that one or two men can control an ap- paratus which consumes carloads of coal each day. Recent improvements in gas engines and the new process of THE FUNDAMENTALS OF MANUFACTURE 391 making the gas called producer gas promise to be revolutionary. By this process gas can be made of coal or coal material of any kind from anthracite to the peat of the bog where it is now being deposited. Thus, the brown coal or lignite of Texas and the Dakotas does not have to await the slow geological process by which it could.be changed to bituminous or anthra- cite. These geological processes, by driving off volatile con- tents, increase the carbon percentage which in wood is only 50 per cent, to over 80 in good bituminous and over 90 in Fig. 133. — Power plant where mechanical device converts coal Into ashes and loads the ashes on the cars. good anthracite coal. The producer gas plant can get out the combustible carbon in the form of gas from any of these coals, from peat itself, from wood, tan bark refuse and even from dried sewage, although these latter have not been used on a commercial scale. This process of using peat offers great power possibilities to many lands poor in coal but rich in peat, such as Ireland, where one-fifth of the surface is covered with peat bogs. Peat also covers large areas in Scotland, Sweden, Denmark, Russia, Canada, and New England. It is an important domestic 392 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY fuel in the European countries. Germany uses 10 million tons per year. The Dismal Swamp, south of the mouth of the Chesapeake, is a peat bog 20 to 25 feet in depth covering several hundred square miles and having material which would make millions of tons of coal in some millions of years or can make millions of horse-power of energy right now if put through the producer gas plant and the gas engine. Recent experiments in Sweden have shown that a ton of coal costing $3.95 was equal to only 1,214 tons of dried and pulverized peat costing $2.76 and burned in a dust blast under a boiler — another suggestive way of enriching the peat owning nations (U. S. Con. Rep., May 25, 1911). Briquettes are compressed lumps of coal made by mixing small particles of coal with some adhesive material and pressing it in molds so that it holds its shape until burned. In Germany 17 to 18 million tons of briquettes are made annually while the industry is only getting started in the United States after many years of trial. Germany has more expensive fuel, cheaper labor and a great abundance of binding material in the tar from her by-product coke ovens. The United States is somewhat lacking in all of these respects, but "there is an abundant supply of raw material which can be used for briquettes and in the utilization of which one of the greatest steps in the practical application of conservation principles could be made. This consists of materials which unless used in this way are wasted. The classes of low-grade fuel available for this purpose are: (1) anthracite culm; (2) slack coal from semianthracite, bitu- minous, and sub-bituminous coal mines, which does not possess fusing or coking qualities, and is therefore not available for the manufacture of coke and which is in many cases burned to keep it from "cumbering the ground"; (3) lignite, which disintegrates on exposure to air, will not stand transportation to distant points, and cannot be stored for any length of time; (4) coke breeze, which possesses high fuel efficiency, but which, because of its small size, cannot be used as such either for domestic or other fuel. The quantity of this coke breeze produced in the United States each year and practically wasted at the present time is from 2 million ;o 3 million tons; and (5) peat, which usually occurs at lon~ - (stances from the coal supplies, and THE FUNDAMENTALS OF MANUFACTURE 393 which, if properly prepared, makes an excellent fuel." (From Mineral Resources, U. S., 1909, Vol. II, p. 198.) A satisfactory process of briquetting already in use at Trenton, New Jersey, and elsewhere is making anthracite coal dust into a substitute for the large anthracite coal. Coke, Gas, and Gas By-products. — For the making of iron it is necessary to use coke. This fuel is made by heating coal in closed retorts where the gas is driven off and the coal is left in big lumps that are harder than the coal itself was and therefore hold up the burden of the ore so that the fire in the blast furnace does not smother. In coke making sometimes as much as 10,000 cubic feet of gas per ton of coal may be entirely wasted by the old-fashioned bee-hive oven, or saved by an improved by-product oven. The purification of the gas from the by-product oven gives several pounds of crystallized ammonia and several gallons of tar per ton of coal. The ammonia is a valuable fertilizer, the tar is used for roofs and roads besides furnishing a host of chemicals and dyes. The Germans, scientific, thrifty and poor in coal, lead the world in the manufacture of by-product coke, gas engines and coal tar by-products. 1 Meanwhile we in America are wasting fuel in the old-fashioned bee-hive coke plant, in wasteful engines and in wasteful mining where coal once left in the worked mine can never be recovered. These facts in combination with the rapid increase of manufacture and commerce are causing some alarm for fear of possible exhaustion of our coal resources at a much earlier time than we previously thought. The price of coal is rising and must continue to rise. This turns our attention again toward substitutes of which the chief are water power and petroleum, now both in active competition with coal. Of these, the oil may have an advantage of cheapness while it lasts, but all the minerals are at best an accumulation soon robbed and are but ephemeral in comparison to water power which, 1 The proportion of coal coked in by-product ovens in Germany was 30 per cent, in 1900 and 82 per cent, in 1909; in England, 10 per cent, in 1900 and 18 per cent, in 1909; in the United States, 5 per cent, in 1900 and 16 per cent, in 1909. In 1908 the German coke ovens consumed 30 million tons of coal, made 73 per cent, as much coke, and as by-products 630,000 tons of tar worth $3,000,000, 60,000 tons of ammonia worth 113,000,000, and 60,000 tons of benzol worth $2,000,000. 394 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY depending upon the sun, the sea and the high lands, remains an enduring source of power while climate and land endure. 4. WATER-POWER Water-power Resources. — The water-power resources of a country are affected by many circumstances. If the land is high like Norway it may be rich in power from waterfalls which are so absent from flat lands like Holland, Denmark, and Dela- ware. The seasonal distribution of the rainfall may give three months' flood and six months' drought in which torrents become dry stream beds, a condition found in monsoon coun- tries and where the Mediterranean type of climate prevails. Here water-power plants may be idle a large part of the year unless there is some kind of water storage. The water runs away more quickly from hilly than from level land. Even where the rainfall is well distributed throughout the year, there is, in small short streams, a great variation because of the quick running off of the water after rain. A large river system tends to even up these inequalities. The most important factor affecting water-power is some form of natural water storage. The spongy leaf mass of the forest floor holds water and makes more even stream flow and better water power on the forest stream than on one draining tilled lands. Swamps and marshes are better yet and lakes are best of all. Man improves streams by building dams to serve as reservoirs and hold the water, but the natural reservoirs of lakes are many- fold better, and hold waters that would otherwise be wasted in freshets, and let it out in time of drought. As most of the world's lakes are due to the action of glaciers, the fact that an elevated region has been glaciated is, granted rainfall, the most important thing in deciding its water-power resources. Lake Superior has in it enough water to run the St. Lawrence River for a century and the part that would flow out would keep a river running for many months after all rainfall had ceased. Thus the Niagara River with its wonderful natural reservoirs varies but little in volume, while the lakeless Potomac may be waded across one week and the next is an uncrossable torrent 20 feet deep. 1 1 The Niagara drains 88,660 square miles of reservoirs and has a maximum flow 35 per cent, greater than the minimum. The Potomac with no lakes THE FUNDAMENTALS OF MANUFACTURE 395 Snowfields and glaciers are next to lakes as natural reservoirs and they have the particular advantage of releasing the water in time of summer drought. The recent increase of attention to conservation of resources has caused an estimate to be made of our water-power resources. TABLE SHOWING ESTIMATE OF STREAM FLOW AND WATER- POWER IN THE UNITED STATES 1 Horse-power available Drainage area, square Flow per annum, billion Principal drainages Primary Minimum of six highest months miles cubic feet or minimum Northern Atlantic to Cape Henry, Va. . 159,879 8,942 1,702,000 3,186,600 Southern Atlantic to Cape Sable, Fla. . . 123,920 5,560 1,253,000 1,957,800 Eastern Gulf of Mexico to Mississippi 142,220 6,867 559,000 963,000 River. Western Gulf of Mexico west of Ver- 433.700 2 2,232 2 433,760 829,650 million River. Mississippi River main stream 1,238,800 21,940 147,000 335,000 Mississippi River tributaries from east . . 333,600 12,360 2,472,590 4,940,300 Mississippi River tributaries from west 905,200 9,580 3,948,970 7,085,000 including Vermillion River. St. Lawrence River to Canadian line. . . . 299,720 s 8,583 3 6,682,480 8,090,060 Colorado River, above Yuma, Arizona. . 225,000 521 2,918,500 5,546,000 Southern Pacific to Point Bonita, Cal. . 70,700 2,193 3,215,400 7,808,300 290,400 15,220 12,979,700 24,701,000 223,000 518,000 801,000 62,150 614 75,800 212,600 Total 4,508,289 94,612 36,906,200 66,449,310 By primary horse-power is meant the amount which can be developed upon the basis of the flowage of the streams for a period of two weeks in which the flow is the least. According to the table, if all the installations in the United States were made to use as much of the water as is available the lowest two weeks of whatever varies from 1,000 to 250,000 cubic feet per second. — Review of Reviews, Vol. 41, p. 68. In July, 1911, the drought caused the lakeless Catawba River to become so low that 152 Carolina cotton mills shut down for lack of power, throwing 70,000 operatives out of employment for a time. 1,1 The Conservation of Natural Resources in the United States," by Van Hise, Charles R. pp. 119, 120. 2 Includes Rio Grande in Mexico. 3 Includes drainage in Canada. 396 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY S«.-ft. 180,000 140,000 130,000 100,000 JAN. 10 20 FEB. 1 MAR. 1020 1 10 20 APR. 10 20 MAY 10 20 JUNE 1020 JULY 10 20 AUG. 10 20 SEPT. 10 20 OCT. 10 20 NOV. 1020 DEC. 10 20" 1 m cl la 4 si 80,000 60,000 40,000 80,000 Fig. 134. — Discharge of water in 1900 from the Susquehanna at Harrisburg, a river with a practically lakeless basin with much steep land. (U. S.Geol. Surv.) 9ec.-ft. 8,000 7,000 6,000 5,000 4,000 JAN. 10 20 FEB. 10 20 MAR. 10 20 APR. 10 20 MAY 10 20 JUNE 10 20 JULY 10 20 AUQ. 10 20 SEPT. 10 20 OCT. 10 20 NOV. 10 20 DEC. 10 20 8,000 Fig. 135. — Discharge of water in 1900 from the Arkansas River, a stream fed by Rocky Mountain snows, near Canyon, Colo. (U. S. Geol. Surv.) THE FUNDAMENTALS OF MANUFACTURE 397 ■B Jan. Feb. Mar. Apr. Mav Jun- Jut. Autf. Sep. Oct Nov. Dec M 6 18 95 i_ Z 38 a 50 :« ?? IB 14 1 18 96 10 1 I 2 ■ 6 , L » 2 1 AjL j> J|Mk ^ k« J ■ Fig. 136. — Diagram showing discharge of the Boise in 1895 and 1896. (Newell, U. S. Geol. Surv.) River above Boise, Idaho, (From U. S. Tower.) Bec-ft. 3,000 2,800 2,400 2,000 1,600 1^00 800 400 JAN. F 10 20 1 ■EB. 20 MAR. 10 20 APR. 10 20 MAY 10 20 JUNE 10 20 JULY 10 20 AUG. 10 20 SEPT. 10 20 OCT. 10 20 NOV. 10 20 DEC. 10 20 1 I I I ■ L | J l i V ■! II I H Fig. 137. — Discharge of water in 1900 from the Cobosseecontee, a river draining many lakes in the Maine woods. (U. S. Geol. Surv.) The attempt to make a river discharge a uniform stream is one of man's supreme combats with the uncertainty of deadly nature. 398 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY the year, and allow all the rest to escape without use, there would be developed 36,906,200 horse-power; that is, approximately seven times the amount now produced. The primary power, ac- cording to McGee, "exceeds our entire mechanical power in use, would operate every mill, drive every spindle, propel every train and boat, and light every city, town, and village in the country." Fig. 138. — Abandoned grist mill in Tennessee. Old-fashioned overshot water- wheel, cornfield in background. If flood waters were stored so that the streams were more fully utilized it is estimated that it would be practicable to develop in the United States from 100 to 200 million horse-power. The Use of Water-power. — The use of water-power has had its ups and downs depending on industrial conditions and inventions. It was a factor of great importance in the American Colonies by furnishing a means to grind their flour and saw their logs. The occasional power on a small fluctuating stream sufficed for these small but important services. The old fashioned overshot THE FUNDAMENTALS OF MANUFACTURE 399 water wheels so common in 1800 were 1 largely displaced in the latter half of the nineteenth century by improved engines and cheap coal, but water-power is again coming into use since the invention of the new turbine and pelton water wheels and the ability to transmit power in form of electricity many miles to a convenient place of consumption. The easy construction, effectiveness and permanence of well-built cement dams are ^TSS?-^- 5 *^* jt, * f j»lidtLjS - ■ ■■; $£ _■ " . " .-Mf - : f-;"" Fig. 139. — Concrete dam built in sections across Susquehanna River, McCalls Ferry, Pa. Power-house and forebayette right. Tail race sheltered behind island to left. 200,000 horse-power within reach of Baltimore, Philadelphia and Washington. (Penna. Water & Power Co.) factors whose influence in water-power installation is just begin- ning to be felt. This alone is enough to give us a new epoch. Since 1890 the use of water-power has increased in both absolute amount and in proportion to coal-derived power. An excellent example of this new competition of water-power with coal is to be found in Pennsylvania, the greatest coal-producing state in the world. The Susquehanna River, whose tributaries drain two great and active coal fields, is harnessed by an enormous dam 1 Small country mills were abandoned and ruined by the thousands as a result of this change. 400 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY at Mc Calls Ferry, near the Maryland boundary, where by water wheels 100,000 horse-power of electric energy will eventually be developed. It can easily be sold as far away as Philadelphia and Baltimore, in which latter city the street cars are now being run by this Susquehanna power. This dam is merely one of Fig. 140. — Modern hydro electric power plant, Cazadere, Oregon. Cement in dam, steel penstocks. (From Power Development by F. Koester.) many that might be built on this river. Even the navigable Mississippi is being dammed at Keokuk, Iowa, where 200,000 horse-power will be developed while boats pass up through locks. If we take a long point of view, the water-power of the glaciated region of northeastern United States is likely to have a much greater value than all the coal of Pennsylvania. The lakes and swamps and waterfalls of the glacial region produce power enough THE FUNDAMENTALS OF MANUFACTURE 401 to run enormous industries. Coal will go and the water-power will stay. The best example of this is to be seen at Niagara Falls, where the glaciers diverted a single stream across a cliff of rock, forming the Falls which will develop about 7 million horse-power day and night if they are fully utilized. Hundreds of smaller falls combined have a greater power than even Niagara and many Fig. 141. — Basin of Huron River showing the natural reservoirs afforded by glacial lakes. (Newell.) of them are already in use, as in the wood pulp and paper industry which is scattered from Niagara Falls to eastern Maine. It was this glacial water-power which started New England manufactur- ing. The state of Maine itself is said to have waterfalls that will yield a possible total of 6 million horse-power, that is, about 40 402 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY horse-power for every family in the state. In addition to this we are just learning how to utilize the energy of tides from which it is estimated that a half million horse-power may be developed on the coast of Maine. There is extensive but as yet almost unused water-power on the many streams flowing from the lakes and swamps upon the large glaciated plateau between the St. Lawrence River system, the Atlantic Ocean and Hudson Bay. The province of Quebec alone (see U. S. Con. Rep., Jan. 4, 1911) has, according to the estimate of the Canadian government, 17 million horse-power — Ontario 3 million and the entire Do- minion 25 million. This is equal at 2 pounds of coal per horse- power hour, 8.76 tons per horse-power year (twenty-four hours per day, 365 days) to over 218 million tons of coal per year. It is nearly equal to the entire amount of artificial power developed in the United States. Less than 2 per cent, of the water-power of Ontario and Quebec is now utilized. New York state is about to inaugurate a series of state-owned reservoirs at the headquarters of some streams from which stored water will be released to be used many times as it passes through a succession of water wheels on its way down to navigable water levels. Norway and Sweden have unusual water-power resources in their mountains, glacial lakes, glaciers, and snow fields. They have poor coal supply and in their forests a resource demanding power. It is but natural that they, like the Swiss who have similar conditions, should be leaders in water-power development, as shown by the fact that the Swiss are our leading water-power engineers and that Swedes are able to sell power at the astonish- ingly low rate of $5.35 per horse-power year (U. S. Con. Rep., Jan. 23, 1911). Dry summer lands like the Mediterranean countries and California are greatly handicapped for water-power unless they happen to possess mountains where snow fields and glaciers melt in summer and furnish a flow when.the rains do not come. Thus, the snow-fed waterfalls of the Alps are being rapidly put to use by the Italians who have no coal and the waterfalls of the Sierra Nevada mountains in California are already harnessed, power being carried sometimes as much as 200 miles to serve California THE FUNDAMENTALS OF MANUFACTURE 403 cities, the water that produces it going on down to raise crops by irrigation. Water-power is particularly valuable in these countries because of the absence of coal, and it is being utilized rapidly. Thus Montenegro, is about to become possessed of new industries through the utilization of an 80,000 horse-power fall on the River Tara. Similarly Bombay, India, soon expects to have a 50,000 horse-power supply from falls near three lakes at Lanavla, high up in the Ghats 90 miles away. Japan, also poor in coal, is turning to water-power of which the Empire possesses from 1 to 2 million horse-power. Of this 500,000 are available in the vicinity of Tokyo, a city requiring 125,000 horse-power at present. The Water-power Resources of the Torrid Zone. — The tropics, nearly devoid of coal, have a compensating resource in the enor- mous water-power which their districts of heavy rainfall afford. Africa, a vast plateau, has rivers tumbling down to the sea in many cataracts, those of the Congo in west Africa rivalling Niagara in power, while engineers are already discussing the carriage of power from the falls of the Zambezi, 700 miles to the gold mines of Johannesburg in the Transvaal, and the diamond mines of Kimberley in Orange River Colony. From the plateaus of Central America, streams fed by the trade wind rains develop many fine waterfalls, while from the Andean plateaus streams go down to the interior of South America from the plateaus, which give an unrivalled descent of from 6,000 to 10,000 feet. The plateaus of southern Brazil also result in many extensive waterfalls. Some of these along the coast are being used, but the arrangement of streams causes most of the falls to be in the interior, as the great fall of Iguazu on the Parana. Solar Energy Direct. — There is small prospect of any extended use being made of many of these remote water-powers, while there are so many unused waterfalls, tidal bays, and coal seams in the United States, Canada, Europe, and eastern Asia. It is possible also that none of these things will be fully utilized because of the progress that is being made in developing power directly from the rays of the sun — the source of all the energy of coal and waterfall and the chief cause of the prodigally power- ful winds which fitfully sweep around us with almost unthinkable volumes of energy. 404 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY 5. PETROLEUM Petroleum — A New Source of Power. — It now seems probable that the development of hydro-electric plants and producer gas plants as well as the older types of steam engines may be checked for a time by the competition of cheap power developed by crude petroleum. There has been a sudden and great increase in the production of petroleum accompanied by increased knowledge as to means of utilizing it efficiently. New engines of the Diesel type developed in Germany promise to permit petroleum to replace even producer gas. Such a change may give somewhat cheaper power to a generation or two of men and cheat future generations out of the irreplaceable petroleum of which our supply is much more limited than of coal. Since nothing now in sight can replace it in many of its uses, particu- larly for lubrication, this new means of using petroleum is of questionable benefit to the race. This sudden new onslaught on petroleum as a source of power comes at the end of half a century during which this wonderful fluid has been of service in other capacities, chiefly as a source of light. The Use of Petroleum.— Petroleum has helped greatly in spreading civilization over the world. All the world loves light, which is so necessary for the reading habit and the spread of civilization, and kerosene made from petroleum is, in every con- tinent, the most common illuminant for the family lamp. For ages mankind had been depending upon vegetable and animal oils. Since remote times the lamps of south Europe have been lighted with refined olive oil. In northern Europe and America, whale oil was more popular, but by the middle of the nineteenth century the demand for this oil had become so great that the whales were well nigh exterminated and the discovery of abun- dant petroleum, and the art of using it came just in time to pre- vent a return to the gloom of the tallow candle. The heavier parts of this same petroleum oil the wheels of the world's ma- chinery and the process of refining breaks it up into a surprising number of by-products. The Origin of Petroleum. — Petroleum probably originates from animal remains buried in rocks, although theories differ. It collects, especially in porous sandstones, with water and THE FUNDAMENTALS OF MANUFACTURE 405 natural gas, the gas, being lightest, on the top, the oil next, and the water at the bottom. Small quantities come to the surface in springs of water, and these oily springs have been known for many centuries in the Russian oil fields. In western Pennsylvania they were known for a century before the petroleum industry began, in some cases farmers being compelled to put a board across their springs to turn the oil aside so that their cattle might drink. In 1853, a company began collecting the oil by absorbing it in blankets spread upon the ground, but the real beginning of the industry dates from 1859, when an oil well Fig. 142. — Map showing general distribution of petroleum and natural gaa fields of United States. (Day, U. S. Geol. Surv.) (From W. S. Tower.) was dug in the Allegheny Valley and 2,000 barrels were produced. When the artesian bores broke the impervious caps that sealed the oil sands the oil gushed from the earth, due to the great pressure of the gas imprisoned with it. This sends the oil forth as soda water blows itself from a bottle. This force, common in petroleum fields, sometimes makes a well yield 600 or more barrels per hour. The American Oil Fields. — The oldest American field runs from southeastern New York, southwest through western Pennsylvania, southeastern Ohio, and the adjacent parts of 406 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY Million Barrels 75 70 65 60 55 i i / 50 45 d n (i 40 i/ i I "§tu 30 — * — I r T 1 1 25 \ A / 1 if \\ A / 1 20 15 «/ \ '\/ l\/ H !/, £1 V, V f> it - i a V 10 5 c Cf ?! ' Of i kl sl / & 1" o/ / I IT a f a > iO c 5 oo a s I £ 8 g s OO CO CO OS 35 oj Fig. 143. — Petroleum production of leading states, 1860-1910 (barrels of 42 gallons). (U. S. Geol. Surv.) Petroleum is a meteoric industry. THE FUNDAMENTALS OF MANUFACTURE 407 West Virginia, a territory 160 miles long and from 25 to 40 miles in width. The petroleum industry is a mushroom among industries, so suddenly has it sprung up, so short is its life. Within 40 years after the discovery of the first well, this first field had 20,000 deep artesian wells and 4,000 miles of pipe line to collect the oil in storage tanks and refineries. Large towns bearing such suggestive names as Oil City, Olean, and Petrolia had from small beginnings grown large, rich, and prosperous. But oil prosperity tends to be short lived in any one place. The continuous discovery of new oil fields in many parts of the world indicates, however, that oil may be an abundant material for several generations to come. The ephemeral nature of the oil industry is well shown by the figures of production of differ- ent fields. Some characteristic outputs have been as follows (million barrels) : Pennsylvania Texas Louisiana California 1861, 2 1891, 33 (max.) 1909, 9 1901, 4 1905, 28 1909, 9 1900 . . . 1908,5.7 1909, 3 . 1 1900, 4 1907, 37 1909, 54 1910, 65+ The fluctuating ranks of the states in production is similarly instructive (million barrels) : 1890 1900 1907 1909 Pa., 28 Ohio, 16 Ohio, 22 W. Va., 16 Pa., 13 Okl., 43 Cal., 39 111., 24 Tex., 12 Pa., 10 Cal., 54 Okl., 47 111., 30 W. Va., 10 Ohio, 10 The wild excitement and sudden spurt of fortune that follows the striking of oil in the gushing wells gives an oil field more 408 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY feverish activity even than a gold field possesses. This fact, in combination with the quick rise, short life, quick decline of output, the emigration of population, the dilapidation and decay of temporary structures, makes it proper to call oil resources economic strong drink. American prominence in oil production has been due to its first discovery and development here, but especially to the dis- covery of field after field. The second discovery of importance was the Ohio-Indiana field, which crosses the northern part of the boundary between these two states with its center in Lima, Ohio. Fig. 144. — Oil well, derricks and pipes discharging crude petroleum into a pool containing many thousand barrels, Muskogee, Okla. (Standard Oil Co.) The first decade of the twentieth century witnessed a number of discoveries. In the year 1901 the Beaumont field in south- eastern Texas, only 18 miles from the Gulf of Mexico, at Port Arthur, produced large quantities of oil and gave well owners incomes of thousands and tens of thousands of dollars a day. Unfortunately the digging of many wells finally revealed the fact that the district (Spindle Top) covered about one-half of a square mile. Attention was next attracted to California, which in a short time surpassed in production all older states, to be in turn suddenly rivalled by the new fields, in Kansas, Oklahoma, and Illinois, while in northern Mexico a still more spectacular field was almost immediately discovered. The first California oil field, located in the southwestern part of the state, practically THE FUNDAMENTALS OF MANUFACTURE 409 underlies the city of Los Angeles where back yards bristled with wells, derricks, and some wells were even sunk in the Pacific to strike the oil-bearing rocks beneath the waters. The chief fields of California are in Santa Barbara County in the Great Valley. California oil is of especial value to that state because it is a heavy oil good for fuel purposes in a region surprisingly devoid of fuel. The Russian and Mexican Fields. — All the American fields together were at times distanced (before 1900) by the single great field of Russia. Evidences of petroleum exist from the Crimea in the Black Sea eastward along both slopes of the Caucasus Mountains and along the Persian frontier to the city of Merv, but nearly all the oil thus far produced in this large region has come from the small field around the town of Baku on the Apsheron Peninsula which projects into the Caspian Sea near the end of the Caucasus Mountain range. This has had a greater proportion of naturally flowing wells than any other field, and several wells have yielded as much as a million gallons of oil per day for sev- eral days in succession, a record that was unexcelled until the discoveries of the Beaumont, Tex., field. These in turn were surpassed by the Mexican field in 1908. 1 Other Foreign Fields. — Oil fields exist in widely scattered lo- cations. On the outer slopes of the Carpathian Mountains is the second oil field of Europe. It lies in the Austrian province of Galicia, and in Roumania. Promising prospecting is in progress in Persia and in Egypt. In Burma is one of the older oil fields which has given a steady yield but far inferior in quality to Russia and the United States. The Dutch East Indies pro- duce some oil in northern Sumatra, in eastern Java, and in 1 On the fourth of July, 1908, the greatest oil well of the world was struck at San Geronimo, on the Gulf of Mexico, 67 miles north of Tampico. When struck, the oil gushed so rapidly that before the fire in the boiler of the engine running the drilling machinery could be extinguished the flowing oil reached it and burst into a mass of flame which for two months burned 60,- 000 to 75,000 barrels of oil per day with a flame from 800 to 1,400 feet in height, and 40 to 75 feet in width, making light enough to be seen by ships 100 miles at sea, and to permit a newspaper to be read 17 miles away. After the loss of $3,000,000 the fire was put out, but the oil flowed so rapidly that it could not be carried away or put in tanks, and the English owners saved their oil only by confining it in a reservoir one-fourth of a mile long made by heaping up earth embankments to keep the oil from flowing away like water. Even this well was later surpassed by the Potrero del Lano No. 4 well near Tuxpan, Mexico, which yielded 160,000 barrels a day for some time. 410 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY Borneo, while Peru has, upon the shore of the Pacific near the extreme western point of that country, a field yielding a heavy black oil of some value for illumination, but of great value as railroad and engine fuel in the industries and railroads of Peru, a country having very meager supplies of coal. A more prom- ising field is being developed upon the Peruvian plateau near lake Titicaca. The Peruvian production in 1909 was 1 1/4 million tons. The small production of Canada, Ontario Peninsula, now less than half a million barrels, has dwindled 50 per cent, in ten years because there was but one field, but this is an exception in a dec- ade when there has been phenomenal increase in oil production. PETROLEUM PRODUCTION MILLION BARRELS 1900 1909 Per cent, of world production 1909 United States 63 75 5.7 1.6 1.0 2.2 .8 182 65 14.9 9.3 6.6 11.4 1.8 61 Russia Austria 22 5 Roumania 3 British India 2 Dutch East Indies 3 Japan World Production 285 This table shows that the United States and Russia are the only countries having large surplus for export. The Transportation of Petroleum. — The fact that petroleum products are used in almost all countries and exported from so few necessitates large transportation. The problem of handling this inflammable fuel has been difficult. At first, barrels were used, then came iron tank railway cars and lastly pipe lines where the traffic is great. Iron pipes 3 to 6 inches in diameter are laid over long distances to connect oil fields with great markets and ports of shipment. Thus the products of western Pennsylvania were piped over the Alleghenies to New York, Philadelphia, and THE FUNDAMENTALS OF MANUFACTURE 411 Baltimore, and as oil development has gone westward the pipe lines have been extended first to Indiana and lastly to Oklahoma, whence pipe lines reach eastward to Chicago and New York and southward to the Gulf of Mexico at Port Arthur. Oklahoma oil goes in both directions, but the greater part of it via the shorter lines to the southern port. The recent large production of the California fields has resulted in several pipe lines to the coast. The Russians long used tank cars to transport their product over the 600 miles of railway between the Caspian Sea and the Black Sea ports of Batoum and Poti, whence the product has been shipped in enormous quantities to European countries. A pipe line has recently been established to handle a part of this traffic. The natural accompaniment of the pipe line is the tank steamer, holding hundreds of thousands of gallons and loaded by merely letting the liquid flow in from the pipes. Such vessels connect with the pipe lines at Port Arthur, Texas, and carry crude petro- leum to the refiners of England, France, and Spain, as well as to New York and Philadelphia. They also connect with the pipe lines and tank cars at the Black Sea ports, while interior Russia is supplied by tank steamers which ply upon the Caspian and up the navigable Volga River. The transportation equipment of a single corporation, the Standard Oil Company, makes an impressive list. 8,000 miles trunk pipe lines 75,000 miles feeder pipe lines from wells Storage for 82 million barrels crude oil 10,000 tank cars in America 2,000 tank cars abroad 60 bulk ss for ocean carrying 12 for foreign coasting trades 150 ss and barges in America 3,000 tank stations in America 5,000 tank stations elsewhere. (Duncan, Principles of Industrial Management, p. 59.) Petroleum as a Source of Power. — The first great use of petro- leum was for illuminating oil and then for lubrication, but with the opening of the twentieth century it has rapidly increased in use as a source of power. In three different ways it is now an 412 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY important source of power. The first to be developed was gaso- line, a petroleum product so volatile that it gives fuel for the gas engines that have made possible the large development of the automobile, the motor boat, and the motor cycle. The gasoline engine is also much used for small industrial purposes. The second use of petroleum as a source of power is for ordinary- boiler fuel. The fact that petroleum is the richest of all fuels makes it of great advantage in steamships where space is always the very life of the enterprise. Oil tanks take up less space than coal bunkers and the crew can be reduced because flowing liquid replaces the labor of coal passers. The boilers in numerous small vessels in the United States Navy have for several years been heated with crude oil and in December, 1911, it was decided to adopt oil as the fuel for new battleships. The use of crude petroleum as fuel in merchant ships is becoming more general and some corporations agree to distribute the product throughout the world to steamship and other users, by carrying it in tank steamers, some of their vessels staying in seas west of the Suez Canal and getting the supply at Batoum, Port Arthur, or Phila- delphia, while other vessels avoid the Suez tolls by staying in eastern seas and getting their supply in Burmah, Sumatra and Java. Where coal is scarce and oil is plentiful it is utilized as loco- motive fuel. This was the practice in Peru even before 1900 and recent new discoveries of heavy oil are extending its use there. Five-sixths of all the locomotives of Roumania are oil burners, but southwestern United States affords the greatest example of its use. The great oil fields of Oklahoma and California are at the ends of a region where coal is scarce. In southern Cali- fornia locomotive coal at times cost $11 per ton and the cheap oil of the new fields was quickly utilized and now drives the loco- motives on 17,000 miles of railway between the Gulf of Mexico, Oklahoma, Utah, and California. One-third of the Russian supply is used at home as fuel. The third and newest use of petroleum as a source of power is in the German invention of the Diesel engine, an internal combustion (gas engine) which has the great advantage (in cost) of being able to use the crude petroleum as it comes from the earth. THE FUNDAMENTALS OF MANUFACTURE 413 It is so efficient that a gallon of oil costing from two cents to five cents will develop 15 horse-power hours. This invention promises to make oil a great power fuel while the present cheap oil lasts. In Germany this engine is also being used to develop power from tar oil derived from the tar produced by the by-prod- uct coke ovens and the producer gas plants. Natural Gas. — Natural gas, the most volatile of the petroleum products, is the best and most convenient of all fuels, the cheapest and most convenient of all sources of power. It separates itself from the oil as cream separates from milk but it accompanies the oil in practically all fields. It has for many centuries burned at the crevices of the rocks on the Russian oil fields where for ages the fire-worshippers of Persia have made pilgrimages. The greater part of this gas, which is richer in heat than that manufactured at so much expense in most cities, has been largely wasted, owing to heedlessness of man, and to the inherent difficulties of handling new problems that must be handled by legislation. In 1910, the gas thus going to waste from oil wells in the United States was probably worth at city pricfes over half a million dollars a day. In the American oil fields this gas has been of very great industrial importance in the iron and glass industries, as boiler fuel and as city gas. It has been piped to Pittsburg, to Toledo, Cleveland and Columbus, Ohio, to Ft. Wayne and Indianapolis, Indiana, to Detroit, Mich., and many smaller towns throughout the Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, and Okla- homa oil fields. Recently it was brought to Baltimore. Most unfortunately the life of the gas well is short and the supply is exhausted in a few decades, but it furnishes an astonishingly cheap fuel while it lasts. It is often sold as low as ten cents per thousand cubic feet. This resource has been the fourth element in making western Pennsylvania more liberally supplied with fuel than any other place in the world. In that region a thick forest covered hills which were underlaid with the magnificent coal deposits of the Appalachian field, while further down was crude petroleum, and the natural gas that drove it spurting from the orifices in the rocks. The gas from this field is now about ex- hausted, the forest is practically gone, the oil output has greatly declined, and the coal is being rapidly used up, and scenes of desolation face the traveller. No wonder the American people 414 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY are beginning to consider the question of the conservation of natural resources. Refining of Petroleum. — Crude petroleum is very complex chemically and every year more and more commercial products are being separated from it. The process of refining consists of distillation. The thick, black crude oil is put in a large tank and heated so that one product after another becomes volatilized and passes off, like steam from a kettle, to be caught and condensed. Some of the first products are very volatile oils used chiefly in dissolving rubber in rubber manufacturing. Then come naphtha and gasoline which are used in the gasoline engines of motor boats and automobiles. Kerosene, the great illuminant, is the most important oil of all. The heavier oils that come next are used for fuel and lubricants, for which purpose they are superior to either animal or vegetable oils because they do not become gummy or adhesive so soon. A thick black residue remains. Of this there are two types, one containing much par- affin, the product of oil said to have a paraffin base, the other containing much asphaltum, and hence said to have an asphalt base. Further processes of refining these residues produce paraffin for candles, paraffin oils, tar for roofing, and finally, a hard, black coke, amounting in some cases to 6 per cent, of the whole amount of crude oil. Each product is capable of separa- tion into others by redistillation, some of the products being vaseline and many other ointments and drugs, so that altogether the modern refinery sells in addition to kerosene several hundred by-products. Our Foreign Trade in Petroleum. — The American trade in petroleum products is as wide as the world. Our oil makes better illuminating oil than that of Russia, and is sent, in the crude form, to some of the more important countries, while in the form of kerosene or refined petroleum for lamps it is distributed more universally to the nations of the world than any other product of American export. It goes alike to Greenland and New Zealand, Norway and Madagascar, to the tribesmen in Italian East Africa, and to the Italian in the home country, to the Spaniard in Spain, and the Spanish-speaking Mestiza or half-breeds of the Philippines. The Chinaman, who regards light as a most prized luxury, has taken such quantities of American refined oil that this THE FUNDAMENTALS OF MANUFACTURE 415 commodity alone makes up the bulk of all American exports to that country. The ordinary 5-gallon cans of American refined oil are distributed throughout the interior of China in places where the face of the white man has never been seen. The heavier lubricating oils are not so universally used by all people, but they are sent from the United States to almost every country where railroads exist or steam engines run. We exported in 1910 about a billion gallons of illuminating oil and a sixth as much of lubricating oil and of crude oil. Asphalt and Wax. — These products are not fundamentals of manufacture like coal, iron, petroleum, and natural gas, but their occurrence with petroleum is the reason for presenting them here. Although a solid asphalt is a common accompaniment of the oil fields it is supposed to be crude petroleum oxidized. It, therefore, often occurs where the oil has flowed to the surface and partly solidified. Its existence often points out the existence of the oil. Its chief use is for paving streets and it is produced commercially in the cantons of NeufcMtel and Vaud in Switzerland and also in some places in Germany, France, and Italy. Algiers sends some to England, and the Mexican oil field was known for its asphalt for many years before the oil fields were worked. All these are, however, deposits of minor importance. The best of all asphalt deposits are near the mouth of the Orinoco River in Venezuela and on the adjacent British island of Trinidad. Here is the famous asphalt lake, which at the present time produces the greater part of the world's commercial asphalt because of the great ease with which the product can be gathered and shipped. The lake is less than a mile from the seashore, and workmen can walk across the surface, and dig up the asphalt, which is sufficiently viscous to slowly replace itself within a few hours. Cable ways with travelling buckets transfer it easily from the lake to the holds of the ships which carry it in full cargoes (export 123,000 tons, 1909) to New York, Philadelphia, New Orleans, Liverpool, Buenos Ayres, or any of the world's com- mercial ports where this much prized paving material is in demand. Ozokerite, or mineral wax, a material somewhat resembling paraffin, is found in several oil fields and makes the brightest of all candles. It exists in great quantities in the Russian oil 416 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY regions, but practically all the world's supply is gathered in Galicia, where there are even richer deposits along with a labor supply more abundant than in any other existing oil field. In some parts of the world, particularly New South Wales and southern Scotland, paraffin oils exist in oily shales from which the oil is extracted and refined. This industry was begun in a small way in Great Britain in 1850, but the product there and in Australia has never been large enough to prevent a very great import of oil from the United States and Russia. 6. OTHER SOURCES OF POWER Fortunately man does not have to depend for power upon wood, coal, oil, natural gas, or waterfalls. These are but a very small fraction of a veritable fury of power manifestations in the midst of which man lives. The ultimate sources of this power are two : First: The cosmic force of gravitation and planetary mo- mentum that gives us the tides. These we have thus far used but little, although methods for its utilization have recently been perfected. Second: The chief source of all our power is the sun, whose energy is stored in wood and fossil fuels, but whose chief mani- festation is in the wind. This result of the unequal heating of the earth's surface develops such tremendous energy that in the work of carrying the earth's waters it uses power of which the water-power resources as man sees them are but a small fraction of 1 per cent. In passing over the surface of the sea the wind raises the waves which have eaten away continents. In the mere rising and falling 2 feet three times per minute the waves exert on a strip 100 feet wide 6,000 horse-power per mile. This power man has not yet utilized. The direct force of the wind has for centuries driven man's ships, his grain mills, and his pumps. Wind mills by tens of thousands are to-day pumping water on American and other farms. Wind power is well suited for this kind of work, which does not have to be done at any particular time. The grain can be stored in a hopper and ground when the wind blows and the water is stored in tanks until wanted. If necessity drove THE FUNDAMENTALS OF MANUFACTURE 417 us to it there is no reason to think the inventors and engineers could not in a generation or two devise some effective means of doing our heavy work with wind and wave power. All other sources of power pale beside the great source — the direct rays of the sun which are calculated to hurl into 9,000 square miles of Egypt enough power to replace all the engines and waterwheels in the world. Three different types of mechan- ism have utilized this power to a small extent. The success of such power development to the point of superiority to existing power sources offers interesting speculation as to where would be natural seats of Empire when the best sources of power were within the zone of 200 or 400 mile-power transmission from cloud- less deserts. Alcohol is, however, nearer to us from the mechanical stand- point. It can be produced from henequin pulp, corn stalks, potatoes, and a great variety of vegetable materials. We already know how to use it as a rival of gasoline and kerosene and it is extensively used for those purposes in Germany, which has no petroleum and much potato land. Alcohol as a source of power permits us to go on indefinitely, because it depends upon agriculture, the enduring industry. The alcohol tank steamer coming from a distillery on a trade wind shore beside tropic yam or cane fields tilled by Chinese emigrants could prob- ally give us a surprisingly close duplicate for many of the prod- ucts of petroleum. At this present time fuel alcohol made from sugar cane in Cuba, suitable for automobiles and other gas en- gines, costs per horse-power lower about 60% as much as gasoline at 20c. per gallon. The prediction that our coal will never all be mined is there- fore not altogether fantastic. REFERENCES See General References Persons interested in the mineral industries have unusual sources of information in (a) The U. S. Geological Survey, two-volume annual, " Mineral Resources of the United States" giving comprehensive, detailed, new information and statistics upon the mineral industries of the country and to some extent of foreign countries. 418 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY (b) The Mineral Industry, annual, The McGraw-Hill Company, edited by Albert H. Fay, does the same thing for the entire world. (c) "The Engineering Magazine," New York, publishes each month and annually an index of periodic literature in the whole field of Engineering, including power and power resources, and mining enterprises. The Story of Iron and Steel, by J. Russell Smith, nontechnical account of the development of the industry and of the condition in different countries. Appleton, 1908. The Story of Petroleum, by Walter S. Tower, does the same thing for the petroleum industry. Recent Development of Producer Gas Power Plants in United States. R. H. Fernald, U. S. Geological Survey, also House Doc. 366, 61st St. Congress, 2d Session. CHAPTER XI THE FOREST INDUSTRIES AND PAPER The Uses of Wood. — Man cannot get along without wood. It has been useful in all stages of civilization and the more civiliza- tion advances the greater is the number of services it renders us. It serves as fuel for the savage's camp fire, it makes the wagon in which roving tribesman carries his family and goods, and when he settles down to agriculture he uses wood for his plow, for his house, for the barns for his cattle, and for the fences that limit his land and keep his animals from wandering away. It rendered the same services in the making of house, barn, fence, and house- hold fuel throughout Colonial America, and to-day its use even as fuel is as great in the United States as ever before. World commerce is served by the millions of trees that go each year into the bed of the railway as ties, while the lordly conifer has for centuries been the mast of the ship. In this day of great move- ment of goods, surprising quantities of wood are used for barrels and packing boxes, a single Philadelphia soap factory using for this purpose five carloads per week. Each day some inventor finds a substitute for wood in one of its uses, but other inventors find corresponding new uses for it, so that our dependence upon it is increasing day by day. It has even become essential to the spreading of knowledge, for practically all our books and maga- zines are printed on paper made of wood pulp. The American Forests and Their Destruction. — America is the richest of all continents in useful wood. Through much of our history our people have had to fight the forests, which came down to the shore of the Atlantic so that the first settlers landed beneath its shade. The first effort of the new colonist was directed against the forest, which he worked laboriously to clear away before he could plant a crop. He then had to struggle for years with the stumps before he could have a smooth field to grow his food. Decade after decade, through the seventeenth, 419 420 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY eighteenth, and the middle part of the nineteenth centuries, the occupation of the country east of the Mississippi went steadily forward, accompanied by the destruction of the forest to make room for the plow. In this process millions of fine oaks have been rolled into piles and burned to get rid of them. The price of lumber was practically the cost of getting it out, and for fire wood and some other wood products this still continues to be true in many localities. Throughout this period of most active forest clearing the necessary lumber was usually made in little saw mills on local streams where the water wheel drove a big upright saw up and down and ripped off the boards one at a time for the man who brought his logs to the mill. Recently, great improvements have been made in the manufacture of logs into useful lumber, the circular saw has replaced the upright saw, and in some cases the rapid double-cutting band saw has replaced the circular saw, especially for the large logs in the western mills. The Bise in the Price of Lumber. — About the year 1900 America began to reach the end of an epoch in the lumber supply. For fifty years the price of lumber had been rising in Europe, while we in America had been cutting down the forests, wasting the wood, using lumber prodigally and letting the forest fire run almost unheeded, to the great destruction of the young trees that should make the lumber of the future. Suddenly, there was a revival of prosperity, an increase in lumber demand and lumber price. Saw-mill operators moving from the North and East began to purchase timber lands and timber leases in the South and West. The owners of timber land began to realize that before long it would be more scarce and they would not sell their timber land at the old nominal price of $1 to $2.50 per thousand feet board measure 1 in the standing trees. They preferred to wait for a higher price in the future. Thus the price of timber land and lumber rose. The reasons for this anticipated scarcity were that we had large areas importing lumber from other states. Such older states as Ohio and Indiana that had long been supply- ing part of the supply of the treeless Mississippi Valley with thousands of towns and hundreds of thousands of farms suddenly came to the end of their lumber supply and also began to import heavily from distant places. At the same time northern and 1 Board foot = 1 foot long, 1 foot wide, 1 inch thick. THE FOREST INDUSTRIES AND PAPER 421 eastern lumber regions began to show signs of exhaustion, and lumber operators from New England, New York, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin began to buy timber lands in the South and West, driving up the price of timber lands by their competition for them. The Location of the Lumber Industry. — Lumber is a product depending upon forests and favorable conditions of transportation to market. It can only be made from a large log, very heavy and difficult to transport. This log must be carried sometimes for miles from the stump upon which it grew to the saw mill, and the heavy boards carried thence to market and sold. In the past the price of lumber has usually been much less than a cent a pound, so that lumber making for the market has always been dependent upon very favorable conditions of transportation, often depend- ing in part at least upon water transportation. Owing to the greater difficulty of handling the big log than the smaller board, the saw mills are situated as closely as possible to the place where the trees grow, and if wagons must be used to carry the logs the mill is often portable and moves about the woods sawing the logs of a few acres in each place, thus minimizing the log hauling. A large saw mill is usually found only where the logs can be floated down a river or brought in by rail, so that it can draw its supply for many years from the large territory drained by the river and its branches. As to the forest, it will grow from the heart of the tropics to the edge of the Arctic far beyond the grain line, if there is a moderate rainfall, evenly distributed throughout the year. Granted moisture, no soil is too poor, too sandy, or too rocky if the tree can once catch hold with its roots. So great is this power of tree life that a good timber tree often stands on the face of a cliff fastened by roots that have wedged themselves in rock crevices which they have penetrated in the search for food. Within the forest the trees vary greatly in their suitability for lumber, most of which is made from a few species that are espe- cially adapted for lumber uses by form and quality. The shade trees commonly used along city streets of America and Europe are the broad-leaved deciduous trees. These handsome species are poor timber trees because they grow with many crooks in their trunks and a great proportion of the wood of the trees in the 422 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY branches. The cone bearers are better timber trees because they have a large, straight trunk with small branches. They can also thrive in lower temperatures and poorer soils. As a result our familiar broad-leaved trees do not furnish over a quarter of the lumber used in the United States or in Europe. The Forest Regions of the United States. — The natural forest region of the United States comprises practically all the country along the eastern coast to the mouth of the Rio Grande, from the Atlantic to eastern Texas, Kansas, and Illinois, and central Fig. 145. — Arid regions of world (rainfall less than 20 inches per year shown in white. Forests grow on the mountains of arid regions and on plains at about lat. 55°. (U. S. Geol. Surv.) Minnesota, from Lake Michigan to the Gulf of Mexico; a large area in the higher regions of the Rocky Mountains; and the Pacific forests on the Sierra Nevada and Coast ranges. It is too dry for tree growth on the lower lands of the Rocky Mountain region, the Great Basin and the Great Plains, and the Prairie fires set by Indians to improve the pastures are supposed to have kept down the forest in large areas of the Mississippi Valley where trees now thrive when man gives them a chance. Parts of the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia and West Virginia are for the same reason said to have been devoid of forest at the time of settlement. THE FOREST INDUSTRIES AND PAPER 423 In the consideration of our lumber industry the forests of the United States may be divided into seven districts: The New England and Adirondack Forest. — First of these districts is the upper New England and Adirondack forest NORTHERN FORE5T Fig. 146. — Natural forest regions of North America. (U. S. Forest Service.) occupying a highland with a climate rather too cold for satis- factory agriculture of nineteenth century type. Much of this cold country is impossible of plowing and tilling because it was 424 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY made rocky, swampy and sandy by the work of the overriding ice in the glacial epoch. 1 But its rocky and sandy soils can, if properly cared for, give us crops of wood indefinitely. This lum- ber district being easy of logging and near to cities was the first in the United States to be largely developed. The succession of rivers from the Hudson to the Saint Croix at eastern Maine furnish the water ways by which the logs have for decades been floated down with the spring freshets from the highlands to the manufacturing towns of the lower land near the sea. Thus, Fig. 147. — Mean annual snowfall in inches, for United States. The snowfall on the Sierra Nevada and Rocky Mts. is much greater than shown on this chart. (After Henry.) (From W. S. Tower.) (Snow is a great lumbering factor.) Bangor, on the Penobscot, with its many saw mills, makes yearly many millions of feet of lumber at a place convenient for the loading of schooners that carry it to Boston, New York, the West Indies, Brazil, Europe, or even South Africa. The cold winter and heavy snow of this northeastern highland are an essential factor in the lumber industry because the swamps and rocks, impassable by wagons in summer, are covered by the deep snows of winter so that teams are able to sled the logs out to the stream bank where the melting of the snow in spring furnishes the freshets 1 Thus Hamilton County, New York, in the center of the Adirondacks has but three persons to the square mile, although two railroads give access. THE FOREST INDUSTRIES AND PAPER 425 to carry the logs downward to the mills. 1 For many years timber lands were valuable only when within easy hauling dis- tance of some stream, but the recent rise of price of lumber and recently invented machinery has made it possible for temporary railways and traction engines with sled trains to carry logs many miles from previously unvalued forests to the stream banks. The most important timber tree of this forest region is the white pine, a good timber tree yielding one of the very best of Fig. 148. -The value of snow to the Northern Lumber Industry. Falls, Minn. (U. S. Forest Service.) Thief River woods. It is prized for its lightness, strength, durability, freedom from warping, cracking, or shrinking, and the ease with which it can be worked. So widely prized has it been that it is now becoming exhausted, and the output of it is actually declining. Spruce, an inferior wood, is second in importance, and hemlock, a still more inferior wood, is third. The broad-leafed trees including the maples, beeches, birches, chestnut and oak form 1 The log drive of 1910 on the Connecticut river consisted of 45 million feet board measure and gave employment to 500 teams and 1,000 men. 426 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY but a small part of the forest growth in this and the next forest district. The Forests of the Great Lakes. — The second forest district is that around the Great Lakes, which is climatically and in- dustrially a sort of separated western half of the New York and New England field. Similar glaciers overrode the states of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota, leaving in their northern parts similar sandy, rocky, and swampy areas. The likeness to the east is completed by the predominance of the white pine, the spruce and the hemlock, while the lumbering operations are carried on with the assistance of the snow, which in the region between Lakes Superior and Michigan attains a greater depth than in any other part of the United States and enables the most astonishing loads to be taken out over a land which is in the summer utterly impassable for any kind of terrestrial vehicle. The lumber industry of this district shows the westward develop- ment that has accompanied the advance of the American people across the continent. Lumbering began in the lower peninsula of Michigan, then went to the upper peninsula, then Wisconsin succeeded Michigan as the leading state, and as the forests were cut here, Minnesota succeeded Wisconsin as the leading lumber state. Minnesota in turn has been surpassed by the rapidly rising lumber districts in the south and on the Pacific coast. The exhaustion of the white pine especially has been the impetus to make the lumber men emigrate to new fields. The logging enterprizes of the Upper Lakes have been a link in a peculiar industrial chain. The one-crop farming that has characterized the grain-producing farms of the Mississippi Valley has made a great demand for labor at harvest time, so that a farm having upon it one man in winter suddenly needed two or three more at harvest time. The total result was a demand for tens of thousands of men for a few weeks in a locality which needed them no more until the next season. For many years thousands of men passed the winter in the logging camps at the Upper Lake forests, felling trees and hauling logs to the stream bank. With the spring thaw, many of the choppers rode upon the log rafts down the Mississippi to St. Louis or New Orleans, and in late May began the summer's work as harvest THE FOREST INDUSTRIES AND PAPER 427 hands in wheat fields of Texas, and followed the advancing har- vest season northward through Oklahoma and into the wheat belts of Kansas. They also harvested hay and oats in that state and Nebraska through July and early August, and then took up the harvesting of spring wheat in South Dakota, southern Minnesota, the Red River Valley of the North, and Manitoba. Fig. 149.- -Log slide to the river. Priest River National Forest, Idaho. Forest Service.) (U.S. They followed the threshers through the frost of the autumn, and with the coming of winter rode eastward on the grain-carry- ing railroads to take up their axes once more in the lumber camps. Appalachian Highlands Forest. — The third forest district is that of the Appalachian Highlands, reaching from southern New York to the extreme northern parts of Georgia and Alabama. This plateau, becoming higher as it goes south and reaching its 428 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY maximum elevation in North Carolina, extends the temperature of New England far into the south and with it the trees of New England. Some hemlock is found in western Carolina, central West Virginia has 2,400 square miles of spruce, some white pine, and some hemlock, while hemlock has long been a standard timber from the Pennsylvania mountains. In this Appalachian district the steepness of the mountains and the small amount of snow makes impossible the extended use of sleds as in the New England, Adirondack and Great Lake forests, and the logs are moved to the mills on wagons or, in some cases, on chutes of logs or steel down which the logs slide from precipitous hills to a temporary railway in the valley below. The timber has been almost entirely exhausted from parts of this region. Carloads of lumber are now regularly shipped into Pennsylvania districts from which twenty-five years ago it was sent out by the trainload. Hardwood Forests. — The fourth lumber district is the middle region of hardwoods from New York to Alabama and from Alabama to the Ozarks and the lower Great Lakes. Pine trees grow naturally upon the sandy Atlantic plain, the evergreen spruce, pines, and hemlocks hold the top of the Appalachians, but between these two on the lower slopes of the Appalachians and the hilly country leading up to it on both the eastern and western slopes is a large area where the forest is made up of the broad-leaved 1 trees, the oak, the hickory, the chestnut, the tulip, the black walnut, and to a lesser degree the ash and bass wood classed as hard woods by the forest service. This belt reaches from southern New York through northern and western New Jersey, the central parts of Maryland, Virginia, and North 1 Commercial Woods as Classified by the Forest Service Soft Woods Hard Woods Pines Oak Cottonwood Firs Maple Ash Hemlock Poplar Hickory Spruce Gum Walnut Cypress Chestnut Sycamore Redwood Beech Cherry Cedar Birch Larch Basswood Tamarack Elm THE FOREST INDUSTRIES AND PAPER 429 Carolina, to northern Georgia, thence around the southern and western slopes of the Appalachians to Ohio and thence west- ward to the open prairies and southward and southwestward through Kentucky, Tennessee, southern Missouri, northern Arkansas, and into the Ozarks. This is the region from which the American supply of these hardwood timbers has chiefly come, although they are produced to a lesser extent in both northern and southern forests. Lumbering on a large scale was done earlier in the eastern part of this hardwood district than in the western, so that at the present time West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennes- see, and Arkansas are the states of greatest production. Chat- tanooga is a great lumber market, while Memphis is the greatest hardwood markeb in the world. Oak, chestnut, and hickory are the leading woods, and it is the district producing the greatest amounts of tulip, poplar, and black walnut. Southern Pine Forests. — The fifth lumber district is that of the southern pines. New England has relatively declined while the south has come forward rapidly since 1890, with greatly in- creased shipments of the wood of the long-leafed pine, called hard pine, or yellow pine, Georgia pine or Carolina pine. The strength and hardness of this pine makes it much prized for flooring and the building of railway cars, wainscoting and many other uses and in 1910 it furnished 35 per cent, of all the lumber cut in the United States. Other pine trees also grow in this belt, particularly the short-leaved or old field pine, one of the fastest growing trees in America, which, between 1860 and 1900, covered many abandoned corn and tobacco fields in Maryland, eastern Virginia and North Carolina with a growth large enough for the saw mill. These two pines make an almost continuous forest from Long Branch, New Jersey, to Austin, Texas, the short-leaved being found in the extremes and the long-leaved in the middle part between the mouth of the Chesapeake and Louisiana. The short-leaf pine forests which cover much of eastern Texas are now being rapidly converted into lumber, but the warm moist climate makes this one of the best of sections for the trees to replace themselves if they are properly cared for. Much of this southern country is sandy and level, some of it gently rolling, but none of it is even rugged. A very large propor- tion of it is yet in forests. The lumbering is much easier than in 430 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY New England or the Appalachian district. About the year 1900 the ox-cart, which has been the chief dependence in logging opera- tions, began to be replaced by temporary railroads which are put through the woods about 2,000 feet apart so that a donkey engine winding a cable 1,000 feet long can draw logs from any part of the woods to the side of the railroad track where they are loaded and carried away to the mill or to the bank of some stream upon which they are at times floated 60 or 70 miles down toward the sea for manufacture and shipment by water to the lumber markets of New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and other eastern cities. This wood is also prized in Europe and the combined coastwise and export trade make large shipments from the ports of Mobile, Alabama; Pensacola, Fla.; Brunswick and Savannah, Ga.; Charleston, S. C; New Berne, N. C; and Norfolk, Va., while the new town of Gulfport, Miss., is actually the greatest lumber-shipping point in the world. Vast quantities of southern pine are also sent by rail into the Ohio and Mississippi valleys. Another important timber tree in the southern field is the cypress, which is one of the few trees that will grow in a swamp where its roots must be under water. In past ages these trees have fallen over and been covered by the peat and swamp waters and perfectly preserved, so that houses may now be finished with the beautiful fossil cypress taken out of swamps in the Atlantic coastal plain from Florida to New Jersey. Cypress lumber is much prized for shingles and the interior work of houses and is much substituted for white pine. The shifting source of cypress well illustrates the growing shortage of lumber, and the reasons for its rise in price. Norfolk used to be the great cypress market, but the comparative ex- haustion of the Dismal Swamp supply caused Florida to succeed Norfolk, whereas scarcity in Florida has been followed by the rise of New Orleans as the chief market for the product of this swamp forest tree. The Western Mississippi Valley and the Rocky Mountain Forests. — The central part of the Mississippi Valley north of the Ozark Mountains and west of Indiana was almost treeless when occupied by the homesteaders in the second and third quarters of the nineteenth century. Exception should be made of the moist lowlands along the stream where the scattered growth of THE FOREST INDUSTRIES AND PAPER 431 broad-leaf trees was of great value to the early settlers. At the north the humidity in the glacial swamps and the lakes had pre- served forests west of the source of the Mississippi, and at the south, the Gulf rains had extended the forests over east Texas and the Ozarks. A timberless area bounded by the west boundary of Indiana, the Rocky Mountains, Canada, and the Rio Grande had one oasis of forest on the small highland where the Black Hills, with a greater rainfall, supported a rather inferior tree growth. The heavy timber supply of these treeless states, which has hastened the scarcity of American timber, comes chiefly from the Great Lakes, the South, the Pacific slope and, to a lesser extent, from the Rocky Mountain district. Here, owing to the slight rainfall of low elevations, forests grow only in high elevations, particularly in the South, but the lessened heat and evaporation make the area of the forest increase in Idaho and Montana. The percentage of forest area is comparatively small in New Mexico, but it has many more square miles of forest than has New Hampshire. There are even several hundred square miles of fine forest upon the plateaus of northeastern and central Arizona, and there are large extensions of this same plateau forest in the mountains of northern Mexico through which new railroads under American management are now being built between the Rio Grande and the Gulf of California. Sometimes the Rocky Mountain forests are upon plateaus and slopes at the head of steep walled canyons through which logs will not float, and where the prospect of permanent settle- ment and traffic are too small to warrant the building of railroads. From these seemingly inaccessible places lumber and logs are brought out by flumes or troughs through which a stream of water flows and pushes the lumber down a gentle incline often miles in length over territory utterly impassable by any other means of transportation. Forests of the Pacific Slope. — The seventh forest district of the United States and the finest in the world is that near the Pacific coast. In many of the eastern forests we have only from four to ten thousand board feet of lumber per acre, but large areas in California, Oregon, and Washington have a hundred thousand feet to the acre, and some small groves of the so-called 432 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY big trees will yield from 1 to 5,000,000 feet to the acre. This forest belt begins about latitude 35° in California, where it occupies the Sierra Nevada and Coast ranges, but low rainfall causes the great valley of that state lying between these moun- tains to be treeless, as are the lowlands farther south. In northern California, parts of Oregon, and central Washington Fig. 150. — V-shaped board flume floating sawed lumber out of impassable Rooky Mts. Canyon, Wyoming. At the right a creek adds to the water sup- ply. (XJ. S. Forest Service.) the forests cover not only both mountain ranges, but the rather high and rough valleys between. The second range of mountains sharply limits the rainfall so that, except upon the higher ranges, there is no forest in the Great Basin between the east front of the Sierras and the Wasatch Mountains of Utah nor between the Cascade Mountains of west central Washington and Oregon and the mountains of Idaho. THE FOREST INDUSTRIES AND PAPER 433 The even climate, a good rainfall, and freedom from wind- storms permit the trees of the Pacific forests to grow for ages and attain great size, as is shown by the well-known big trees of California. But commercially more important than these forest giants are large areas of forest in all three of the Pacific states where there is a thick stand of redwood, Oregon pine or Fig. 151. — Relief map of California. The treeless central plain is conspicuous, but the state is largely mountainous. An explanation of the importance of her timber resources. (Prom W. S. Tower.) Douglas fir trees 4, 5, 6, 7, and often 8 to 10 feet in diameter with straight trunks 100 and even more feet in length. It is difficult work to get these huge logs to the saw mill, and for this reason much fine timber is wasted. As it is utterly impossible to haul them on an ordinary wagon, they are sometimes dragged by donkey engines or long teams of oxen over a road bed paved with small logs, oftener they are taken on temporary railways and sometimes they are allowed to slide by gravity down log 434 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY chutes. The lumber is manufactured in the largest and most perfect lumber mills in the United States, some of them using every particle of the log that is brought to their wonderful machinery. A typical mill makes match sticks, but it also sells shingles and lumber produced from the rough portions of the logs, while the sawdust and bark feed the engine fires. Sailing PERCENTAGE OF TOTAL LUMBER PRODUCTION SUPPLIED BY DIFFERENT REGIONS 1350 I860 1870 1880 1890 1900 1910 YEARS Fig. 152. — United States lumber production. vessels load at Seattle and Tacoma, Washington, Vancouver, B. C, Eureka and Humbolt in California to carry this most excellent timber to markets of South America, Australia, Japan, South Africa, and even to England, France, and Germany, a voyage much longer than half the distance around the world. The increased price of lumber in the United States has made possible the carriage of Pacific coast lumber across the continent THE FOREST INDUSTRIES AND PAPER 435 Billions of Board Feet ( Washington Louisiana M ississipp i > 1 2 3 4 Oregon Wisconsin Texas Arkansas North Carolina Michigan Virginia Alabama Minnesota West Virginia California Pennsylvania Georgia Tennessee Florida. Maine ^MHB Kentucky MHHM Idaho South Carolina Kew York Missouri Ohio New Hamshire Indiana Montana Vermont Massachusetts Oklahoma Maryland Connecticut Colorado Illinois New Mexico ■ Iowa ■ Arizona I Delaware 1 New Jersey 1 Wyoming 1 South Dakota 1 Rhode Island 1 Utah 1 Kansas 1 All Other States 1 Fig. 153. — Lumber production by states, 1910. (U. S. Forest Service.) 436 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY to Chicago and even to New York, and it has become an import- ant article of freight eastward upon the transcontinental railways. The Shifting Lumber Supply. — The changes in price, the exhaustion of local supplies and the competition of the different lumber fields gives a great variety of lumber to the eastern United States. In the vicinity of Philadelphia, the joists (floor supports), which used to be of hemlock, are now partly supplied by old field pine grown on abandoned corn and tobacco fields in eastern Virginia. If the outside is of wood it will mostly be made of redwood or fir from the Pacific coast in place of United States 1880 ioor 1907 4.5% "■' 13% 5.05S -2.1* ^mmm:>.r>% ■■— M.!)£ M^^MMH',! ^mmmm ■ ' «BB^BBI,.4;' ^■^H U* 9.4£ 116 Million Feet 140 Million Feet Fig. 154. • — The shifting lumber supply as shown by percentage of output by states is 1880 and 1907. (U. S. Forest Service.) white pine from northern forests. For interior finishing, cypress, Georgia pine and West Virginia chestnut have replaced Maine pine. The flooring is the hard pine of the South, the shingles are fir from the state of Washington, which has replaced the cedar from the swamps of New Jersey, or cypress from the Dismal Swamp of Virginia. Nearly all American cities have an equally wide supply and have had equal shifts in its source. Examination of the production chart shows some surprising facts such as Louisiana outranking any northern state, Virginia leading California, and Maine being eighteenth in the whole THE FOREST INDUSTRIES AND PAPER 437 list and with a smaller output than any one of eight southern states. Our increasing dependence upon wood, also our new Billions of Board Feet Yellow Pine (.Including the Short Leaf and Loblolly Pinee) Douglas Fir Oak White Pine Hemlock Western Pine 9 . ! 1 i t . < _^^^ Tulip Poplar ' fmmmm Red Gum ^■H Redwood W Chestnut tkewmm Beech *w\m Birch ■b Cedar HUM Basswood •eeW Hickory ■■ Elm •m Larch •m Ash m Cottonwood m ■\Yhite Fir ■ Tamarack ■ Sugar Pine ■ Tupelo ■ Balsam Fir ■ Sycamore ■ Walnut i Lodgepole Pine i All Other ■ Fig. 155. — Lumber production by varieties, 1910. (U. S. Forest Service.) abilities to use it are well shown by the transformation in the veneer industry 1 from a bit of luxury in furniture to a material 1 " Formerly veneer making was confined to a few hardwoods selected for beauty of grain and used as an exterior finish for high-grade furniture and cabinet work. With the improvement of veneer machinery and methods of drying there has developed a large demand for veneers cut from cheap woods and used for packing boxes, berry cups, fruit baskets, veneer barrels, drawer bottoms, filling in three-ply lumber, glass backing, and novelties, such as butter dishes, wooden plates, and fancy confectionery packages. "On account of the constantly increasing price of hardwood lumber used 438 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY for packing boxes. Half a billion feet of lumber are used as veneer each year in the United States; it is rapidly increasing, and eighteen different woods were used to the extent of over 10 million feet each in 1910, the principal one being red gum, a wood that had long been wasted because it could not be split for firewood, and when sawed it warped excessively and soon rotted. In veneer work its non-splitting tendency is a positive advantage. U . . ^^==^ j FOREST PRODUCTS IN CLASSES FIREWOOD. I9C FO B 7. RE !LL ST IO > vs > < iTE or RIA Ct LF IBi 5 IEG Ci UK JEC LUMBER AND SHINGLES _ POLES, POSTS. AND RAILS ■ ■ 1 HEWED CROSS-TIES COOPERAGE STG-.K PULP-WOOD. ROUND MINE TIMBERS DISTILLATION WOOD Fig. 156. — Lumber uses. Canadian Forests.— Four of the forest belts of the United States touch and extend across the Canadian boundary. The Pacific and Rocky Mountain forests combine in Canada, extend northward through British Columbia and on to the Yukon, a vast region crossed as yet by but a single railroad, the Canadian Pacific near the Canadian boundary, so that most of it is unsettled and much of it is even unexplored by any but the unscientific for making furniture, fixtures, and cabinets, built-up lumber, which is usually made of three-ply veneer, is being extensively substituted. For manufacturing this built-up material, it is possible to use woods which heretofore have been but rarely used, owing to their tendency to twist and warp when sawed into lumber." — Bureau of Forestry Report. THE FOREST INDUSTRIES AND PAPER 439 trapper and prospector. It contains, along with some land good for agriculture, many forests that await the building of railroads to get the product upon the world's market. The treeless belt of the Mississippi Valley goes northward through Canada until in latitude 60 the moisture conditions for forest growth are again found and there is a connection between the Rocky Mountain forests and the forest region north of the Great Lakes in a sub- arctic forest belt 200 to 300 miles in width. The whole of the country from near Winnipeg to the Atlantic was originally a forest of which but a fraction has been cleared for settlement in the region between Lakes Erie, Ontario, and Lower Huron, and in the St. Lawrence Valley. North of this small inhabited belt is one of the great forest reserves of the future reaching from near Lake Winnipeg to the mouth of the St. Lawrence and from Hudson Bay to Georgian Bay, the Ottawa River and almost to the banks of the St. Lawrence itself. Much of it is upland, it is well sprinkled with lakes and marshes, and is practically un- settled, except by a few Indians, fur trappers, and summer fish- ermen. A railroad is being built across it from the south end of Lake Winnipeg to Quebec, and branch lines have been built northward from the Canadian Pacific to reach silver and nickel mines in the newly discovered Algoma district north of Lake Superior, otherwise this great forest is yet without industry save lumbering on its southern edge. For this the Ottawa River gives a good outlet and the city of Ottawa is an important lumber market. There has already been great injury by far-reaching forest fires and the railroad increases this danger. The cold climate of the great Canadian forest area north of the land of farms gives a slow growth to the trees. A continuation of the New England forests occupies most of the Canadian territory between the St. Lawrence and the Atlantic, and lumber is an important export from both Quebec and New Brunswick, which latter greatly resemble the state of Maine in climate, topography, agriculture and in the importance which lumber and fishing assume. Forests cover much of Newfoundland, and wood products are the only plant products exported from that cold, foggy, and sparsely peopled island. Alaskan Forests. — The forests of Alaska are a continuation 440 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY of those of British Columbia. In the southern part of Alaska, especially on the rather narrow Pacific slope, there is a heavy- rainfall and a considerable area of evergreen forests. In the interior of Alaska there is also forest growth along most of the streams. This is true of nearly all the lower courses of the Yukon and its branches and the wood thus supplied has been of great aid in the operation of steam boats and hunting for gold along those streams. But little of this timber of interior Alaska is large enough for the saw mill, its rate of growth is slow and it has had serious fire injury. Fortunately small trees are as suit- able for paper making as large trees. Comparison of European and American Timber Conditions. — Europe, having four times as many people as the United States and Canada, and having been much longer occupied by a large population, has very different forest conditions. The Ameri- can settlers found a continent covered with the forest growth of centuries which they have cleared to get at the earth in desirable localities and have elsewhere cut recklessly and with no regard to the future. While a scarcity threatens the United States, Europe has long felt it in the form of high prices, and is raising timber as carefully as she raises breadstuff. Euro- pean timber consumption per capita is about one-sixth or one- seventh that of the United States, which is over 400 feet board measure per year. This European economy involves many practices unknown in new forested countries. The American people annually destroy tens of millions of barrels and packing boxes, after they have been used but once. These barrels and boxes are made of sawed lumber with all the waste this involves. In Europe packages are often used repeatedly and are usually baskets made of round or Fig. 157. — An example of French economy. An 11-pound cut flower basket for parcel post shipment made of split cane and requiring but a fraction of the material necessary for a wooden box. (U. S. Consular Bureau.) THE FOREST INDUSTRIES AND PAPER 441 split twigs of willow which is grown for the purpose. The trees are planted in wet ground and repeatedly cut off when 5 or 6 feet high so that the stubby trunk with its great load of long twigs yields repeated harvests of basket material, being man)' times as productive in this respect as American trees that are once cut to have boards made of the trunk only. Reeds re- sembling bamboos are also planted in the south of France and other European localities for package material. Frame houses have been built by hundreds of thousands all over the United States and Canada, while many people in central Germany never in all their lives saw a frame house. It is decidedly cheaper there to build one of brick, stone, or plastering put upon a wooden framework. This framework is often of unsawed poles made from small trees, rather than the sawed material from large trees as in America. Reeds from the stream bank often replace in Germany the plastering lath used in America. This house made of reeds, poles, and plaster illustrates Europe's economy of wood. In forested mountain districts the European often uses wood as shown by the well-known Swiss chalet. This form of house seems to be a mountain institution, as it exists also in southern Asia Minor and on the southern slope of the Himalayas. European Timber Markets and Exporters. — All Europe north of the Mediterranean slopes is naturally a forest country. In England, however, only 4 per cent, of the land remains in forest. The needs of tillage have not caused such complete clearance of the North Central Plain which reaches from northwestern France through north Germany and central Russia to the Urals. There are considerable areas of sand suited to little but pine forest. Holland 10 per cent, forest, Belgium 17 per cent, forest, and well-tilled little Denmark 4.8 per cent, forest have put their land to the plow and must import nearly all their timber of which but four countries in Europe have a surplus, namely, Norway, Sweden, Russia, and Austra-Hungary. Norway and Sweden are, like New England and Canada, glaciated, mountainous, and unpopulous, with a comparatively small proportion of their land good for anything but the growth of trees or forests, which assume a very important place in the foreign trade of these countries. In Norway 75 per cent, of the land is unproductive, 21.5 per cent, is in forest and but 3.5 per cent, is under cultivation, and forest 442 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY products make up over 25 per cent, of the exports. In Sweden 52.2 per cent, of the area is in forest and the proportion of the population engaged in the manufacture of wood products is nearly as great as that engaged in railroad work in the United States. As in America north of latitude 60, the forests of Canada extend east and west across the continent, so in Europe the forests of Norway and Sweden in the same latitude are continued east- ward across Finland and north Russia to the Urals and onward across Siberia to the Pacific. Hence the Baltic and White Sea ports of Russia have an important timber export. The fourth European lumber export district is western Austria containing on the mountain ranges of the eastern Alps much forest, largely oak, which yields a comparatively small quantity of export timber. FOREST AREA Percentage of area in forests Approximate area of forest lands, square miles Total area, in square miles United States New Hampshire Washington State California United Kingdom England Russia (European) France German Empire Switzerland Italy Austria Holland Denmark Norway Sweden Japanese Empire includ ing Formosa. .289 .676 .514 .20 .041 .052 .409 .18 .24 .21 .139 .346 .10 .048 .21 .522 .165 860,000 5,628 34,000 31,250 5,000 2,680 761,772 36,000 54,000 3,355 15,437 41,100 1,264 750 26,900 90,241 29,000 2,973,890 8,315 66,127 155,652 121,391 50,890 1,862,524 207,054 208,780 15,976 110,550 115,930 12,648 15,582 128,129 172,876 175,540 THE FOREST INDUSTRIES AND PAPER 443 Forestry and Timber Supply in Central and Northern Europe. — The scarcity of timber, that has caused the European nations to preserve their forests and produce lumber under a forestry- system, has usually caused the central governments themselves to go into the lumber business. Nearly all the governments own forests and care for them as part of their administration. As a result France has 18 per cent, of her area covered with forests, Germany 24 per cent, and Switzerland 21 per cent., and in populous Saxony the forest area rises to 25 per cent. During the disturbances of the French Revolution, forests were cut from some of the mountains of France so that the earth, exposed to the erosion of rainfall, was washed away to the destruction both of the mountain soils and the valleys below, upon which the rocky earth was piled. After the end of the Napoleonic Wars, steps were promptly taken to replant these areas wherever possible. The French government now owns and operates 6 million acres (over one-fourth the forest of France) at a cost of ninety- five cents and a profit of $1.75 per acre per year. 1 Within a century an area of shifting sand dunes and marshes in the south- west of France twice as large as the state of Delaware has been turned into a profitable pine forest yielding rosin, tar, pitch, turpentine, and other products. These are made from small trees which are bled to death in the process, and the trunks sent to England to serve as mine props. This thinning promotes the growth into sawlogs of the trees that remain. Scientific Forestry in Europe. — It is to Europe that we must go to see forests well managed and producing their maximum out- put. There we can learn to make our own forests permanently meet our needs. In densely peopled localities the trees are often planted as thickly as hills of corn in the United States, which is about 4 feet apart. When the trees are 1 1/2 to 2 1/2 inches in diameter they are cut for use as bean poles, hop poles, fence palings, -etc., while the later thinnings furnish poles for firewood and many other uses, including part of the framework of the plaster house. At the end of fifty or one hundred years, after many thinnings, the forest contains only big trees that can be sawn into boards and building timber, after which the forest is replanted, to go through the same cycle of harvests. Many 1 Science, Aug. 20, 1909. 444 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY Fig. 158. — German fence made of forest thinnings. Uprights are first thinning 1 1/2-2 l/2 inches in diameter, round. Cross pieces are second thinning split. Posts are larger round pieces. No saw or slab waste. Fig. 159. — Cornfield made by the Indians' method of deadening the trees and letting them stand. Slopes of Blue Ridge, Mitchell, Co., N. C. (U. S. Forest, Service.) THE FOREST INDUSTRIES AND PAPER 445 German and Swedish towns own adjacent forests which are carefully managed and furnish the towns with a large part of their revenues. There are several different systems of handling forests in Europe each suiting some particular kind of forest or condition of marketing the product. Sometimes they take out only the largest trees, thus giving the small ones a chance to grow. One fact rather discouraging for America has been shown by European experience. The large trees make wood faster than small ones, so that it takes a forest many decades to reach its period of maximum production, and the scientific forestry of west Europe does not meet the needs. Even France, Germany, and Switzerland with their relatively large percentage of well- managed forests do not supply their own needs. The importance of forests and forestry is shown in the mountains of Switzerland and the Black Forest district of south Germany, where wood carving is an important industry of the peasants in the winter season, and their wooden toys and curios are exported throughout the western world. In the beech- growing districts of the Chiltern Hills, northwest of London, 50,000 families are engaged in chair making, working mostly in their own houses, where parts of chairs are made to be assem- bled in the towns, of which High Wycombe is the most important. The Forest Policy of the United States. — The European experience of timber scarcity, soil loss, tree planting, and forestry has at last been heeded to some extent by the United States, especially since the rising price of lumber, beginning about 1900, has called the attention of all classes to the promised scarcity of timber. Our national government has begun a national forest policy by setting apart as national forests parts of the govern- ment land having trees upon it and not fit for agriculture. The map of the national forests shows that they comprise large areas in the west, being nearly five times as large as New England, and comprising about one-fifth of the standing timber of the United States. The national forests of California alone cover 43,000 square miles,, an area more than two-thirds as great as New England. Oregon and Washington together have the same amount and Idaho and Montana each have two-thirds as much — the total area of national forests in these five states being greater than that of the United Kingdom and Belgium combined. With 446 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY THE FOREST INDUSTRIES AND PAPER 447 good care our national forests can be made to produce vast amounts in future decades. Many of our states also own timber lands, but these are chiefly burnt over stump lands wh>ch have reverted to the state because no one will pay the taxes. Our forest policy is as yet in its infancy and its chief*function thus far has been the merely preventive one of fire protection, which after all is the most important thing in all forestry. Fig. 161. — "After Man the Desert." These rocks were covered with trees, roots and black soil before the forest fire. Mt. Tabor, Rutland Co., Vt. (U. S. Forest Service.) Numerous forces are promoting forestry in the United States — the high price of lumber, the sentiment for conservation of natural resources and lastly the irrigators of land and those interested in river navigation. These latter, although their interests as applied to the same stream are diametrically opposed, want water in the streams and this is promoted by the natural storage in the leaf mold beneath the mountain forest and by the earth which the gripping roots preserve upon the mountain's rocky framework. This lack of the protection to the earth, our greatest resource, has wrought fearful destruction in old lands. We may expect a steadily increasing output of lumber from 448 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY national forests chiefly by the sale of standing trees to saw-mill owners. The Forests of Mediterranean Countries. — In Europe, as in America, the coniferous trees comprise the northern forests while the oak comes from lower latitudes, growing in Spain, Italy, Hungary, and the Balkan Peninsula. In Servia, the oak trees on the high lands comprising most of that country furnish in their acorns one of the leading crops — harvested by swine. There are practically no forest resources of importance along the southern or western shores of the Mediterranean and the dry summer of Spain, Portugal, Italy, Greece, and Turkey limits tree growth to the mountains with their greater rainfall, and leaves all these countries with an insufficient supply of lumber. The houses are almost invariably built of earth materials, mostly stone and plaster and, as these countries are barren of coal, and populous with poor people, many of the inhabitants suffer keenly from cold in the winter season. Italy, having, like France, lost good lands from unwise defores- tation, has also been planting forests. The soil destruction in these European countries is as nothing in comparison to that which has occurred in north Africa, Palestine, Syria, and Asia Minor, where many districts that were fertile and populous in Roman times have been reduced to deserts through neglect, forest fires, overpasturing, and reckless tree cutting by ill- governed peoples. It is said that there are more Roman ruins west of the Jordan than in all the rest of the world together, and where there were once populous cities, there is now no support for tillage and a very considerable territory east of Antioch which was populous when conquered by Pompey and ruled by Caesar is said to have the soil so thoroughly washed away that there is nothing but bare rocks. Some of this desolation has probably been caused by the changes in the rainfall but forest denudation has been a more certain factor. Cork. — Cork, the most important forest export of south Europe, is the tough outer bark of a kind of oak growing upon the highlands of Portugal, Spain, southern France, and the mountain ranges of north Africa running through Morocco, Tunis, and Algeria. The bark can be stripped repeatedly from the trees at intervals of a few years. The chief export comes from Spain THE FOREST INDUSTRIES AND PAPER 449 and Portugal and a smaller amount from Algiers and Morocco. The cork oak grows without cultivation on rough mountainous land and it covers large areas in the northeastern part of Spain near and upon the Pyrenees Mountains in Catalonia where the best quality of cork is produced. An increasing output shows the importance of the industry in this district — 18,000 metric quintals in 1819, 36,000 in 1842, 62,000 in 1865, and over 85,000 or one-third of the Spanish product at present. It is also largely grown in the province of Andalusia and Estremaduro in south- western Spain and in the adjacent parts of Portugal. The Spanish cork exports exceed $7,000,000 and the cork forests cover 1,300 square miles (840,000 acres) in Spain and also in Portugal. In Algeria the area is 50 per cent, greater and the output is 50 per cent. less. Some cork is also grown in the south of France and the introduction of the tree into the United States shows that we have large areas suited to it if we choose to so use our land. Because of its high value and easy transport by pack animals this is an ideal crop for isolate and almost inaccess- ible locations. Japan's Forest Industries. — Japan is a country which from necessity takes excellent care of its forests. Because of the rocky nature of the country and heavy rainfall, forests cover a large portion of the country, much larger than in mountainous Switzer- land. Having a meager coal supply, the forests have up to a re- cent time furnished all the fuel as well as building material of a dense population, now 50 million people on 112,000 square miles. 1 The United Kingdom with 45 million people on 121,000 square miles has used up practically all her forests and has long been importing from the United States, Canada, Norway, Sweden, and Russia. Since her industrial Revolution Japan has opened up previously unused oak forests in her little used north island, Yezo, but this does not seem to meet her growing needs, for in recent years lumber import into Japan from the United States has begun. It is probable, however, that Asia will supply most of Japan's timber. The immediate cause of the Russo-Japanese War was a dispute over certain timber concessions along the Yalu River between Manchuria and Korea. Manchuria and 1 Excluding cold Yezo. Total Japan 147,655 sqare miles. Total Empire 175,540. 450 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY Korea have extensive forests under Japanese control, but most of them will be inaccessible until American methods of lumbering shall be introduced and new railroads built. In bamboo, lacquer, and camphor Japan has three forest products that well illustrate the genius of oriental people. The bamboo is probably the most important Japanese tree. It is planted and cared for like a field crop and fills a multitude of uses. It is said that the ingeni- ous Japanese can build with it an entire house — framework, floor, walls, and roof — while its large joints serve as buckets and other utensils in great variety, the young shoots serve as food. The lacquer, that beautiful varnish which we see on the glossy lacquer ware, is made from the sap of the lacquer tree. The camphor is a kind of resin from a tree which grows throughout most of the Japanese Empire, but the trees have been so vigor- ously cut that the greater part of the world's supply now comes from the Japanese colony of Formosa. In the effort to raise revenue camphor has been made a national monopoly and wars of extermination have been waged against the savages of east Formosa, so that the camphor gatherers could stay with safety in the forests. Camphor trees grow to great size, and a single specimen will keep a couple of men at work for a year or two, chopping it to bits, from which the camphor is soaked in boiling water and finally secured by distillation. The Japanese government regulates this monopoly with sys- tematic care, making provision for its perpetuity by adequate planting of young trees. But the monopoly totters before scien- tific agriculture and industrial chemistry. The chemists have found that there is more camphor in the leaves and twigs than in the trunk. As the leaves grow annually and can be har- vested without injury, it is manifest folly to wait fifty or a hundred years for a tree to grow and then reduce it to shavings. The average worked camphor trees are 12 feet in diameter and yield 3 tons of camphor, but are a quarter of a mile apart. Scien- tific agriculture shows the camphor tree to be hardy in many countries including Florida. The U. S. Department of Agri- culture introduced specimens into Orange County in 1881. In thirty years one of them had attained a diameter of 4 feet, was perfectly hardy and the ground beneath was a mass of camphor seedlings. The seed has been planted like oats, the young THE FOREST INDUSTRIES AND PAPER 451 plants harvested with reaper of special design and fine camphor distilled from the resulting "hay" of camphor tops. 1 Fig. 162. — Forestry. Bamboo grove in central China where temperature falls to 20° F. (Photo F. M. Meyer explorer, U. S.' Dept. Agr.) Numerous successful groves attest our ability to grow useful varieties of bamboo in the United States when we appreciate the need and profit of so doing. 1 Ref.: Rural New Yorker, 1911; Harper's Magazine, 1912; Scottish Geo- graphical Magazine, Vol. 20. 452 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY Forests in China. — The Chinese forest situation is far inferior to that of Japan. In some districts her dense population long ago used all the forests and often dug up the roots with frightful results in floods and denudation. In many sections of the country, her people raise a small amount of fuel for domestic use in the form of the stalks of a coarse millet, while considerable parts of the Empire have been irreparably injured by the cutting off of the forests and washing of rocky mountain earth over the fields in the erstwhile fertile valleys. A scientific forest policy is undoubtedly one of the most pressing needs of the new govern- ment, and one of the most difficult for it to bring about. Mean-, while the new era of railways will bring much lumber from the less populous parts of the Chinese highlands, especially to the south of the Yangtse. At the present time there is a consider-' able and growing import of lumber from the United States. The Siberian Forest. — As Canada holds a great forest reserve for America, so the corresponding parts of east Asia promise to serve that continent. Much of the Amur River basin is useless for agriculture as we now know it, but, like upper New England, Newfoundland, and Quebec, good for forests. A recent estimate (U. S. Con. Rep., Feb. 15, 1911) places the forest area of the Amur basin alone at 20 per cent, or 400,000 square miles, an area much greater than all the forests of west Europe. This and other forests of northeast Asia are the real hope of the Mongolian people for a nearby timber supply. In Siberia west of Lake Baikal the forest belt narrows but it reaches clear over to the Urals, an area of vast but unknown extent situated in admirable relationship to the agricultural belt to the south of it. , The Tropic Forest and Its Products. — The torrid zone contains a larger area of forest than does the temperate zone. Tropic woods are in great variety and many are of surprising beauty! and hardness, but the forests upon the whole are very much less valuable than those of the cooler north with its less favorablet. conditions -for the growth of vegetation. The relative useless-' ness of the tropical forests is due to poor quality and inaccessi- bility. Many trees of the tropic forests are crooked and Useless for lumber. They are often worthlessly soft and weak, and the good ones are almost always mingled with many other species. This mixture of species is a striking and important contrast to THE FOREST INDUSTRIES AND PAPER '453 .the practically solid stand that exists in. the pine or spruce forests of Maine, the fir of Washington, the cypress of Louisiana, Fia. 163. — Tropical forest in southern Mexico. Good logs are scarce and industry quails before the task of extricating them. (W. L. Tower.) or .the oak of West Virginia. Those who gather tropic logs usually find but one tree of a kind in a place, surrounded by hundreds of useless specimens of other varieties. To make 454 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY matters worse, the heavy rainfall and the heat produce such a wealth of bushes, small trees, and vines that a man can only- force his way through by first cutting a path. Thus the machete, a long-handled knife, is the most universal tool possessed by the inhabitants of many tropical countries. With it they cut paths through the forest in which each tree is often bound by creepers to a dozen others so that the felling of one tree is a most difficult process. As the jungle is often swampy, it is evident that a wagon can rarely enter to carry logs because the wheels would sink into the soft earth even if roadways could be cut. The nearest approach to the northern blessing of snow with its sled transportation is the annual floods of the rainy season, which permit the floating out of those logs which grow on overflowed land and are light enough to float. Those that are heavier than water, and most of the tropical cabinet woods with their great strength and beauty are heavier than water, must rot where they grow, or be dragged out at great expense. Consequently, the chief timbers exported from the tropics are the buoyant mahogany and cedar, of which the United States imported $3,000,000 worth in 1911, while all other cabinet woods imported were not one-tenth as valuable. One vast belt of solid green girdles the earth wherever the land emerges from the equatorial sea, yet this equatorial forest has thus far been of less use to man than if it were a desert with an occasional oasis. The Philippine Forests, an Example. — The botanists tell us that more than a hundred species of useful woods are to be found in the Philippine Islands, which are largely covered with forests belonging to the United States Government. It is not the number of species, but the goodness and cheapness which makes them valuable. Ten species of trees, namely, yellow pine, Douglas fir, white pine, hemlock, western pine, spruce, cypress, the oak, and maple, have furnished 95 per cent, of American timber and made the United States the greatest timber producer and exporter in the world. Despite their riches in forest area and number of varieties the Philippine Islands, like many other tropic countries, are tree poor, and buy timber from the United States rather than supply us with it. The Woods Exported from the Tropics. — Mahogany, the most important wood exported from the tropics, is hard, strong, THE FOREST INDUSTRIES AND PAPER 455 taking a beautiful finish, and is much prized for furniture and interior work. It is light enough to float and valuable enough to be hauled out of some locations where there are no floods to float it. The best mahogany is shipped from the Island of Hayti, and an inferior product comes from British Honduras and Cuba. Like other tropical trees, the mahogany grows singly here and there in the forest. The mahogany hunter, climbing one tree, looks across the forest to locate the next mahogany tree towering above the level green, and then cuts his way to it. African mahogany, a slightly different species, is shipped in large quantities from coast ports between Senegambia and Kamerun in west Africa. The chief market for this wood is Liverpool, whither it is shipped in great logs and forwarded to the finer wood-working establishments of Europe and the United States. Cedar, the second tropical wood in commercial import- ance, exists in many varieties, exported chiefly from the West Indian Islands, and the Gulf coasts of Mexico and Central America. One of the chief uses for this soft light wood is the making of cigar boxes and pencils. The third of the tropic woods is the teak, a wood which resembles oak in its physical characteristics, but is much more valuable than oak for ship building because, unlike oak, it contains an oily substance which acts as a preservative, and will not corrode iron as does the oak. It grows in the forests of southeastern Asia from India to China and has been planted for timber purposes in Java. The chief supply of commerce comes from Burmah where it is floated down the Irrawadi River to Rangon, the Salween to Moulmein, and from Siam where the Menam River floats the valuable logs down to Bangkok, and Paknampo for shipment. As Britain is the greatest ship-building nation in the world, she imports most of the teak. Minor Products of the Tropic Forest. — The tropic forest is more important for its minor products such as rattans and gums than for its major product of wood. Of these minor products the greatest, rubber, greater in value than all the other products of the tropic forest combined, is left for another chapter. Closely allied to it from the botanical standpoint are many other gums which are produced from the dried sap of trees. The well-known "gum arabic" so commonly used as office paste has the useful 456 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY quality of being soluble in water and is plucked from trees by natives throughout the half-forested belt that lies between the jungle and the desert and reaches across Africa from Senegal to Abyssinia. It is also shipped from Somaliland, India, Australia, and Cape Colony. In Kordofan there are plantations of trees for the production of this gum. Gums of another class known as copals are with difficulty soluble and therefore serve as the basis of varnish used for vehicles. They are produced by many trees, one, the Kauri gum of New Zealand, is extra-tropical, being found in a fossil con- dition covered by the surface earth where it has dropped from . Kauri trees of past ages. It has been diligently dug for the last sixty years and is still being found, and small quantities are pro- duced by the living forest. Other copals are dug from the earth in Madagascar, Zanzibar, and adjacent Africa, but the greatest center of shipment for these gums is Singapore, the Malay me- tropolis. Here also is gathered for shipment a large proportion of the world's rattan, the jointed stem of a creeping vine that runs for hundreds of feet through the tropic tree tops and helps to bind them together in the jungle mass. Properly split it makes the cane seats of chairs. Nuts make an entirely different class of forest product and one of indefinite expansion. From Para, Brazil, come the long dark Brazil nuts (or butter nuts) with their triangle cross-section and rich white meat. They could apparently be produced, in indefinite quantities if desired. From Ecuador and Col-, ombia several thousand tons of palm nuts (Corozo or ivory/ nuts) are annually exported to European and American button; factories. This valuable nut, sometimes as large as a hen's egg, is the product of a palm that grows wild in most locations, some?-; times yields thirty pounds of nuts and lives for fifty or one. hundred years. The market has of late been partially supplied by somewhat similar nuts from Italian Eritrea (on the Red Sea), i and the Soudan. ■ - -■"' Tropic Imports of Temperate Zone Woods.— It is true that some tropical timbers have great hardness, strength, durability, and' beauty, but many of them are so hard that tools will scarcely work: them. Furthermore, their inaccessibility makes them, as useless? as the -millions of tons of excellent building stone which lie' THE FOREST INDUSTRIES AND PAPER ; 457 ' valueless in the heart of every mountain region far from growing cities. Despite the riches of millions of square miles of jungle and forest lands, American lumber is imported by practically every tropical country in America and Africa, and occasional shipments go even to Asia and the East Indies. The rubber mer- chants of Para or Manaos on the Amazon, desiring to build a warehouse, prefer the soft woods of the United States, into which they can easily drive a nail, to the beautiful but hard cabinet woods in the forest that actually encroaches upon their building lots. This choice explains our lumber trade to the forest-bowered parts of Brazil, the Guianas, Venezuela, Colombia, Central America, and Ecuador. In Peru the commercial centers along the Pacific are located in a desert three or four hundred miles away from the Peruvian forests on the Amazonian low plains accessible only by the pack train across the snow-clad passes of the Andes. In Bolivia, the same mountains and desert shut off the possibility of native lumber. Chile, which is in the temperate zone, has coniferous forests in her rainy, cold, southern provinces, but facilities for getting out logs and sawing lumber are so much better in the states of Washington and Oregon that most of the lumber for treeless north Chile comes from that source rather than the south temperate forests. The Argentine Republic, the most commercially progressive of all the South American countries, has large sub-tropical and tropic forests in her north- eastern territories where the jungle conditions prevail. But her centers of population are in the temperate zone and she is the largest of all South American lumber importers. Her extensive temperate-zone forests at the base of the Andes in Patagonia are too distant from ports and transport facilities to be developed as yet. The form of the two Americas makes great contrast in lumber resources. The large forests of the north temperate zone are in the high latitude where the areas are great. In these lati- tudes of good timber South America tapers to a point and suffers from aridity. The Forests and Forest Imports of the South Temperate Zone. — The south temperate zone, so important in the produc- tion of meat, wool, mohair, and grain, is strangely lacking in exports of lumber. Most of the south temperate zone is in the latitude of Spain and New Mexico and is too dry for good forests, 458 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY the only important exceptions being the small and rough points of South America (in part), of New Zealand, and the island of Tasmania. This explains the fact that South Africa and Aus- tralia, like temperate South America, are importers of lumber from the United States and Sweden, although certain small sections in southwestern Australia produce two species of export wood. They are members of the Eucalyptus family, the karri and jarri, which, through their hardness and durability in the ground, are well suited for wooden pavements and are exported to European cities for that purpose. The northern island of New Zealand has some splendid forests of the well-known gum-yielding kauri, a tree furnishing logs 8 to 10 feet in diameter and 100 feet long. New Zealand's lumber export, though small, is growing. Naval Stores and Tanbark. — Important among the many minor industries of the forest is the preparation of naval stores, the name applied to turpentine and resin, products of the sap of certain pine trees, having the same relation to the tree as the gums of the tropic forest. The resin is the residue remaining when turpentine has been distilled from pine sap. The chief center of production is in the long-leaf pine forests of the south- eastern United States; Charleston, Savannah, Pensacola, and Mobile being important points for the shipment of these com- modities, with Fernandina, Florida, the greatest of them all. They are also shipped in small quantities from the pine forests in the sandy plain of southwestern France near the Bay of Biscay. The manufacture of naval stores, as carried on in the southern United States, is very injurious to the forests. Great wounds are made in the base of the tree from which in a few years it bleeds to death. During the process it is exposed to easy destruction by fire, and is easily overturned by wind storms. Inasmuch as the slabs which are burned or wasted around many southern saw mills also contain large quantities of sap, as do the small branches and tops which are left in the woods, it is likely that we will have more economic methods of gathering naval stores. Some proc- esses already discovered take all this refuse wood and soak from it the sap for distillation and leave the pulp thus purified for the making of paper. Another industry which has caused great destruction of Ameri- can forests is the gathering of bark for tanning. The chief THE FOREST INDUSTRIES AND PAPER 459 bark trees are the hemlock and certain species of oak growing from Pennsylvania southward on both slopes of the Appalachians where millions of good trees have been cut down for their tan- bark alone, the trunks being allowed to rot. In 1909 the hemlock bark output was 700,000 tons and oak about half as much. This shameful waste of logs still goes on to some extent in the eastern country and also in California, where in the Coast Range there is a Fig. 164. — One of our crimes against posterity is this Georgia saw mill slab fire that burned for 25 years without stopping. (U. S. Forest Service.) considerable collection of tanbark from one of the western oaks that grows among the redwoods. The tanbark district of Wis- consin and Michigan (chiefly hemlock) is second to the Appa- lachian in output. Wood Manufactures. — The manufacture of the heavy log into rough lumber naturally clings to the forest, although special conditions cause some export of logs, especially of such high quality woods as mahogany and walnut. The further manu- facture of lumber, usually carried on in planing mills, tends to concentrate near the market in or near centers where building 460- INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY operations are largely carried on. This industry tends to cling ' to the market because the rough lumber is so much more easily moved and stored than the easily injured dressed plank or the sash, doors, blinds, and special shapes that the planing mill turns out. The same factors tend to locate furniture manufacture in great centers of consumption, especially in. timber-importing countries. , Thus London is both market for product and center for raw material because the wood (imported) is unloaded there from ship,- In the United States the frontier lumber town has raw material and lower living cost to offset the market advantage, and very low freight rates to reach the market, so we have had a great furniture industry developed in Grand Rapids and other towns of the Lower Peninsula of Michigan, .and more recently the same industry is rapidly increasing in North Carolina. Paper. — In 1870 it would have seemed preposterous to place a discussion of the paper industry in a chapter dealing with forests and forest industries, but thiS is an industry which changes in raw material have transformed. Some material for the easy recording of thought is important alike in industry, commerce, and civilization. [ The inhabitants of Babylon, Nineveh and other cities of Mesopotamia wrote on clay tablets and baked them, making the clumsiest but most enduring, of all books. The -Egyptians made papyrus to closely resembKpfiiaper by carefully pasting together the pith of a sedge- like reed of the Nile bank, which was carefully cultivated on large areas where now corn, cotton, and rice are grown. The wasps and hornets have for unknown seons made real paper by the process now followed by man — macerating wet vegetable fiber and spreading it out thin to dry. The Chinese invented paper making. The art spread thence through central Asia to the Arabs, was brought by them to Spain, and became established in England in 1588. Without it the printing press would have been of little value, for the only alternative was parchment, made of sheepskins, much more durable than paper, but too expensive. What Paper is and How it is Made. — Paper is made of matted fibers, mostly vegetable^ Nearly all plants have fiber in them, and as indefinite numbers of vegetable materials will make paper, the actual choice of materials is decided by the relative quality - THE FOREST INDUSTRIES AND PAPER 461 and cheapness. For two or three centuries cotton and linen rags and- also woolen rags were the chief dependence because they were a by-product of civilization and, until the middle of the nineteenth century, their quantity sufficed. In 1857 an Englishman invented a process of making paper from a tough grass called esparto, which grows well on arid, sandy, and rocky land and is found wild over large areas in the Barbary States of north Africa and in Spain, growing with especial luxuriance in damper localities near the sea. In less than thirty years after its introduction, it was much more important in English paper- making than rags, which were also imported in large quantities from the continent. Changes follow each other quickly in modern manufacture, and by 1901 rags had almost ceased to be imported into Great Britain, and the esparto was far outranked by the predominating wood pulp, which is now making an ever- increasing part of the world's paper. Various other fibers are used to a small extent, such as the bark of the baobab tree, which with long, strong fibers makes the exceedingly fine paper used for bank notes. The cotton stalk is full of fibers and some in- ventors are promising us that it will soon be an important material for paper. Paper is made by grinding up the rags, grass, or wood until the fibers are almost microscopic in size. They float in water which is kept at a uniform soupy thickness by stirring. For centuries paper making was a handicraft carried on by the paper maker and his family, who dipped sieves into vats of floating fiber and carefully lifted out upon the wire gauze enough fiber to produce a sheet of paper when properly dried. In the paper machine a stream of water uniformly charged with the fibers flows over thin sieves, leaving the fiber, which is transferred to rollers, which press the ever-hardening sheet of paper, squeeze out the water, and lastly run it between hot rollers which dry it so that it emerges at the other end of the rolls, 50 or 100 feet away, a finished roll of paper. Some machines turn out more than 500 feet per minute and send it away from the factory in sheets miles in length wound upon spools into rolls 3 or 4 feet in diam- eter. Single machines make as much as 50 tons per day. If the paper is to be for writing purposes the spaces between the fibers are closed by a process called sizing, which fills up the pores with 462 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY material chiefly composed of china clay, resin, alum, and talc, a process that greatly adds to the weight of the paper. Clear water is a very important consideration because the dirt of the water can adhere to the floating fibers and thus pass into the paper. In a country like England which imports its raw material and has many of its streams impure from sewage and factory refuse, clear streams are important in locating paper factories. For this reason British paper mills are chiefly located on the slopes of the central mountain range in Lancashire and Derby- shire, and in Scotland where the streams are clear. While the expensive hand method of paper making prevailed, its price was high, and demand was small. Paper machines have greatly cheapened paper, thus greatly increasing its possible uses, and the resulting rapid increase of consumption has in turn called for new raw materials. Paper from Wood. — The manufacture of paper from wood pulp was begun in the United States in 1867, and tree trunks now make the greater part of the world's paper. The cheapness of this material greatly reduced the price and depressed the trade in esparto grass, which had been a staple export of many of the Arab tribes of north Africa. The resultant hard times produced discontent which, as is commonly the case, was blamed upon the Government, and the French rulers of Algiers had serious trouble with the tribesmen who found themselves poverty stricken through the loss that followed the decline in the esparto trade. Before the pulp era, paper making had been like many other manu- factures a follower of cities and population. Our early paper mills had, like our woolen mills, been clustered along the small streams in the vicinity of centers of population. Some of the best paper in the United States was made early in the nineteenth century along country creeks near Philadelphia. The great increase in the use of wood pulp for paper in the United States since 1890 has caused the transfer of the center of the paper industry to the forest districts of the New York and New England highlands. The spruce wood originally so common in this region furnishes three-fifths of the wood pulp in this country and two-thirds of the paper mills of the country use water-power because it is the cheapest source for the great amount of energy required to grind up the wood into pulp. So important THE FOREST INDUSTRIES AND PAPER 463 is this relationship of water-power to paper that over 60 per cent, of the water-power utilization in the United States is in the paper mills. The combination of water-power and spruce logs makes the states of northern New England and New York the greatest paper-manufacturing district in the United States. Massachusetts is also an important paper state because it has excellent water and water-power, and it is near enough to get some of the pulp 1 from the northern forests, it has a skilled labor supply, and is also near the centers of population and of import for the supply of rags. This state alone makes two-fifths of the rag paper in this country and turns out a large proportion of fine writing papers, for the manufacture of which Holyoke on the Falls of the Connecticut with twenty-four paper mills, is the most specialized center in the United States. Pennsylvania, being a manufacturing region near the ports of import, also com- bines the rag paper with the wood pulp paper manufacturing for which her mountains supply the raw material. Two Kinds of Wood Pulp Paper. — Wood pulp paper is of two varieties, the cheapest being simply ground wood which makes the flimsy and perishable newspaper. The better and more expensive kinds have the fibers loosened and the quality improved by the action of chemicals producing "sulphite" or "soda" pulp. These chemicals are put into tanks containing hundreds of tons of chips from which the chemical liquors, heated by steam, digest the cellular structure, leaving the fibrous parts which thus make a stronger paper. The better grades or book papers are made largely of poplar wood, which has a longer fiber, while the news- paper is practically all made of spruce. Two-thirds of the news- paper comes from the Adirondack region of New York and New England highlands, while three-fourths of the remainder is made on the southern edge of the upper lake forests in Wisconsin. Poplar (the wood of the tulip tree), being largely an Appalachian wood, supplies scattering mills from New York to Carolina. Paper Industry Leads to Forestry. — A paper mill with its water wheel, grinding machines, digesting tanks, and large rolls is expensive and the impossibility of moving it makes it necessary 1 It is common practice in both America and Europe for one mill to make the pulp which is shipped great distances to become the raw material for another mill. 464 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY that a paper company shall be sure bf its wood supply. To do this they must often own the land, and, since they cannot flit from tract to tract after the manner of lumber manufacturers, some paper companies have become the foremost foresters in the United States, owning large areas of spruce land which they care for and cut systematically. As their enterprises are often located in the deep forest, the companies must sometimes even build and own the towns in which the people live who make their paper. A good example of this is afforded by the town of Millinocket, Maine, where the largest paper mill in the world, turning out 250 tons of paper per day, was built far in the forest beside a great waterfall. A special railroad was built to it, and the town built around it. The plant cost $25,000,000 or $350 per ton for the annual output — an excellent evidence of the im- possibility of moving and the necessity for conservation of wood supply. 1 The paper industry is undergoing rapid change in the source of its raw material. For a time the pulp supply was limited to spruce, then poplar and hemlock came into use and now it has been demonstrated experimentally that practically all of our native woods can be used. It becomes then a question of in- dustrial adjustment. Already twenty species including pine, chestnut, and cottonwood are contributing to the national con- sumption of 4 million cords (1910) per year. Slabs and mill waste are also being utilized and there will soon be no excuse for the frightful wood waste of the past. The rival woods have cut in so rapidly on spruce that its percentage of the total fell from 68 in 1901 to 58 in 1910. Paper from Straw. — In the eastern part of the wheat belt in Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois there is a considerable paper industry using straw, chiefly wheat straw, which makes cheap wrapping paper and strawboard, the so-called pasteboard of common use. This is an industry which might easily move west and northwest with the moving wheat fields. It has already declined in New York. Our Commerce in Paper. — No other people in the world use so much paper as the people of the United States with their large consumption of newspapers, magazines and books, and 1 Cassier's Magazine, Vol. 20, p. 420. THE FOREST INDUSTRIES AND PAPER 465 advertising. We import rags from Europe by the hundreds of millions of pounds, and from Canada a quarter of a million tons of wood pulp, about equalling in value ($5,000,000) the European rags. One of the surprises of commerce is the import by the United States of a quarter of a million tons of wood pulp from Europe, chiefly Norway and Sweden. Despite our large manu- factures our import of high-grade paper from Europe, especially from Germany, is about as valuable as our export of newspaper and book paper, which we send to the United Kingdom and to almost all countries of Europe, Central and South America. Paper Industry in Europe. — England, with no forests for pulp wood, is an importer of both wood pulp and paper, while all im- portant countries of the continent are paper exporters except Spain and Russia. Spain's importation of paper is an excellent illustration of the industrial backwardness of that country, for she exports thousands of tons of bulky esparto grass to be made into paper in England and Germany, and then brought back; again to Spain. Germany, located in the center of Europe, where 400 million people are daily converting clothing into rags,, has the best raw material supply in the world for the manufacture of fine rag paper, of which she is the greatest exporter, sending it into every country in the world. Sweden and Norway, with their large proportion of forests and mountain streams to furnish material and water-power, export newspaper and wood pulp to England and the other paper-manufacturing countries of Europe. Paper In China and Japan. — The Mongolians, who first invented paper, still make an excellent quality and a large quantity of it. The cheap paper is made of rice straw, while the so-called fine '.'rice" paper of commerce the Chinese manufacture from the, pith of a plant grown in Formosa. It is in Japan that we see paper rendering its greatest service. The people of the empire, have the highest per capita consumption of daily newspapers in the world, and, having a large forest area and a small arable area, they are compelled to make paper fill uses supplied in other countries by the products of agriculture. Thick, tough papers are substitutes for leathers, which they cannot produce at home owing to their lack of cattle. A very strong and durable paper is made from seaweed, and the Udo, a bush, also called paper 466 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY mulberry, or paper plant, is grown on many Japanese hillsides for the very strong paper that can be made from its bark and used for grain sacks, for waterproof tarpaulins, and even for walls of houses. Paper is an excellent non-conductor of heat, and the native Japanese house, adjusted to the needs of a country that is often visited by earthquakes, is made earthquake proof by having a bamboo framework and paper walls. The Japanese paper umbrella and lantern are well known among us, and the Japanese have long used paper napkins and paper pocket hand- kerchiefs. Efforts at introducing the Japanese paper plant into southern United States have succeeded, but it has not yet become the basis of an industry because of our great supplies of wood pulp and other paper and fabric materials. While we have not succeeded yet in establishing a paper industry on the Japanese model, the Japanese have copied ours. A new $4,000,000 pulp paper mill has recently been started at Tomakawai in the forested North Island of Japan. It is the largest enterprise of the kind in the Orient, is located on the Pacific Ocean, develops 15,000 horse- power from Lake Shikatsu 800 feet above, and its daily output of 70 tons supplies 50 per cent, of the consumption of the empire. All of the electric machinery and 97 per cent, of the paper machin- ery came from the United States, most of the paper machinery being made at Watertown, N. Y., in the midst of the Adirondack paper district. The Japanese method is shown in that one foreigner only was employed, an American to superintend the erection of the machinery. The Paper Industry of the Future. — This Japanese paper mill in northern Japan, like that at Millinocket in the woods of Maine, recent new ones on the north shore of the Gulf of St. Lawrence, and especially a large mill owned by a London Publishing syn- dicate in unagricultural Newfoundland — all these are suggestive of the ultimate service of the far northern country that will produce trees but not, under present conditions, any adequate food supply. In the meantime cheap vegetable fibers of all kinds and from all climes are likely to enter more and more into the making of paper for which there is every prospect of greatly increased use. THE FOREST INDUSTRIES AND PAPER 467 REFERENCES See General References The Bureau of Forestry publishes a vast amount of material under many titles, of which the constantly changing list may be had upon application. Two suggestive titles from this list are: (a) Zon, Raphael. Forest Resources of the World. (b) R. Kellog, S. The Timber Supply of the United States. Bureau of Plant Industry. Division of Foreign Seed and Plant. Intro- duction has a suggestive list of bulletins, for example, one on Bamboo in the United States, another on the Udo, or Japanese Paper Plant. "American Forestry" (Washington), a monthly, gives valuable current information. Zon, Raphael, and Clapp, E. H. Cutting Timber on the National Forests and Providing for a Future Supply. Yearbook, U. S. Dept. Agr., 1907. Hall, Wm. L. Progress in Saving Forest Waste. Yearbook, U. S. Dept. Agr., 1910. Hood, S. C, and True, R. H. Camphor Cultivation in the United States. Yearbook, U. S. Dept. Agr., 1910. Brand, Chas. J. The Utilization of Crop Plants in Paper Making. Year- book, U. S. Dept. Agr., 1910. Veitch, F. P. Suitable Paper for Permanent Records. Yearbook, U. S. Dept. Agr., 1910. CHAPTER XII FIBERS, TEXTILES, AND CLOTHING The clothing of mankind is the product of wide-reaching world industries, which, with the production of the raw materials, touch in varying degrees all countries. The United States, with its preponderance in cotton production, is the greatest factor in the production of raw material for the world's clothing. The United Kingdom has a similar leadership in the textile manufactures, one-seventh of her workers being employed with textiles and clothing, while in the United States but one-sixteenth are so employed. If the figures for the production of raw mate- rials could be added it is likely that the totals would be nearly equal in the two countries. The discoveries that fibers could be twisted into thread and the thread made into fabric were of primeval antiquity, world- wide distribution, and absolute necessity before men in great numbers could occupy frosty lands. A multitude of fibers contribute to man's clothing, but cotton is much the most impor- tant. In 1911 its closest rival, wool, was used in the United States to the extent of 277 million pounds (scoured). The raw cotton consumption was 3,749 million pounds, over thirteen times as much. i. THE SUPPLY OF RAW COTTON The Universal Use of Cotton. — It is probable that few readers of this book ever saw a person into whose clothing cotton did not enter in some part, for it is alike the raiment of princes and of the savages who in the first upward steps in human progress clothe themselves with a breech cloth. Cotton was in extensive and general use in India as much as twenty-seven centuries ago. Unlike most other important plants, its distribution throughout the part of the world suited to it took place at a very early time, probably by natural means, 468 FIBERS, TEXTILES, AND CLOTHING 46$ for Columbus and the early discoverers found it in general use in the West Indies and from Brazil to Mexico, in which latter country its use as clothing material was common. Likewise, Captain Cook in his discovery of the Pacific Islands found it on many of the larger land areas in that part of the world. Although generally known, cotton was until the end of the eighteenth century one of the most expensive of fibers, because hand labor was the only method of separating the fiber from the seed, a fact which made it more expensive than wool and linen and caused it to be relatively more expensive than silk is now. In that day "cottons" was the name of a fabric made of wool in imitation of cotton — a process now so diligently reversed. The poor man of 1790 had to choose between wool, linen, and leather, and this last material, in the form of workmen's clothing, played a much more important part than now in man's raiment. Revolution through the Cotton Gin. — In the year 1793, the cotton gin started a revolution in the cotton industry and through it changed the course of American history. 1 Before this time cotton production required a most abundant supply of cheap labor to pick out the seeds from the fiber, a day's work resulting in from 1 to 2 pounds of cotton. The cotton gin separates the seeds by a very simple mechanical device in which slowly revolving saw teeth catch the fibers, pull them through a comb, through which the seeds cannot follow. This easy ginning so reduced the price of cotton that it descended from luxury to necessity and a great industry sprang up. Between 1790 and 1890 the import of raw cotton into Great Britain increased 7,000 fold. The greatly reduced price and increased demands shifted the deciding factor of production from cheap labor to cheap land. In 1790 three-fourths of the British import was from the West Indies and 8 per cent, was from Brazil, where populous coast settlements grew and seeded it by hand. By 1890 its production in the West Indies had changed but little and was therefore a negligible factor. Brazil's share had, while greatly increased, dropped from 8 to 2 3/4 per cent., while the United States, with cheap and fertile land, was supply- ing over three-fourths of the entire world's supply, because 1 The influence of cotton on slavery and of slavery on the history of the. United States is an interesting bit of the economic explanation of history. 470 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY the gin and tillage machinery had transferred it from the class of garden and hand labor crops, to the class of machine-grown field crops. The year before the invention of the cotton gin the American crop was so insignificant that the United States had in a treaty willingly promised to export no cotton to Great Britain, but within less than forty years we were sending Britain over two-thirds of her imports. So sudden was this change that, while we were cotton importers in the half decade 1790-95, Fig. 165. — The branching habit of the cotton plant and its uneven ripening has long, baffled the inventors of picking machines. (U. S. Dept. Agr.) we exported nearly half of our crop during the next five years and by 1806-10, a proportion which we have usually maintained and often exceeded for a century. During the century following the invention of the gin, cotton has become the well-nigh universal clothing. It has almost entirely replaced linen, is competing with wool in the soft and warm flannelettes and canton flannel, and it is also very generally mixed with wool in the production of cloth to which it adds cheapness and in some cases durability. Other cotton fabrics FIBERS, TEXTILES, AND CLOTHING 471 such as sateen greatly resemble silk, while mercerized cotton is often sold as silk, so that cotton is replacing this fiber also. Natural Cotton Regions. — Cotton is a woolly fiber attached to the seeds of a shrubby plant and contained in a pod or ball, which at ripening time opens so that the white fiber protrudes in a mass nearly as large as a small apple. Although tropical and sub-tropical, the plant will grow almost everywhere through- out the world between 40° north and 30° south. Owing to combinations of geographical and industrial conditions, it is exported as yet from few and comparatively small areas and thus in its distribution throughout the entire world, it gives rise to a great commerce. The northward growth of cotton is limited by the requirement of about seven months of frost-free weather. It also heeds a good summer rainfall without too great an excess of rain, a uniformly warm summer without too ex- cessive heat, and bright sunshine. A frost-free season from April 1 to Nov. 1 is thus a necessity unless the plants are started under glass. Cotton is like many other useful plants in that it tends to be more productive toward its northern limit. The unmitigated heat and moisture of some tropic locations cause the plant to flourish for years, but the gradual cooling of the early autumn or the drying of arid localities suggests death to the plant and drives it to seed and fiber production. It thus happens that this tropic plant yields most of its harvests under the threat of death by northern frost or arid thirst, while the vast reaches of green humid equatorial lands are cotton importers. Thus Mexico, with several thousand miles of tropic coast lines, grows three-fourths of its small cotton crop by irrigation in the northern interior. Beginning of Cotton Growing in United States. — The cotton gin in co-operation with the negro labor of the southern United States caused cotton to become the leading article of American trade for many decades during which it was frequently declared that "cotton is King." 1 Slavery, which had become unprofitable for practically all industries other than rice growing in the swamps 1 While it is not now so relatively conspicuous or so politically dominant, its export is more valuable than ever, having reached 585 million dollars in 1911, while meat and dairy products were 150 million and flour 50 million. 472 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY of South Carolina and Georgia, became profitable in the growth of cotton after the invention of the cotton gin and again assumed importance in the United States. The great abundance of cheap land in the southern states made easy the growth of cotton by- slaves under plantation methods. Under this system of one crop, extensive agriculture, it was the common practice to clear up a pine forest, raise a few crops of cotton and corn, abandon the field, and clear up more land, the ground being cleared in the winter time by slaves who cared for the crop in the summer and picked the fiber in the autumn. At the present time the agri- culture of the South is greatly limited and our soil resources need- lessly diminished by a too great continuance of this one crop system. The Possible Area In United States. — It is estimated that '700,000 square miles of the southern part of the United States has the climate suitable for cotton. Owing to the ease of injury by too much rain and cloudy weather the coast districts of South Atlantic States are not so well fitted as the districts further inland where the greatest centers of cotton production are found. The small proportion of cotton states actually in cotton at one time shows how the one-crop system still finds room and also shows great possibilities of increased production. In 1879, 20,000 square miles were in cotton. This was practically doubled in 1898, but by 1911 it had not reached one-fifteenth of the total 700,000 square miles of possible cotton land. It is thus evident that the cotton output can be increased several fold and other crops can also be largely grown in the same belt. Method of Growing. — The cotton seeds, about the size of a small pea, are planted thickly in rows in March and April. As soon as the plants are established they are thinned with hoes, after which frequent cultivations with the plow or cultivator are needed to keep down the weeds. During the growing season, the plant attains a height of from 4 to 5 feet, produces a beautiful blossom followed by a green pod, which later bursts open showing the bunch of white fiber. The picking of this fiber, which has thus far baffled all machin- ery, must be done by hand. Several pickings are necessary (usually four), beginning in August and extending through the autumn and sometimes even into the mid-winter months if the FIBERS, TEXTILES, AND CLOTHING 473 winds and storms have not beaten it into the ground. The large amount of work involved makes picking the limiting factor in cotton growing and the range in prices of forty cents to $1.00 per hundred pounds shows the desire of planters to get the crop harvested. Owing to the light nature of the work, much of it is done by negro women and children. The cotton-growing industry has been seriously threatened by an insect, the cotton boll weevil. It came to us apparently from Mexico and destroys the crop by tunneling through the unopened boll and blasting it. The damage has amounted to scores of millions of dollars, but it will probably be a great blessing by giving a diversified agriculture to the South. 1 The ease with which the grower's cotton crop, indefinitely keeping, easily handled and king of money crops, could be mortgaged and the great difficulty of mortgaging any other crop were factors in the establishment of the great crop-mortgage system in the South after the Civil war. This mortgage system still continues to some extent and has been an important factor in the continuance of a one-crop agri- culture in which very few supply crops are grown, so that even the 1 Mr. Bradford Knapp, writing of the Farmer's Demonstration Work of the U. S. Department of Agriculture (Year-book, Department of Agriculture, 1911) in connection with the outbreak of the boll weevil in Texas in 1904, says: "As long as the merchant and banker refused credit it was necessary to show the farmer how to produce the food necessary for his own family and how he could live at home on the products of his own farm and still produce cotton. He was instructed by agents in the raising of corn and was urged to plant a home garden. They raised cotton in spite of the weevil; at the same time they raised much more corn under the instructions of the agents than they had ever been able to raise before. Diversification be- came one of the principal means advocated for meeting the ravages of the weevil and has constantly been urged by the agents engaged in this work from the very beginning. The certainty that the weevil would infest all cotton-growing sections of the South made it apparent that the more rapidly the cotton farmer could be brought to diversify the better would he be prepared to meet the weevil. "Cotton was the sole cash crop and was generally raised on what is known as the advance system. The cotton planter or small farmer obtained credit with his banker or merchant for the necessary provisions and supplies to make the crop and generally gave some sort of mortgage upon the crop and often upon his team and tools. At the end of the year the merchant or banker took the crop, sold it, paid the indebtedness for advances, and re- turned the balance, if any, to the farmer. When the weevil appeared and destroyed the crop, merchants and bankers refused to make advances, and the farmer found himself without credit, without food, and without money. The result of this condition was a financial and agricultural panic. Labor left the country, farms were abandoned, stores closed, and disaster was apparent everywhere." 474 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY hay eaten by the mule is often imported in bales from north of the Ohio or west of the Mississippi. The man who advances the money to the cotton grower does not encourage the growth of other crops, nor the development of a more rational agriculture, because no other crop is so easily mortgaged, so easily kept or so readily salable as cotton. Thus the South, which has excellent natural facilities for the development of live-stock industries and the growth of forage crops, continues to import mules and hay and corn, butter, cheese, and pork, which it might produce as cheaply as any other part of the world. 50-150 150-250 250-350 over 350 Less than 50 lbs. Fig. 166. — United States cotton production in pounds per capita by states, three-year average, 1909-11. (U. S. Dept. Agr.) Pop. 1910. Important Cotton Districts. — Cotton is grown in every county and almost every township (often called district in the South) from Norfolk, Va., to Austin, Texas, and up the Mississippi to Memphis, but three localities with unusual soils stand out con- spicuously. One is the rich, black prairie of Texas, another the so-called Mississippi "bottoms," a term chiefly applied to the alluvial land to the east of the Mississippi River between Mem- phis and Vicksburg, which, like similar land in the flood plain of this river, is occasionally fertilized by the mud deposited when the river overflows its banks and floods the whole region. FIBERS, TEXTILES, AND CLOTHING 475 The third district in which the natural fertility of the soil suffices to give a crop nearly double the national average of about 200 pounds per acre is the so-called " Black Belt " of Alabama. This is a wide limestone valley, running from east to west a little above the central part of that state and having a fertile limestone Percentage"|~ Million Bales Texas 20.0 Georgia 16.9 Alabama 10.5 South Carolina 10.5 Mississippi 9.7 Arkansas 6.4 Oklahoma 6.4 North Carolina 6.4 Percentage United States 58.6 2.1 1.3 1.3 1.2 British India 20.7 Egypt 6.6 Million Bales 11.6 4.1 1.3 All others 6.6 I .8 + China 6.1 1.8 All others 8.0 I 1.6 : Total 12.4 Fig. 167. — United States cotton pro- duction, three-year average, 1909-11. Total 10.8 Fio. 168. — World's cotton production, three-year average, 1908-10. soil of exceptional productivity for cotton, which, like many other crops, does its best in soils rich in lime. The center of cotton production has steadily moved to the west during the last sixty years, until recently it shifted to the eastward, due largely to the influence of the weevil. But despite this pest, Texas yet produces more cotton than any other state. 476 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY Upland and Sea Isle Cotton. — The fibers of the ordinary upland cotton, the chief product of the United States, are a little less than 1 inch in length, but a variety known as Sea Isle cotton, considered the best in the world, has fibers as much as 2 1/2 inches in length with an average length of over an inch and a half. This long fiber produces a superior thread and commands a high price for use in the manufacture of fine fabrics. Sea Isle fiber is chiefly grown along the low sandy islands (barrier beaches) off the coast of South Carolina and Georgia and seems to require heavy rain, much moisture, and the slightly saline soil and air of shore districts. It has recently been introduced to the adja- cent mainlands where the amount grown now exceeds that from the isles. It has also been introduced into the Pacific Islands of Tahiti and Fiji, the shore district of Queensland in Australia, and into the West Indies. Asiatic Cotton Growing. — Asia is second to North America in cotton production, and India is, according to published statistics, second to the United States in production. China is a rival of India in cotton production, but of Chinese industrial statistics there are only fragments and the amount of her cotton crop is a matter of conjecture, but it must be great. In addition to meet- ing the demands of the enormous population, whose chief clothing is home-grown cotton, a quarter of a million bales are annually exported. China is an excellent cotton country. It is essen- tially a duplicate of the eastern part of the United States in lati- tude, relation to the land mass,, and adjacent seas. One of the regions of greatest Chinese production is the Hoang Ho Valley in the provinces of Chili, Shansi, Shensi, and Honan. The loose soil of this region and also of the Wei Basin of south central Shansi is admirably suited to cotton. The prohibition of the growth of the poppy for opium is increasing the cotton output of China. Cotton also grows over a large area in southern Korea, where it has been a family-supply industry. It is now under Japanese direction spreading out as a commercial crop, and is also grown to a small extent in southern Manchuria. Cotton Growing in India. — In India, the second country in cotton export, the leading cotton area is located on the plateaus between one and two thousand feet above the level of the sea and lying east of the western Ghats Mountains in the region commer- FIBERS, TEXTILES, AND CLOTHING 477 cially tributary to Bombay. The crops depend upon the mon- soon rains of summer, which in this section are rather light, owing to the mountains which intercept the rain-bearing winds. Droughts follow rains and no cotton could be grown at all but for the very peculiar character of the so-called black cotton soil, which in the rainy season is often flooded, becomes a tenacious mud, and after the rains have ceased dries somewhat and is separated by countless cracks into hard lumps. This does not prevent the spongy soil from retaining sufficient water to mature the cotton, which is here sown broadcast like wheat, in a lava soil so enduring that some of it has been planted annually to cotton for centuries. The yield is only about half of that of the United States and because of the short staple the quality is poorer. The influence of climate is shown by the improvement of Indian cotton when grown in America. Cotton can also sur- vive standing in water in India, but in the United States it is fatal because of the smaller amount of evaporation by which the plants rid themselves of surplus moisture. In northern India, some cotton is grown in the irrigated districts along the Indus and Ganges. There is cotton climate from India to Asia Minor and the Straits of Gibraltar and cotton is grown in scattered spots throughout the region, but most of it is so arid that the small proportion of arable land must be used to grow food crops. Under the stimulus of famine prices during the American Civil War, cotton growing in all these countries rose rapidly to an important amount. Turkey, for example, produced. 235,000 bales, but soon declined to less than a fifth of that figure. Ten thousand bales of cotton are grown in Italy and Greece, a little in Malta and Cyprus, and in Asia Minor, under the influence of German enterprise, it is again increasing on the plains of Koniah and Cilicia, and the province of Adana now produces nearly 100,000 bales for manufacture at Tarsus and for export from Mersine. Cotton growing is on the increase in the Jordan Valley and Mesopotamia has great possibilities when new irri- gation works shall again rehabilitate the seats of the ancient Em- pire. Persia grows over 100,000 bales on the few oases that en- liven her arid wastes, but Asiatic Russia is by far the leader of all Eurasian cotton growers west of the Indus. 478 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY Cotton in Central Asia. — The building of the railroads from the Caspian Sea into the oases of central Asia, especially Ferghana, has made possible the export of cotton which has been grown in a small way for local use for many centuries. Within two decades after the railway was built, cotton became one of the most impor- tant money crops from the irrigated fields of the oases which are fed by the melting snows of the high mountains of central Asia. The product, however (642,000 bales, 1910), is insufficient for the needs of the Russian Empire, and there is small possibility of its large increase because of the very limited areas for which it is possible to secure water. One-fifth of the irrigated land of Turkestan 1 is in cotton and the Russian government is trying to double this by arranging for an outside supply of wheat sc that the wheat lands of Turkestan can be put to cotton. Egyptian Cotton. — The Nile Valley of Egypt is without question the best cotton field in the world. The alluvial soil of the Nile Delta fertilized by the flood waters, with almost con- tinuous sunshine and warmed by a climate in which there is a steady rise in temperature from spring to summer and a steady decline from summer to autumn, produces 500 pounds of cotton per acre, which is double the yield of any other country. Unfor- tunately, its area is not great. Furthermore, the quality of Egyptian cotton, owing to its long, strong fiber, is better than that of any other but Sea Isle. It commands a higher price, and the production which covered 1,350 square miles, or one-seventh of the cultivated area in 1885, increased to 2,670 square miles in 1908, an area greater than that of any other crop and covering one-fourth the fields of Egypt. Cotton is there a recent industry and can only be grown by frequent irrigation, which has been possible only since the introduction of modern engineering devices under European management. The greatest of these efforts at cotton extension is the building of the Assuan Dam, completed by the British in 1902 at an expense of $125,000,000. It holds back vast quantities of water from the season of flood until the time of need and permits irrigation at all seasons. Flooding of 1 About one-twenty-fifth of the area of Louisiana is in cotton and with adequate drainage works practically the whole state, 29 million acres, 45,- 000 square miles, is fit. FIBERS, TEXTILES, AND CLOTHING 479 the Nile has gradually spread a layer of mud over the Egyptian fields permitting continuous cropping for many centuries without any other fertilization. Already there is complaint from the natives that the fields of lower Egypt are declining in fertility since the Assuan Dam shut off some of the floods and the mud. The Government began a rigorous inspection of cotton growing in 1911, enforcing the destruction of diseased leaves and prevent- ing overirrigation, with the result that the largest crop on record was harvested. Evidently, the possibilities of expansion here are far less than in any one of half a dozen American states. Because of the climate, Egyptian cotton differs from others so greatly that it is imported into the United States in quantities (178,000 bales, 1910) greater than our total cotton consumption of 1830. Many attempts have been made in other parts of the world to cultivate Egyptian cotton, successfully, but the frequent reports of success have not been verified by later experience. Texas in the district of San Antonio has a very similar temperature, but it lacks the almost continuous sunshine of Cairo, while regions of greater elevation even in upper Egypt produce an inferior fiber. Within the last few years it has been found that the conditions of the Yuma district of the lower Colorado basin in California and Arizona, because of the great similarity of climate, produce cotton that is quite the equal of that of Egypt. It is not likely, however, that the labor conditions of the Southwest with its high wages will favor cotton growing in competition with the Egyptian fellahs. Peruvian Cotton. — The deserts of the coasts of Peru produce a small quantity of very excellent cotton, where sufficient water can be had to irrigate the fields. The great aridity gives this fiber a crinkly character which, in combination with its brownish color, makes it of high value because it can be successfully mixed with wool in the production of expensive fabrics to which it gives a greater strength. Brazilian Cotton. — Brazil grows about twice as much as Missouri grew in 1911. It is grown upon the coast district, 65 per cent, of it in the vicinity of Pernambuco where there is a distinct dry and rainy season aspect to the climate. There has 480 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY been a considerable decline since the period of unusually high prices during the American Civil War and the small changes of price which raise or lower the American product seem to have but little influence upon Brazil. It is a region of great unde- veloped lands but with small prospect of much change in cotton production at any early date. The World Supply and European Efforts to Enlarge It. — Of the world's commercial crop, the United States produces about six-tenths, India two-tenths, Egypt one-tenth, and many scattered countries the remaining tenth. The great dependence of Europe upon the United States for its cotton supply causes any kind of disturbance of cotton growing or export in the United States to be sharply felt in Europe and gives an unpleasant feeling of de- pendence upon this country for the raw material of one of the most important of all industries. During the American Civil War, when the northern states blockaded the South and stopped the export of cotton, the price rose to a dollar a pound and the conse- quent closing of mills caused great hardship to the cotton manu- facturers of Lancashire, England, and other European textile districts. Again in the year 1901, a short production and sub- sequent speculation in American markets caused high prices and the shutting down of mills in Europe. As a result every European nation with tropical colonies is diligently trying to stimulate the growth of cotton, but the results so far have not been very en- couraging, although the possibilities are doubtless very great. Good samples of cotton are reported from many places through- out the Tropics and the possible areas are extensive. For instance, it is claimed that the supposedly unimportant Cook Islands in the Pacific have 200,000 acres of cotton land capable of producing enough cotton to feed the factories of a city. A British cotton- growing association is trying to revive cotton growing in the West Indies and to improve the quality of that grown in India, while the state railways in the British Colonies of west Africa have recently offered free transportation to all cotton for three years and the steamships offer free carriage to Liverpool for the first thousand tons. The French, German, Portugese, Italian, and Dutch governments are making similar efforts in Africa and the East Indies. The ultimate results are entirely problematical, but the British Cotton Growing Association report for 1912 shows FIBERS, TEXTILES, AND CLOTHING 481 that the production in the various British possessions in Africa exclusive of Egypt increased from 10,900 bales in 1905 to 52,500 bales in 1911. Probably the most promising of all the tropical colonial regions is that of upper Nigeria and the Sudan, a transition region between the desert and the tropical forest which reaches practically from the Atlantic to the Red Sea with several hundred thousand square miles of territory, possibly rivaling in size the American cotton belt, and containing in places comparatively dense populations of natives who might be converted into a labor supply under European management. At the present time this region is practically without transportation facilities and cotton develop- ment will come slowly if at all, but the climatic and human elements there are both favorable. Queensland, Australia, has much cotton land, but the fact that the white population is very scanty and that colored races are rigidly excluded makes any large industry impossible. Probable Improvements in America. — With the continued rapid spread of more scientific agriculture, with crop rotation and animal husbandry .in the cotton belt of the United States, the production can be increased several fold during the present cen- tury. The invention of a successful cotton-picking machine, which now seems assured, would work a great revolution by re- moving the greatest labor element in its production and putting it on a par with wheat, oats, and corn, in all of which crops machinery has made possible the production of many acres by a single individual. The cotton gin brought great emanci- pation to cotton growing, but cotton picking still depends upon human fingers. This alone restricts the possible production of the grower to a fraction of what it might be with a successful machine picker. The stimulus to the breeding of early maturing varieties of cot- ton produced by the Boll Weevil outbreak is likely to permit the northward extension of cotton growing in this and other lands, For example, it is now thought that cotton will grow in the Crimea and the Russian province of Kherson north of the Black Sea. In the period of domestic industry before 1860 cotton was grown on the peninsula east of the Chesapeake Bay. The ex- tension of cotton growing 100 miles toward the poles would 482 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY greatly enlarge its possible production, especially in the United States. By-products from Cotton.— The cotton seed, one of the most nutritious of morsels, was for a long time thrown away, or even burned. Later it was returned to the fields as fertilizer. Then came the discoveries that the oil in which it was so rich could be extracted and put to many and rapidly increasing uses. The manufacture of cottonseed oil is now an important by-product industry throughout the South. The seed, more than 130 million bushels, and worth nearly a dollar a bushel, is hulled, ground, and run through heavy presses to extract the oil of which a ton makes 40 gallons. The oil cake which re- mains after pressure contains about nine times as much of the important plant foods, phosporic acid and potash, as does the fiber produced by the plant. It is thus evident that the returning of the seed to the land is an excellent way to maintain soil fertility, but the food value is too great to permit such use. The great richness of this cottonseed meal in proteid, of which it is now the cheapest available source, has led to its appreciation as food for dairy cows, and the present value, nearly two cents a pound, is causing most of it to be used for that purpose, for which it is shipped to every important center of butter and cheese produc- tion in the United States, Canada, and Europe. Its use as a breadstuff for human food has already begun in a small way. The oil is largely used for food in various manufactured forms, cottolene, for example, and also as a direct substitute for and adulterant of olive oil, which it greatly resembles in food value. Unfortunately this oil, unlike olive oil, becomes rancid when exposed to the air for a few weeks. 2. MANUFACTURE AND TRADE IN COTTON CLOTH Spinning and Weaving in the Hand Labor Era. — Fibers of any sort, when twisted around each other, tend to cling together and form a thread, string, or rope. Cotton, being a flat hollow tube, has unusual spinning powers. It is not known when man began twisting (spinning) threads of cotton, wool, and silk to be woven together in cloth. It is a primeval discovery. Primitive peoples in every continent have some method of their own, also FIBERS, TEXTILES, AND CLOTHING 483 devices for weaving. In the rudest or most complex forms weaving is the same as the method by which splints are made into a basket. During the early centuries of the Christian era, the material to be spun was held on a distaff and the thread, often twisted by hand, was, when finished, wound upon a spindle. The spinning wheel, used at an early date in the Far East, was also independently invented in several parts of Europe in the fifteenth century, was universally used in that continent and was scattered over the world, wherever European colonists went. The thread thus laboriously spun was woven into cloth in hand looms, the industry being carried on in the homes of the workers even when the product was intended for sale. Some people were spinners, others did the weaving and cloth making for sale was a common household by-industry throughout the western world in the middle of the eighteenth century. Textile Machinery and the Factory System. — In 1764, an Englishman by the name of Hargreves invented a machine called the spinning jenny which was the first machine ever used to make more than two threads at one time. This invention promptly sent the spinning wheels to the garret and greatly increased the output of a family of spinners. Five years later Cartwright in- vented the so-called "water frame" or throstle, a spinning machine which could make the heavy warp thread. Ten years later Crompton invented the "spinning mule" which was a combination of the machines of Hargreves and Cartwright and which has been largely used down to the present time. The present spinning mule contains over a thousand spindles upon each of which a thread is wound and one man can operate two of the machines, making over 300 pounds of thread per day. While the Hargreves spinning jenny was used in the homes of the old- fashioned hand workers, the spinning mule was best adapted to factories where larger amounts of power could be generated. This power was furnished at first by the water-powers of Lancashire, England, but steam, which was introduced into English factories about 1790, was soon utilized. For a few years there was a great surplus of thread. The weavers, who had previously been able to use the thread of six spinners and often had to go to the houses of many spinners in the morning to get enough to weave during the afternoon, now found themselves utterly unable to handle 484 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY the vast quantities of thread which the new machines produced. In 1787, however, Cartwright invented a power loom which water wheels and steam engines could run, thus enabling weavers to use up the thread. One invention demands and usually produces another. The spinning machine demanded weaving machines and the weaving machines demanded cotton. In answer to this demand came the cotton gin (1793), six years after the power loom had made cotton scarce. Cotton quickly became cheap. This combination of cheap cotton, spinning machines, weaving machines, and the coal and the iron resources of England, enabled that country to forge rapidly ahead in cotton manufac- ture while all the continent of Europe was disturbed with the turmoil of Napoleon's wars. In 1785, the export of cotton goods from England was worth a million pounds sterling; in 1815 it was 22 million pounds, and during this period it increased from 5 per cent, of British exports to 38 per cent. That short period of thirty years produced greater change in British industry than many previous centuries had made. It has been well called the Industrial Revolution, and, like inven- tions, machines, and styles, it has spread and is spreading to all manufacturing countries. Before this revolution, man used little artificial power and the manufacturer often lived in the village or in the country where he gardened, kept some live stock, and worked on near-by farms. He was near to the food supply and had opportunity to use his extra time to good advantage. After the. Industrial Revolution, the worker found himself living in a city tenement to be near his steam-driven machine in the big factory. He was away from the earth, the one great resource. He had no chance to produce food in his odd moments and was dependent upon the factory wage and imported food. This removal of man from the land, this great disadvantage of the factory as compared to the domestic system goes far to explain the fact that with all the stupendous machines of the factory system, the condition of so many of the workers is so little better than it was in 1780 if, indeed, it is any better. They . have been removed from opportunity of steady work and by- industries and taken too far away from mother earth, which is our support. It is entirely erroneous to think of the machines of modern FIBERS, TEXTILES, AND CLOTHING 485 manufacturing as having completed their evolution. Mechanical improvement is going forward as rapidly now as ever, and to this improvement the textile industry is no exception. Between 1904 and 1909 the number of textile workers in United States increased 20 per cent, and the value that they added to the raw material increased over 50 per cent. As this was a period of decrease in the hours of labor, the increased result is plainly due in large part to the machinery. Fig. 169. — A modern loom. Spools of material to the right. Card board patterns overhead. (Crompton Knowles Loom Works, Worcester, Mass.) The completed modern cotton mill is large and often costs over a million dollars. While one plant often completes the process, it is still a characteristic of the cotton-manufacturing industry that the yarn is made in one place and the cloth in another, as was done in the days of the wheel and hand loom. Thus, England is sending yarn to the Far East to be there woven into cloth; Japan and India are sending yarn to China; the mills of 486 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY Massachusetts are sending yarn to Philadelphia, and the mills of Philadelphia are sending yarn to Rhode Island, while a wagon carrying yarn from mill is a common sight in every cotton-manu- facturing city. Present Distribution of Cotton Manufacture.— During the nineteenth century, cotton factories have spread to many countries, and cotton cloth has traveled to the ends of the earth. The spinning wheel has disappeared before steam- borne commerce in ever-widening circles, until now it lingers only in exceedingly remote locations, where it continues, not because it is impossible to transport cotton cloth, but because it is impossible to send out any product with which to pay for it. Homespun cotton cloth is still made in native hand looms in some remote parts of Africa, the Andean districts of South, America, and large parts of Asia. Japan is still in the process of emergence from the hand-loom epoch, and the Chinese are, in the majority of cases, still clad in homespun. In the United States, the old method still persists in the heart of the Appalachian plateaus of eastern Kentucky and North Carolina. Of equal or greater significance is the persistence of the domes- tic system in Europe itself. ' Ireland is reported to have 6,000 women lace makers and from the Donegal peasant women's looms comes an increasing export (now $50,000 a year) of home- spun cloth, much prized for its texture, figure and home-made vegetable dyes. Switzerland is far ahead of Ireland in this respect, having in household industry 130,000 industrial workers. This amounts to 3.9 per cent, of the total population of Switzer- land, while in the United States but 8.3 per cent, of our population is reported by the Census of 1910 as engaged in manufacture. The 130,000 household workers of Switzerland comprise 39 per cent, of the textile workers of the country, 56 per cent, of the straw-braid makers and 52 per cent, of the wood carvers. England's early leadership and present dominence in cotton manufacturing is shown by her leadership in the number of spindles, cotton consumption, and export of manufactures. FIBERS, TEXTILES, AND CLOTHING 487 MILLIONS OF SPINDLES IN THE WORLD 1900 Great Britain 45 . 5 Continent, Europe 32 . Germany 8 . Total Europe 77 . 5 United States: Cotton States 4.3 Other States 15.1 Total U. S 19.4 British India. Japan China 4.9 1.2 .5 1912 55.3 43. 10.7 98.3 11.5 19. 30.5 6.1 2.1 .8 Canada. Mexico . .5 .4 .6 Total World 105.6 141 .0 COTTON MANUFACTURERS, 1910 Pounds of Cotton per capita Exports, million dollars United States . . . United Kingdom France Germany Switzerland Spain Japan Italy 40.8 583.866 63. 105.318 (1906) 50.136 9.268 5.248 5.209 Relation of Cotton Manufacture to Density of Population. — The world's cotton mills produce many varieties of cloth between the coarsest and the finest, and the distribution of the different kinds is an admirable illustration of the effect of dense population upon manufacturing industries. A pound of raw cotton may, with much fabrication, become several dollars' worth of the best machine-made lace, or it may become a yard or less of coarse, 488 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY heavy cotton duck. Several times as much labor and capital are required to produce the finer of these two products, even if machine made, while if the lace is made by hand it takes vastly more labor than that required for machine lace. Brussels is the center of the world's hand-made lace industry for the natural reason that it is the metropolis of the most densely peopled nation. Much of the lace is made by the Belgian peasants in the intervals of their farm work — a means by which they hang on to the great advantage of the domestic system — steady employment. England's early monopoly in cotton manufacturing has given way, due to the rise of the industry elsewhere, as in the continent of Europe and in the United States, which regions were, in 1820, the chief British market. Although country after country has taken up the manufacture, the English product has never- theless increased steadily, because it is the characteristic of new cotton industries to start with a crude product and England has held her own by making a finer and finer product for ship- ment to other lands. The United States has an instructive distribution of the industry into regions of coarse and fine production. Cotton manufacturing had its origin in New England, where it is most developed, and it has had a recent rapid growth in the South, where it is less developed but progressing, as is shown by the fact that the average annual consumption of raw cotton per spindle in the South in 1880 was 155 pounds, in 1905, 119 pounds, while in Massachusetts it was 72 pounds, and in England 38 pounds. Granting equal speed of work per spindle, the average of the southern cotton mills in 1905 was three times as heavy, and the cloth, therefore, three times as coarse, as the British product, and about twice as heavy as the New England product. Speaking broadly, the South is, in its cotton cloth, exporting primarily its raw material. New England and Old England are exporting primarily their labor. The product of the Middle Atlantic States, as might be expected, is midway in fineness between that of New England and the South. British Cotton Manufacture. — For more than a century the name of Manchester has been synonymous throughout the com- mercial world with cotton cloth. That city, the metropolis Million Dollars FIBERS, TEXTILES, AND CLOTHING 489 of Lancashire, has been the center of the greatest cotton manu- facturing district in the world and it is still adding spindles to the equipment. The industry, established there as early as 1640, was partly due to the Atlantic winds which gave the mois- ture necessary to the best cotton manufacturing. Later these same Atlantic winds influenced the indus- percentage try through the water power of numerous small streams that descended from the Pennine Chain and led to quick develop- ment after the invention of the new ma- chines. Both of these advantages have now passed away. The moisture, like the „ r J ' Great Britain 53.7 temperature of the factory air, can be con- trolled and the factories of Lancashire have long since outgrown the water-power and turned to steam, for which the local coal fields are very convenient. The third factor in Lancashire's start was the con- venient harbor of Liverpool, which has long had wide ship connection with regions pro- Germany 10.9 ducing and consuming cotton. The city of Manchester itself has now ceased to be so strictly a manufacturing city,, and has become the sale and storage center for the product of many surrounding towns. Liverpool, the natural port of entry for this region, is the greatest cotton port in the u ' r; world because back of it lies the greatest cotton manufacturing district. It is, in- deed, surprising that after a century and a quarter, the British cotton industry should ^ J°*l Expo 9 °° of have spread so little. Eighty-three per cotton manufactures, cent, of it is still in Lancashire and 99 per ^^ Commer " cent. of it is estimated to be in the district which has extended to adjacent parts of Derbyshire, Cheshire, and Yorkshire, but nowhere more than 40 miles from Man- chester. This district clothes Britain and supplies 70 per cent, of the world's export cotton cloth. The intensity of the indus- try has given to Lancashire ten times the population of Rhode 98 - France 6.0 India 5.3 nited States 4.8 Switzerland 4.4 Japan 3.0 " Allotners 11.9 490 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY Island although its area is only 8 per cent, greater. A son often succeeds to his father's place in the mill and the skill of the Lancashire operative may well be said to be hereditary, with factory work and school dividing the years of youth. England has easily led all countries in the manufacture of cotton goods because she has had the great advantage of an early start and in addition she has had peace while others have had wars, she has had capital while others have had to borrow, she has had the most wide-reaching shipping connection and in addition she has had the local advantages of unrivalled coal, iron, and har- bors. Because of her tariff policy, she has had cheaper food than any continental country and she has had cheaper cash wages than America. As a result of all these advantages the equipment and also the operation of a cotton mill is much cheaper in Lan- cashire than in Massachusetts (U. S. Con. Rep., Jan. 13, 1912). Hence the United States like many other countries places a tariff against the import of foreign (primarily British) cottons. England sends fine cottons into the best cotton manufacturing districts of United States and of northwest Europe, and all kinds of cottons to the Mediterranean countries, to Russia, Norway, and Sweden. Her cloth goes to every colony in Africa, to the countries of west Asia, to the East and West Indies, to Central and South America, Australia and Polynesia; in fact, to the islands, colonies, and non-manufacturing countries everywhere. The British exports of cotton manufactures, $583,000,000 (1910), exceed by far in value the foodstuffs exported from the United States, $385,000,000 (1911). Continental Cotton Manufacture. — The entire continent of Europe has about two-thirds as many spindles as Great Britain, but owing to the coarser product produced there is a greater relative consumption of raw cotton. Bremen and Havre are the chief importing points, and the greatest center of manufacture lies between the Elbe River and Paris, the North Sea and the Alps. This district includes northeastern France and the popu- lous Rhine Valley with a host of manufacturing towns in Ger- many, Holland, Belgium, and Switzerland, in all of which fine cottons are made for home consumption and some for export. England, however, is still much the greatest of all exporters of cotton manufactures. FIBERS, TEXTILES, AND CLOTHING 491 In Spain, which imports about a quarter of a million bales of cotton, the chief manufacturing district is Barcelona. Genoa is the chief cotton-importing port of all south Europe, because it receives some Swiss imports and is the point of supply for Milan and the manufacturing districts of North Italy. Here the water- power of the Alps is being rapidly utilized for manufacture, but Italy does not produce enough cotton cloth for home use, al- though Switzerland is per capita as heavy an exporter of high- grade cotton manufactures (chiefly laces and embroidery) as is Britain herself. Cotton maufacturing is important in the island city of Venice, to which the raw material goes directly from New Orleans, Galveston, Savannah, and New York, as it does also to Trieste to be manufactured in Vienna and other towns of Austro. It should be noted that most of the manufacturing of Austro-Hungary is done in Austria and that most of the Austrian manufacturing is done in populous Bohemia. There is some cotton manufacturing scattered over nearly all manufacturing districts of Europe, Russian Poland, with its chief centers at Lodz and Warsaw, being the only other important district not previously mentioned. Cotton Manufacturing in the United States. — In the United States cotton manufacture is an important industry, but we export less than 10 per cent, of our total product, and our imports are more valuable than our exports. It is, therefore, plain that cotton manufacturing for this country is, from a national stand- point, essentially as yet a supply industry as contrasted with Great Britain where cotton goods comprises about two-fifths of her enormous exports. While the number of spindles in the United States was increased by 6 million in the six years between 1900 and 1906, England's increase was 8 million in the three years between 1903 and 1906. The relative youth of our cotton industry is shown by the high character of our imports, one- half of which are lace and embroidery, coming chiefly from Switzerland, France, and Germany, and to a lesser extent from the United Kingdom. The United Kingdom sends us large quantities of fine cotton cloth, and yarn to be used in our looms. In the United States the manufacture of cotton is concentrated in the region east of the Appalachians, in a long belt from Maine 492 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY Percentage Massachusetts 29.7 North Carolina 11.6 South Carolina 10.5 Rhode Island 8.0 Georgia 7.6 Pennsylvania 5.4 33.9 Sew Hampshire 5.3 33.6 Maine 4.0 24.9 Alabama 3.5 ~ 22.3 New York 3.2 ~ 20.4 New Jersey- 2.2 I I 13.7 All Others 9.0 56.3 Million Dollars 186.5 72.7 65.9 to Alabama, with its greatest centers in New England and at the eastern base of the Appalachians in the Carolinas and Georgia, with a lesser center in Philadelphia. New England, with 17 million spindles, is the leader in cotton manufacturing and is likely to be for an indefinite time to come, although the southern states with 11.5 million spindles are already consuming more cotton in a single year than does New England. But New England is making finer fabrics and more valuable product. The Influence of Water Power In New England. — The cotton-manufacturing in- dustry is, next to paper, dominated by water-power more than any other in the United States. The industry was estab- lished in New England along the water- falls of her glacial streams. These loca- tions were, like Lancashire, close to harbors for the service of shipping and in a region of good labor supply. The Merrimac River has falls of more than 50 feet at three places, and at these the great cotton towns of Lowell, in Massa- chusetts and Manchester in New Hamp- shire have arisen. Taunton on the Taunton River at the head of the tide- water in eastern Massachusetts; Holyoke on the Connecticut in central Massa- chusetts; North Adams on the Hoosac River in northwestern Massachusetts; and Fitchburg on the Nashua in northern Massachusetts are all indebted to waterfalls for their prominence in the cotton industry, as are Pawtucket, War- wick, and Woonsocket in eastern Rhode Island and Lewiston at the falls of the Androscoggin in Maine. Many mills which started with water-power have grown so large that steam must now be used. The leading cotton-manufacturing city in the United States to- 50.; 48.0 Total 628.4 Fig. 171.— Value of United States cotton manu- facturers, 1909. FIBERS, TEXTILES, AND CLOTHING 493 day is Fall River, Massachusetts, where the little Fall River tumbles down to the sea and develops enough power to start the town. Being at the head of a bay, it has a good harbor and can take advantage of ocean transportation for the delivery of cargoes of cotton and of coal, which now drives practically all the machinery of the city. The finest cotton cloth in New England is probably produced in New Bedford, Massachusetts, a town on Buzzards Bay with the same port advantages that have made Fall River and also Providence the great cotton centers they are. Many persons point to the fact that New England, lacking alike food, raw ma- terial, and fuel, must, therefore, be unable to compete with other localities. The industries are established with the powerful momentum bred by an early start and the weight of her handicap in fuel is often overestimated. A steam-driven Rhode Island 75,000 spindle cotton yarn mill near tide water had in 1910 an output of $1,000,000 per year. The coal cost was $25,000 or 2 1/2 per cent, of the output. It comes by barge from Norfolk at a very low rate, costing $4 to $4.75 per ton at the mill. The coal handicap of a New England mill on tide water, over one in Philadelphia appears to be less than 1 per cent, of the total costs, not a very important consideration. The nine years ending with 1909 saw cotton consumption increase 68 per cent, in the South and 12 per cent, in New England, but in 1910 the number of spindles increased 3.6 per cent, in cotton-growing states and 3.3 per cent, in New England. At this time Massachusetts alone had 34 per cent, of the spindles of United States and the Carolinas 24 per cent. The New England textile labor situation is typical of many American industries. The people of New England, after a cen- tury's experience as textile workers, are skilled operatives, but the industry no longer depends upon native stock. Within recent decades large numbers of French Canadian workers have come from Quebec to the mill towns of New England to find employment which their own country with its rapidly increasing population lacks. Latterly large numbers of Europeans have come also with the result that Lawrence and other mill towns have many languages and little English. Southern Cotton Manufacture. — The cotton manufacturing 494 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY belt of the southern states is located near the fall line which marks the boundary between the Piedmont district and the Atlantic Plain, and also in the Piedmont district, where it has been able to take advantage of many waterfalls. In Alabama it is also close to the coal fields. Its nearness to the raw product which is often grown in the immediate vicinity is an advantage 1 shared by no other important cotton manufacturing district in the world. Despite these advantages, it was the labor that was the chief factor in locating manufactured cotton in the South. The Appalachian Mountain district had a white population, dense in relation to the resources,, and therefore, with inadequate opportunity for employment, so that wages were much lower than in the North and West. These mountain people migrated in large numbers to the mills just as the people of Quebec and Europe migrated to the mills of New England. In these localities, where agriculture with its low wages had been the only industry, and with an abundant supply of cheap labor, which was and is exclusively white, the cotton manufac- ture of the South increased with great rapidity. Between 1880 and 1905 the spindles increased from 1/2 million to 9 mil- lion, and the cotton consumption from less than 200,000 to over 2 1/4 million bales. The mills of New England have actually been surpassed in the amount of cotton consumed, but Massachusetts still has more spindles than the whole South. The southern product is the coarser cotton sheetings and cloths, a product requiring a large amount of raw material with a small amount of labor, and that not the most skillful. This district has entered, therefore, more largely into supplying our exports than any other district because coarse uncolored cloth constitutes the chief bulk of our exports. Other kinds of cotton goods in- volving a greater labor element we cannot export in competition with the manufactures of Europe. Our best cottons stay home and our export is consumed in largest quantities in countries where, like China and Africa, the coarse cloth is desired by a poor population. Consequently, American cotton cloth is worn by the workmen of Cuba, Central America, many South American 1 Owing to the fact that freight rates are usually less on raw than on finished products, this is questionable advantage for the southern cotton mill manufacturing for other localities. FIBERS, TEXTILES, AND CLOTHING 495 countries, and the Philippines, and it furnishes the scanty rai- ment (loin cloth 3X10 feet) for some of the tribes of Africa. China alone has in some past years taken the greater part of our entire export of cotton goods. Cotton Manufacture In Other Sections of the United States.— Many English textile workers have settled in Philadelphia and their imported skill has made possible the introduction of tex- tile industries that had not previously flourished in America. Philadelphia is the chief center of cotton manufacturing in the Middle Atlantic States, the leader in the production of tapestries, cheneilles and other cotton goods that require skill in coloring. This city also sells machine-made lace, hosiery, and knit goods. The dependence of the textile industry upon labor more than any or all other factors has caused the amount of cotton manu- factured west of the Alleghanies to be very small, and it is not increasing. The Extension of Cotton Manufacture. — Cotton manufactur- ing is an industry which many countries are trying to foster by high tariffs. Brazil is an example. Large cotton mills have arisen at Petropolis, a suburb of Rio Janeiro, where water-power is developed, as streams come down from the plateau, but the output is entirely inadequate to supply local consumption. Exactly the same conditions exist at Lima in Peru and at towns on the east edge of the plateau of Mexico. It is often the case that the cotton factories of new districts are built by capital, equipped with machinery and staffed by foremen from an older cotton district. The mills of Carolina and Georgia are often branch enterprises of New England companies. The mills of Mexico are largely French. A British company owns the one great mill of Venezuela at Caracas. The textiles industries of Italy and Spain even are largely British property. The prospects of increased cotton manufacture in the Orient are many fold greater than in tropic America or Africa. The people of tropic America are too few. The peoples of Africa are too little used to industry, but the half of the human race that lives in eastern and southern Asia has the patient diligence born of centuries of labor, and the density of population makes them welcome factory opportunity. In 1880, India, with its millions 496 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY of cotton wearers took about one-half of England's exports, but since that time the import has declined as a result of the intro- duction of cotton mills built by English capital, equipped with English machines and directed by English foremen teaching the cheap laborers of India. Her exports are now about half as large as her imports and comprise both cloth and thread sent to China and Japan. In the Presidency of Bombay alone, there were in 1911, 431 cotton factories. One hundred and eighty-four of these factories employed 160,000 hands. In the same year the cotton employees of the United States numbered 387,000 and those of Britain 550,000. India even imports raw cotton from Texas and is competing at Aden with the American cotton cloths for the supply of Arabia and east Africa. The example of India is now being duplicated in Japan. With its small amount of arable land and dense population, Japan is of necessity turning to manufacturing. She is now importing raw cotton from Texas, China, and India, and is likely at an early date to develop a much greater cotton industry than she now possesses. The American Consular reports fairly clamor with the accounts of the competition of Japanese cotton manu- factures with the American, which they seem to be displacing in the markets of Manchuria and north China. The Japanese industry being comparatively new, competes directly with the low-grade American goods sent to the Chinese markets. If the Japanese labor is less efficient than the American, the wages as reported for certain Japanese mills for the month of March, 1912, twenty-three cents per day American money for men, and fifteen cents per day for women, give a powerful basis for competition and explain the statement that the Japanese can use American cotton and produce the finished cloth at from 10 to 25 per cent, less than it costs in America. Japan was (1911) in competition with west Europe by sending socks, shirts and imitation Turkish rugs to Salonica, Turkey. China with its coal, its iron ores and its millions of laborers will almost inevitably follow Japan's lead in a general as well as a special sense. New mills at Shanghai are operated by a Japanese company using British machines, American engines, Japanese coal and Japanese foremen. The cotton factory epoch in China is just beginning — the spindles now reported being but 900,000, less than 2 per cent, of the British FIBERS, TEXTILES, AND CLOTHING 497 number, but the use of machine goods is rapidly increasing. The enormous resources of coal, iron and labor become profoundly significant when it is remembered that the high value of the raw material permits it to be taken half way round the world for manufacture and then taken back for consumption. American piece-goods dealers are already complaining not only of cheap ' Japanese goods, but of increasing output of Chinese-made goods (U. S. Con. Rep., 1911). Cotton and Cotton Goods In Commerce. — Cotton, the greatest staple of the world's clothing, gives rise to much commerce. As no important cotton manufacturing country except the United States produces enough raw cotton for its own use, we are sending it to nearly all the manufacturing countries, and even the United States is importing Egyptian and Peruvian cotton because they possess qualities not found in American cottons. As the greatest cotton grower is also a cotton importer, so no city, not even a great cotton-manufacturing center, like Fall River, produces enough varieties of cotton goods for its own use. This gives rise to a commerce in cotton manufactures so widespread that in the stores of almost any town will be found the cotton products of a dozen cities — the cotton duck of the south; the tapestries and knit goods of Philadelphia; the ginghams and dress goods of New England; the thread of Rhode Island; the fine products of Great Britain, Germany, France, and Switzerland. Cotton goods are one of the most universal staples of import. Made in few countries, they are imported by all, whether they are in the stage of bree'chcloth, sombrero or silk hat. Cottons, indeed, tend to be relatively more important in the breechcloth stage than in any other, comprising, for instance, one-fourth of the im- ports of Sierra Leone. 3. THE WOOL-MANUFACTURING INDUSTRY Wool and Its Qualities. — Wool was originally the under coat of the sheep. Many animals have an outer coat of coarse hair with a shorteJ warmer coat under it. The seal skin of commerce is such ah under coat. On the sheep this under coat has the character we call wool and by long breeding and selection, sheep have come 498 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY to have their chief coat of wool, although this animal also has some hair and in some hot countries it has hair only, like a deer or cow. Wool differs from hair and other fibers in being crinkly or curled, so that it makes an elastic cloth, and also in being covered with minute scales, whereas hair is smooth. These scales overlap each other as do shingles on a roof, and when the natural grease is scoured from the wool, the scales catch each other and hold the wool together as a tangled mass. This quality is utilized in making a matted threadless fabric called felt, pro- duced by beating, shaking and rolling the fibers together. This felting process is also used in making hats, both soft and hard. Woolen clothing is the best for cold, moist climates because it holds in the body heat, permits the moisture of perspiration to pass through and yet does not become wet so easily from rain as do fabrics of other fibers. The Process of Manufacture. — The fleece as it comes from the sheep has impurities which amount to half or three-fourths its total weight. Chief among these is the grease which exudes from the sheep, and serves to make the wool waterproof and also keeps it from felting on the animal's back. Sometimes the wool is scoured to remove the grease in the country of production before it is shipped to the market, but the danger of its felting en route is causing a decline in this practice. Other impurities in wool are dust, sand, burrs, and other seeds of plants, which, in combination with the differing qualities of the wool from many varying breeds of sheep and the differences resulting from food, soil and climate, give wool an almost infinite number of com- mercial varieties, greatly complicate its manufacture, and make wool buying a highly specialized task. The process of preparing wool for use consists in washing it to get rid of the loose dirt, scouring it to remove the grease, combing and carding it to get rid of other foreign substances and to lay the fibers out straight ready for spinning the yarn for the final weaving into cloth. In its relation to household industry and the industrial revolution, wool is like cotton and the other textile industries, except that it is older and much more widespread than cotton manufacture. Wool manufacturing has one by-product. The grease, long wasted, is now, especially in Germany, used for many purposes, including soap, lubrication and oiling leather. FIBERS, TEXTILES, AND CLOTHING 499 Woolens, Worsteds and Shoddy. — The term "woolen goods" as used in the trade, includes only those woolen fabrics which do not show upon their surfaces the inter-twining threads of ordinary woven goods. Woolens are woven but the fact is hidden by a process called "fulling" in which the cloth is beaten to give a felting effect and finally the fibers are pulled up by being gently combed with teasles so that the surface has a uniform, smooth, almost furry, appearance. The chief woolen fabrics are broadcloth, cashmere, tweed, blankets, flannels and shawls. "Worsted goods" are those which are made of woolen yarns and show upon their surfaces their woven origin. "Shoddy" is thick, warm cloth made of re-manufactured wool fibers obtained by tearing up tailors' clippings and woolen rags, mixing them with new wool, and weaving all into a warm cheap cloth. The demand of the English shoddy mills for wool rags is so great that they are imported from the United States, Holland, Belgium, France and Germany. European Wool Manufacture. — Flanders was in the middle ages the great leader in wool manufacturing. The fertile, well- tilled Rhine delta gave a good food supply for a manufacturing people, and canals, rivers, land routes, and sea routes made easy the distribution of the goods produced largely from imported wool, then the staple export of England. The English kings introduced Flemish weavers into England during the eleventh, fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, but for a long time unfinished English woolen cloth went to Flanders to be finished and dyed. This practice seems to have ended about 1650 and England has now surpassed her old teacher, Flanders, in quality of output. English woolen cloths have been much famed during the period since power-driven spinning and weaving machinery have been adapted to woolen manufacture, an occurrence that soon followed their application to cotton manufacture. England, long a wool exporter, now uses four times as much as she grows, and leads other countries in the excellence of her wool cloth. The towns of Bradford, Leeds, Haddersfleld in Yorkshire, just across a low mountain range from Lancashire, are known wherever fine woolen cloths are bought and sold. The same resources of coal and iron that served the cotton industry have served other industries, and these Yorkshire woolen districts also manu- 500 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY facture some cotton cloth and a wide variety of metal manu- factures, for they are also near to iron and to the eastern harbors. England has been unable to secure such leadership in the world's supply of woolens as has been the case with cottons, nor is the industry so important. It employs about a quarter Percentage Prance 25.8 United Kingdom 22.6 Germany 20.4 United States 9.4 211.6 Belgium 9.2 206.0 Russia 3.7 83.1 Austria-Hungary 2.8 ^ [ 63.0 All others 6.1 136.0 Million Pounds 578.5 506.5 457.7 Total 2242.4 Fig. 172. — World import of raw wool, three-year average, 1908-10. Percentage United Kingdom 39.3 Australia and 15.6 Argentina 14.5 Chinese Empire 8.9 All others 22.0 Million Dollars 15.7 6.1 5.8 3.55 8.74 Total 39.9 Fig. 173. — United States import of raw wool, three-year average, 1909-11. of a million workers, less than half the number employed in the cotton industry. There is considerable equality in the amount of woolen goods produced in England, the United States, Austro- Hungary, Germany and France, while the rest of the world produces an almost insignificant quantity, but it should be FIBERS, TEXTILES, AND CLOTHING 501 remembered that Britain produces and exports the finest grades of woolen cloths. The explanation of this greater equality in wool than in cotton manufacture is to be found in the fact that wool manufacturing was a worldwide domestic industry. The Industrial Revolution found wool an established industry and merely transformed it. Wherever men made flour, they made wool cloth and the adaptation of primitive water powers to the hand loom was a small change, much smaller than learning how to use a new fiber such as cotton. Cotton manufacturing was thus a new business, resulting from what was the practical discovery of cotton when Whitney's cotton gin made its pro- duction cheap. This came after the textile machines were established in England. That country, being in much the best position to manufacture textiles in factories, seized the new raw material and built up a world's trade in cotton, while wool, an industry as old as history, was still being made upon hand looms in millions of farm houses and in every textile village of Europe and America. With the tenacity which comes of an early start and the hereditary knowledge that lingers in families, wool manufacture has continued wherever, in the cooler parts of Europe and America, there is a population dense enough to develop any extensive manufacture. Upon the continent there is really but one wool district, extending from Vienna to the North Sea and the English Channel, including Paris and Berlin. This takes in the valleys of the Upper Danube, the Elbe, the Rhine, the Seine, and includes the densely peopled manufacturing region of Austria, western Germany, Switzerland, northeastern France, Holland and Belgium. This continental wool industry is newest and most progressive in Germany, which leads all nations in the deliberate and skillful promotion of industry. Silesia, Saxony and Westphalia, three German coal districts, are important wool centers. Wool Manufacture in the United States. — In the United States we see the effects of the colonial importance of the woolen industry, for its manufacture is the most widely scattered of all the textile industries. Small mills, comparable to the rural grist mill and driven by small water wheels on insignificant streams, were established in the last half of the eighteenth and the first half of the nineteenth century over almost all the settled 502 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY country, and small factories are to be found to-day in every state of the Union, although in many of them the output is insignificant. The large scale manufacture of modern type, with big factories, is concentrated east of the Alleghanies, north of Maryland, in an almost continuous belt reaching from Wilming- ton, Del., and southeastern Pennsylvania, through northern New Jersey, southeastern New York, and lower New England into southern Maine. These factories, like the modern American wool industry, have largely arisen since 1865. In this concen- tration of the wool industry, we see another example of the dependence of textile manufacture upon dense population, the valuable wool of Montana, New Mexico, Ohio and distant for- eign countries being carried thousands of miles to the place where abundant labor exists to manufacture it. Philadelphia is the greatest single woolen manufacturing center in the United States, but almost every city of importance in this eastern belt has woolen mills. In the New England towns they are particularly common, especially in Massachusetts, which state leads all other states by producing more than a quarter of the total output. The two states of Massachusetts and Penn- sylvania manufacture about half the woolen goods in the United States. In Rhode Island, which is little more than a collection of manufacturing cities, the woolen industry has great concentration, since that tiny state produces half as much as Massachusetts, more than New York or any states other than Pennsylvania and Massachusetts. With the increase of population and capital woolen mills are now beginning to be built west of the Alleghanies. Ohio, the leading western state, ranked tenth in woolen manufacturing in 1900, with but a fraction as much woolen manufacturing as rural Vermont, but the rapidly rising woolen industry of Cleveland, the first large manufacturing city to the west of the Alleghany plateau, is very suggestive of a general westward movement. There has been rapid increase in the woolen industry in the United States since the Civil War, when very heavy protective duties were levied upon its import. In the year 1909 American woolen manufactures were worth nearly $450,000,000, but the raw materials cost nearly two-thirds of that sum. Four hundred and fifty million pounds of wool were required by American mills FIBERS, TEXTILES, AND CLOTHING 503 and we imported a little more than a third, as has long been our custom. Seventy million pounds of wool are also reused in mak- ing shoddy. The declining importance of wool is indicated by the fact that the woolen mills used 110 million pounds of cotton, which we are becoming more and more skillful in mixing with wool. Worsted, Carpets and Hats. — Worsted, the manufacture of which was first introduced into this country about 1860, had become so popular as outer clothing by both men and women by 1900 that its production exceeded that of all the woolens com- bined. This lead is increasing, stimulated by the scarcity of high grade wools. In avoiding this difficulty, the woolen manufacturers are learning how to use some of the coarse wools for the worsted goods. Wool is important in carpet manufacture, but only inferior carpets are made of pure wool. The better ones, such as Wilton, Axminster, and even Brussels have a strong web of linen or hemp into which the wool is woven. Philadelphia has long been noted as the great carpet manufacturing center of the United States and although the carpet industry there is steadily growing, the increase of carpet mills in some northeastern cities has caused Philadelphia's share of carpet manufacture to decline from nearly a half to about two-fifths. The leading import of carpets into America is from Constanti- nople where the Turkish and Persian rugs, the best carpets in the world, are gathered for shipment. These valuable products, borne by caravan from the oases and villages of the remote interior, are the product of pasture and flocks highly condensed by the slow laborious hand labor of a domestic manufacture which, it should be noted, is turning out a better and more highly prized product than the western factories with their mechanically per- fect goods. Hats are classed with wool manufactures, but they are made chiefly of felting rather than weaving, the usual material being the hair of rabbits and other fur-bearing animals, the fur of the beaver being used for the finer " top " hats. This branch of the American woolen industry amounts to nearly $40,000,000 a year, of which one-half is paid for the furs. Hat manufacturing is chiefly centered in the district between Connecticut and Philadelphia, 504 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY with the New Jersey cities in the vicinity of New York giving the leadership to their state. Transportation and Import of Wool. — The high value of wool causes the cost of transportation to be but a small percentage of the total cost of the wool bale at the mill, so that the place of production has but little influence upon the place of manufacture. This is even more conspicuous in the case of wool than with the less valuable cotton. Our chief wool-producing districts are west of the Mississippi River. The diverse requirements of differ- ent mills give us very scattered sources for our imports. The best wools — known as Class 1 — are used for making the finest cloths and are chiefly the product of merino sheep. Our supply of these comes almost entirely from Australasia, the Argentine Republic and the states west of the Mississippi River. Class 2 wool, sometimes known as worsted wool, coarser than No. 1, is chiefly home grown and from districts east of the Mississippi River. Of the small import of this class England supplies the greater quantity. "' ''Our heaviest importation is in Class 3 wool, usually known a's carpet wools, of which we buy more than of the other two combined. These are the coarse, harsh wools produced in countries where breeds of sheep are unimproved and the flocks ill-cared for. China, with the product from arid Mongolia, leads in the supply of this grade, largely exported from Tientsin. Other sources of important supply being south Russia, Turkey (both Asiatic and European), and Scotland, where the hardy highland sheep, braving the storms of his mountain heather pasture, produces a coarse wool little used in English manufacture, but well suited to certain American carpet factories. An extreme instance of the tendency of wool to make long journeys is shown by Australasia, the largest wool producer and the producer of the best wool in the world. It exports nineteen- twentieths of the wool it produces, sends it half-way round the world to west Europe and the United States, and then buys back, chiefly from Britain, $5,000,000 worth of woolen manufactures. The Limitation of Raw Materials. — Wool is scarce and getting scarcer with small prospect of adequate increase of supply to meet increasing population. Wool is a by-product of the meat industry, so the conditions of the wool manufacturing cannot affect the raw material supply so directly as cotton manufacturing FIBERS, TEXTILES, AND CLOTHING 505 can affect its raw material, which is a product grown for its own sake. A 25 per cent, increase in the price of wool, say from twenty to twenty-five cents per pound, amounts to twenty or thirty cents' increase in income per sheep per year — a factor of small importance. A similar increase in cotton, from ten to twelve and one-half cents, changes the entire basis of the business and causes great increase of output. 1 The cotton and wool indus- tries have, therefore, fared very differently in the past twenty-five years. While cotton production and manufacture have been going up by leaps and bounds, the production of raw wool throughout the world has increased but little, and has at times remained stationary or even declined. As a result, cotton has been substituted for many of its uses. If the process of sub- stituting other fibers for wool does not continue we are likely to have much higher prices for wool, because of the large amount of land needed to produce it. The industrial awakening of China and Japan, and their adop- tion of western ideas and methods, will increase rather than dimin- ish the world scarcity of wool. China is now exporting her small crop of wool because the native styles of clothing can be supplied by cotton and silk, chiefly cotton. European styles demand wool, and Japan with practically no wool supply is beginning to import and manufacture some foreign wool. The adoption of western styles of clothing by modernized China may be expected to produce a similar result in that country, as it has already done to some extent in India, which now imports $10,000,000 worth of wool and makes nearly $2,000,000 worth. These oriental changes of style are likely to be permanent in contrast to the seasonal changes that beset the world of clothing, especially woolen clothing. The woolen industry is one peculiarly subject to the influences of style. A large part of the woolen cloth is used for external clothing and when the styles in women's dresses suddenly require 6 yards as in 1912, where they previously required 12, it makes dull business and gloom in wool-manufacturing towns of Britain and in the fine wool-growing districts of the southern hemisphere. 1 The cotton grown to meet the new demand would be on the market in a year or even less, while the wool resulting from a desire to increase the output would have to await the maturity of animals yet unborn. 506 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY 4. SUBSTITUTES FOR SHEEP'S WOOL The other animal hair fibers used for fabric seem destined to continue in very secondary place— as the alpaca wool with its resulting fabric, the camel's hair with its fabric, the Cashmere goat's hair with its fabric. Certain coarse felts are made of cow's hair, but the uses for such fabric are limited and most of the hair that might be obtained is unused. The Mohair, fleece of the Angora goat, native of the province of Angora in central Asia Minor, shows well the process of invention and substitution. Its main use is for plush, as for car seats, but of late it has been used to make imitation fur of such reality that detection is difficult. In this capacity it has furnished the coat of the well-known Teddy bear. All of the minor animal substitutes for wool are insignificant in comparison to the greatest substitute of all — cotton. 5. MINOR ANIMAL HAIR PRODUCTS In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, hair cloth was in vogue especially for furniture covering. It is a smooth, black, shiny, clean, cool fabric made from the manes and tails of horses. Hair cloth still has many uses, but this hair is now chiefly used for mattresses, for which purpose it is curled. The bristly hair of the pig is used for many kinds of brushes and the bristles them- selves come in large quantities from China where the patience of the low wage workers prepares them for market. The softer hairs of the badger's coat make shaving brushes and the yet softer camel's hair supplies us with fine paint brushes. 6. SILK How Silk Is Procured. — Hundreds of species of insects spin cocoons in which to pass the chrysalis period of their lives. One of these insects, a moth, most commonly spoken of as the silk worm, makes a particularly fine cocoon, the fiber of which we call silk. The process of spinning is very similar to that by which the spider makes its web, except that the silk worm winds its thread around and around itself, as a result of which it can be easily unwound if the worm is killed — as it may be by roasting — FIBERS, TEXTILES, AND CLOTHING 507 before it cuts the thread by eating a hole in the end of the cocoon to emerge as an adult moth. The fibers are so fine that five are required for fine thread, and ordinary silk thread has ten to twenty fibers. The cocoons are soaked to loosen the fiber, the ends of several strands are placed together and the several cocoons easily unwound to make the thread of raw silk. This laborious process adds greatly to the cost of silk, which is ever the product of much labor. The favorite and chief food of the commercial silk worm is the leaf of the white mulberry, a tree which will grow in the tropics and in the temperate zones as far as the grape extends, so that natural conditions for silk production are good in much of Europe, a large part of the United States, as well as some large part of every other continent. The successful prosecution of the industry, however, requires a second crop of leaves upon the tree and this requires a temperature of 54.5° F. for at least three months. Owing to the great amount of labor involved, the dis- tribution of the production of silk, however, depends not upon climatic conditions, but upon the labor supply, which must be both abundant and highly skilled. The Raising of Silk Worms. — The eggs of the adult moth are carefully collected; and upon hatching, the voracious young worms are kept in a house upon trays which must be kept clean through the weeks during which the greedy worm devours his daily portion of fresh mulberry leaves, brought in at daylight, mostly by women and children. The worm can endure less cold than the mulberry tree, so the worms are kept in heated rooms in Europe and also in parts of China and Japan. Humidity and temperature must be closely watched or epidemics may carry the worms to a speedy death. When the worms have reached adult size, they crawl into bundles of straw to spin the cocoons which the women pick out by hand. Throughout the whole life history of this insect and in the preparation of the fiber, the labor must not only be cheap, but careful, patient, watchful, and deft of hand. It thus becomes an industry that thrives where the labor of women and children is cheap, as in the densely peopled parts of the old world. It is easy to understand why the various attempts at silk growing in the United States have failed, despite the many baskets of sample cocoons that have been produced, 508 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY Percentage Japan 34.1 (JBina 31.7 France 11.7 Italy 7.4 All Others 15.1 Million Pounds 17.0 and despite the great anticipations that accompanied the plant- ing of thousands of mulberry trees which have thriven. Oriental Silk Production. — The production of silk responds to this labor factor so surely, that the industry is readjusting itself in accordance to it. The forcible opening up of China and the modernizing of Japan, and the resulting development of transport facilities have opened the silk growers of the world to the Oriental competition. France and Italy have been growing silk for centuries, the governments are aiding the silk industry all they can, but their silk growers feel Oriental competition and the output has begun to decline, the European crop in 1906-07 averaging 12.8 million pounds and that of 1909-10, 10.5 million pounds. During this period, the Oriental exports increased from 28 million to 36 million pounds per year. The greatest silk-pro- ducing region is China, where it is a house- hold industry of the peasants centered between 30 and 35° north latitude. This corresponds roughly to the Yangtse Valley, a region whose silk output makes its metrop- olis, Shanghai, .the world's greatest silk market. Canton in south China is also a considerable silk center with many silk filatures employing 500 persons each. In Yunnan, southwest China, there is a school of sericulture spreading the knowledge of silk production so that the people may have a substitute crop for the forbidden opium which has been so important there. In various parts of the country, several wild moths produce a marketable kind of silk, so that one-fifth of the Chinese silk is known as wild silk. Japanese Silk Production. — Silk growing is very important in Japan, and this people, being more forward than the Chinese in the use of scientific devices, adopted filatures, or machines for 6.3 4.0 8.1 Total 53.7 Fig. 174. — Produc- tion of raw silk, three- year average, 1908-10. FIBERS, TEXTILES, AND CLOTHING 509 unwinding the cocoons and preparing the raw silk of commerce. The Japanese silk export has increased more rapidly, therefore, than the Chinese export, with the result that the Chinese are now adopting the new method of preparing it. Silk is particularly suited to the conditions that prevail in Japan. The monsoon rains of summer give the moisture needed to make the mulberry trees yield abundant growth of leaves. The small proportion (less than a sixth) of the land that can be cultivated leaves abundant room on the hillside for the mulberry trees and the overcrowded population furnishes the labor. It is natural, therefore, that this opportunity should, in a land of scanty raw materials, be eagerly seized upon, as shown by a 50 per cent, increase in the export of raw silk within five years, 1906-1910. The Japanese export of silk is equal to the entire world production of silk as statistically reported 1 for the five-year period 1876-80 and its value, $65,000,000, comprised 28.5 per cent, of Japan's export and in total amount was greater than the entire exports of Japan two decades before. Silk in India and West Asia. — Early attempts at introducing silk culture in India have led to a considerable production for local use, but the export has never been important nor does it under present conditions promise to be. From India westward the climate of Asia is arid, with dense populations centered here and there where some mountain slope produces sufficient rainfall, as in the small area of Persia between the Elburz Mountains and the Caspian Sea. Here some silk is produced for home use and export, as is also the case in a small district on the south slope of the Caucasus Mountains in the Russian province of Trans- Caucasia. Certain densely peopled valleys of Asia Minor and Syria also contribute a little to the world's supply, but none of these regions seem able to offer or promise serious competition with Japan and China. Their labor conditions are not the equal of those of the orient and they lack the abundant possibilities of tree growth. The Commerce in Silk and Its Production in Europe. — For centuries silk was the mainstay of commerce between the Far East and the Mediterranean world, and the Chinese jealously prevented the export of silk moth's eggs. However, according 1 Domestic consumption of the orient excluded. 510 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY to legend, an enterprising traveller finally broke the embargo and carried some away in a hollow bamboo walking stick, so that in the sixth century A. D., the growth of silk worms become common in Greece, southern Italy, and Spain. In all of these districts the amount produced is now negligible, because the small amount of arable land is given over to crops with a richer harvest than mulberry leaves. But silk has become very impor- tant in northern Italy where, upon the level plains of the Po, three-fourths of the European silk crop is produced. Here a traveller may never see an open field for miles, because of the rows of mulberry trees, bare in early summer, because leaves have been stripped for the silk worms during their seven weeks of rapid growth in the springtime. The intensity of Italian agriculture is attested by the fact that while wheat and other grains are grown between these rows of mulberry trees, the trees themselves are so trimmed that each tree holds out its two branches as arms to its neighbors and upon these outstretched arms grape vines are often trained. Thus three crops are ob- tained from the same land. During the mediaeval prosperity of the Italian city republics, Bologna, Lucca, and other cities of north Italy were famed for their silk manufactures, and in 1515, when Francis the First of France conquered Milan, he introduced Italian silk workers into France. They established the silk-manufacturing industry at Lyons and the cultivation of silk in the valley of the Rhone, where there are now 114,000 silk growers. For a long time it was more important here than in Italy, but the greater density of Italian population in the Po Valley in recent decades has given that district the leadership in European silk production. Pasteur and the Silk-worm Disease. — Silk-worm production affords a fine example of the dependence of industry upon science. In 1853 a silk-worm disease appeared in the Rhone Valley and threatened the silk industry of the world, as the phylloxera later did the grape industry. The French scientist, Pasteur, at the order of the French government, investigated the silk-worm disease and found that, by the use of the micro- scope, he could detect the healthy insects. Only the healthy were permitted to lay eggs and thus a sound generation of worms was produced. The French silk industry, which had FIBERS, TEXTILES, AND CLOTHING 511 declined 90 per cent, between 1853 and 1876, again steadily increased for thirty years. Comparison of Transportation and Labor Factors. — Since the transportation cost is unimportant in silk production, labor is the determining factor in locating the business. The peasant who produces S3.50 worth of wheat must deal with the problem of paying freight on 200 pounds of freight, more or less. If he produces $3.50 worth of raw silk he has to pay freight on only 1 pound. A freight rate of 3 cents per pound is about 1 per cent, on the silk and the same freight is from 150 to 200 per cent, on wheat valuation. The freight is, therefore, an almost negligible factor in sending silk half-way around the world from the place with the most desirable conditions for the production of raw silk to the place with the most desirable conditions for its manufacture. It is easy to understand why the United States, the country with the greatest silk manufacture, does not produce a bale of the raw material. Silk Manufacture in Foreign Countries. — Silk fabrics have long been more largely used in China and Japan than in any other part of the world. Some of the hand-made fabrics are of most excellent quality, but, owing to the relative superiority of Chinese and Japanese in the production of raw silk, and to the influence of western tariffs, the oriental exports of fabrics have been limited to small amounts, and they are chiefly of the inferior goods made by the newly introduced western machinery. Dur- ing the nineteenth century, France has been the great leader among the nations of the world in the manufacture of silk, the center of the industry being in Lyons, in the raw silk-producing section. The Jacquard loom which was invented there early in the nineteenth century produced figured brocades of great beauty and excellence, and French brocades became famous wherever ladies dressed in Parisian style. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, the ease of sewing made possible by sewing machines and the rapid communication established by mail and telegraph, caused fashion in ladies' dressing to change so rapidly that a valuable French brocade which would last for years would long outlast the style. Hence, the prefer- ence was for less expensive, less durable, but equally beautiful fabrics. These the Germans and the Swiss, with their policy 512 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY Percentage Japan 59.6 Italy 19.3 China 16.4 Million Dollars 44.1 of pleasing their foreign customers, promptly supplied. The prosperity of Lyons waned and it took years of depression to convince the manufacturers of that city that their silks were too good for the market. They have recently begun to compete with their eastern neighbors in the manu- facture of the poorer goods desired by the swiftly changing market, and the Lyons output in 1910 amounted to $87,000,000. The Swiss silk manufacturers are scattered through many towns, but Zurich is the chief center of the manufacture of cloth, and at Basel, just across the Swiss bound- ary in Germany, is a great ribbon-manu- facturing center with the largest ribbon mill in the world. The German silk indus- try is like many other industries of that country, rapidly increasing and availing itself of the teachings of science as shown by its manufacture of artificial silk (to be discussed later). British Silk Industry. — The silk industry in England is peculiarly unimportant for a nation so great in textile manufacture. England's early lead in cotton was dupli- cated by the similar early success of France in silk manufacture, which enabled the mills of that country to compete with those of England even in their own market. Of late years there has been some manufacture of cheap silk goods in the cotton and wool districts of England, but the best silk goods used in England are imported, and the total number of silk employees is only about half as great as that in the United States. Silk Manufacture in the United States. — The French manu- facturers have had to meet (in the American markets) with the competition of the American silk manufacture, which has increased with great rapidity from an output of $12,000,000 in 1870 to $103,000,000 in 1905 and $196,000,000 in 1909. This 14.3 12.2 2.5 0.9 France 3.4 All Others 1.3 St Total 74.0 Fig. 175.— United States imports of raw silk, three-year average, 1909-11. FIBERS, TEXTILES, AND CLOTHING 513 has supplied about five-sixths of our consumption and has held the import for some years at a fairly constant though large figure. Over half of the total value of silk production is expended for the raw silk which costs nearly $3 a pound and is furnished to the United States as follows: Japan nearly two-thirds, China one-fifth, Italy one-seventh, France one-thirtieth. STATISTICS OF AMERICAN SILK TRADE Imports (1911) into United States Exports (1911) Country- Raw silk Mfg. silk Silk mfgs. Amt. in lbs. Value from U.S. Japan 14,013,000 6,294,000 2,948,800 1,560,000 $47,336,600 14,057,400 10,264,000 2,013,900 $ 5,056,000 486,600 1,095,700 18,250,000 4,975,000 4,039,000 6,311,000 31,500 Chinese Empire . . Italy $200,500 915,800 Total 26,666,100 $74,998,300 $41,746,800 $1,569,400 Our exports of silk manufactures are quite negligible and the prodigious increase of our production is due largely to the restriction of the market by a protective tariff and to the rapidly rising standard of consumption in America. Every device that permits the cheapening of silk goods places them within the reach of an ever-widening circle of purchasers. There is every prospect of continued increase in the American silk industry, and of continued dependence upon foreign lands for the raw material. We will certainly not produce the raw material and we may expect increased demand for the goods, for every general increase in purchasing power places more people in a position to use this prized luxury. 514 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY Relation of Silk Manufacture to Other Industries. — Silk manufacture is comparatively light work, and the percentage of women operatives in the silk mills is higher than in any other branch of textiles. This predominance of women gives the silk mill a tendency to be what is sometimes called a "parasitic industry"; that is, it is located because of the presence of other industries which employ large numbers of men, so that the wives and daughters of the workmen make a labor supply which en- courages the creation of silk mills. Thus Paterson, N. J., an important place for the manufacture of various classes of iron goods, which employ only men, has long been the most important silk-manufacturing town in the United States, having produced over a quarter of the total silk product in 1890 and about a fifth in 1905. This relation of the silk to heavy industries is well shown in Pennsylvania, where the silk mills are located chiefly in and near the coal-mining towns, especially Scranton and Wilkesbarre, and the cement-manufacturing towns of Allentown and Easton in the Lehigh Valley, and in the agricultural imple- ment-manufacturing town of York, and more recently in the coal and iron region of western Pennsylvania. Silk manufac- turing has not made great headway in New England outside of Connecticut, which is also an important state in the manufacture of machinery and metal goods. In order of value of output, New Jersey ranks first, Pennsylvania second, and New York third, but industrially, the cities of northern New Jersey are suburbs of New York and the New York-New Jersey silk district may be considered as one. It is thus to be seen that with the near-by mills of Connecticut and Pennsylvania, silk manufacture is the most concentrated of all our important textile industries. Artificial Silk. — The silk worm makes silk by drawing the fine threads from a jelly-like mass in its head. This material is made from the cells in the worm's vegetable food, as changed by the chemistry of its body. Man has copied the worm's process. By chemical process of the laboratory, saw dust or cotton waste may be converted into a jelly much like that from which the caterpillar makes his silk. By air pressure this cellulose is driven through very small apertures in glass. Each aperture makes filaments so small that, as with silk, it takes ten to twenty of them reeled together to make a thread. This process which began in FIBERS, TEXTILES, AND CLOTHING 515 France has spread to Germany and Switzerland, England and America, and the output is increasing with a suggestive speed. In 1909, the output was 3 million pounds, and in 1911, it was 13 million or nearly a fourth as great as that of real silk. This country used 914,000 pounds in 1909 and imported twice that much two years later. The price, which is declining, was $1.70 per pound, while that of real silk was $2.80 per pound. At first artificial silk was used for woof or weft threads only, but of late it has been used for warp also. Its chief use to date has been for edgings and trimmings, for which because of its superior luster it is actually preferred. It should be noted that this most suggest- ive fiber, now in its infancy, is made now chiefly from cotton, an abundant raw material. Artificial lace and artificial silk tulle of high quality, especially suitable for women's hats, have been successfully made by molding cellulose of the kind from which the artificial silk is made (U. S. Con. Rep., July 17, 1911). These new products of science will apparently give cheap silk to the masses. It is too soon to tell whether or not they will displace real silk. 7. THE PLANT STALK FIBERS Machinery has revolutionized the textile industry by giving it new ways to produce its old results. It has revolutionized it also by giving the new seed fiber, cotton, in place of the stalk fiber, linen, and it holds the possibility of further revolution by giving us yet other cheap stalk fibers. Of plant stalk fibers there are many. Practically all the larger plants have some form of fiber in them. Several thousand plants have stalk fibers which are of good quality for textile use if they could be secured in cheap abundance, and several dozen such fibers are actually in exten- sive use in various parts of the world. This group of fibers is of unknown antiquity and because of gin-cheapened cotton, it has probably been of less relative importance to man in the century 1812-1912 than in any century for many centuries. It has been displaced for the time being, but there is no guarantee of the continuance of cotton's leadership in plant fibers. Some stalk fiber cheapened by machinery may compete with it, but just at present the plant stalk fibers with all their superiorities over cotton are at low ebb. 516 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY Flax and Its Preparation. — Flax is now, as in the past, the most important plant stalk fiber entering into our clothing. This plant, a member of the nettle family, has been yielding linen since the pre-historic Lake dwellers inhabitated the Swiss lakes, and the mummies, bound up in linen cloth, were placed in the Egypt- ian tombs four or five thousand years ago. Before the invention of the cotton gin, the common stinging nettle was much used in Europe as a substitute for flax. In 1790 when cotton was less used in manufacture than China grass or ramie is now, flax was the most important of all vegetable fibers. It was grown on almost every European and American farm, and in many an old American home the implements for the preparation of flax are still to be found. The introduction of cheap cotton caused flax to disappear from gardens at about the time of the passage of the spinning wheel and the hand loom. The plant is somewhat branching, but otherwise resembles the small cereals in appearance and method of cultivation. For fiber it must be pulled, piled up to dry, and the seed removed with an iron comb; then the straw is "retted, " — a process of partial decay to make easy the separation of fiber. In some places it is retted in bunches, spread upon the ground of moist meadows; in others, as in Ireland, it is immersed in water. In Belgium, where a small flax industry still survives, the water of the river Leys is of pe- culiar fitness in retting flax, and in it the straw is immersed for a few days' time, then dried, subjected to two more wettings, during which it decomposes and is ready for the "breaking." This is accomplished by running the straw through rollers, after which the scrutching or separation of the fiber is accomplished, some- times by hand, sometimes by running the straw through a machine with dull knives. Fibers thus obtained are from 8 to 50 inches in length, and are strong and durable, but the labor, coming at the busy season of a farming year, has made the method impracticable wherever wages were high and import of commercial products easy. Flax is unquestionably superior to cotton for many uses, but from the standpoint of competition on the point of cost, it rests under yet other handicaps. Although flax grows in a far wider range of climate than cotton, it is much more easily injured by drought or wet weather and the difficulty of preparing it gives FIBERS,. TEXTILES, AND CLOTHING 517 lack of uniformity, a serious handicap to the manufacturer. The fiber is impregnated with pectose, so that it is more difficult than cotton to manufacture. It requires more power and more labor. Machinery has increased the linen spinner's efficiency only about one-half as much as it has the cotton spinner's efficiency. The Distribution of the Flax and Linen Industries. — Scotland and the north of Ireland, long important centers of flax growing, now have a greatly reduced production, but the manufactures that developed from the local flax still persist in increased quan- tity. Some flax of excellent quality is produced in the Po Valley of northern Italy, but the great paijt of the world's supply is now produced in northern Russia; where labor is cheaper than: in any other part of Europe suited to flax growing. The manufacture of flax into linen is so important in the United Kingdom that more than $40,000,000 worth of flax prpdu'cts are annually im- ported, and 100,000 people are employed. The north of Ireland, (especially near Belfast) and the south of Scotland, which a century ago grew flax and manufactured it in hand looms,; now are i the centers of the world's finest factory operated linen manufactures, excellent illustrations of the influences of an early start as the basis for an industry. In Germany 'the linen manufactures of Westphalia are famed, as ;are; also those of Bohemia and of Belgium. Linen rhanufacture has thus far been exotic in ; the United States, and is of small amount, but a fraction of the im- port, which amounted to $18,000,000 in 1911. We do not pro- duce the finest grades of cloth nor the thread from which we pro- duce the small amount of cloth now made. Collar and cuff manufacturing is one of the most important American industries using linen, and this branch of manufacture shows a most astonish- ing concentration in the city of Troy, New York, where nine- tenths of the entire product of the United States is made. This concentration is best explained by the fact that, if a new collar and cuff factory is to be established, the best place in which to find labor already trained for the work is in the city of Troy. 1 The Range of the Flax Plant and the Flax-seed Industry. — While flax produces a valuable seed (linseed) the plants grown for 1 It is stated that the wife of a Troy blacksmith first made shirts with detachable collars about seventy-five years ago and that a Methodist minis- ter encouraged this home industry. See R. H. Whitbeck, Journal of Geog- raphy, Oct., 1909. 518 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY fiber are pulled before they blossom so that flax fiber districts have no valuable by-product of seed as is the case with cotton growing. Flax thus gives rise to two industries, one, fiber, the other, grain. The plant has an exceedingly wide range, having produced good fiber all over the eastern United States and Europe from Scotland, Sweden, and Russia to Italy. It is now in cultiva- tion from Algeria to Archangel, the present great center of fiber production. The flax fiber crop requires a fertile soil with a cool Hi Cultivated primarily for seed production; straw not used for fiber except to limited extent in Russia and Siberia. lH^i Cultivated primarily for fiber; straw used for fiber and seed for oil, except in Ireland where seed is usually not saved. Fio. 176. — Distribution of flax in cultivation. (Original by Lyster Dewey.) moist climate. The southern part of the Russian flax fiber district has the latitude of Winnipeg, thereby suggesting great flax areas in Canada. For seed it will do well in warmer dryer climates and poorer soils. While the fiber is grown in Europe, the seed crop is grown in America, Africa, and India. The cultivation of the flax plant, like silk culture, shows fine responses to labor conditions— density of population. Varieties producing poor fiber but fine seed are grown in several of the important wheat regions, as the Argentine Republic (one-third of the world's crop), Central Russia (one- fifth of the world's crop), the winter wheat belt of the Red River FIBERS, TEXTILES, AND CLOTHING 519 of the north United States and adjacent districts (one-fourth of the world's crop) and northern India (one-eighth of the world's crop). In all these districts, with a total crop of 100 million bushels, flax is, from the agricultural standpoint, not a fiber but a cereal planted like wheat, harvested with the most improved reaping machinery, threshed by steam, and handled in every respect like wheat with no thought of saving the fiber that is in the straw. Indeed, the straw is often burned. The laborious hand processes in sparsely peopled countries like Dakota and Argentina are entirely impossible, but fit well into the scanty opportunities of north Russia. The seed, upon being crushed, yields linseed oil, much used for making paints and varnishes. The "oil-cake" that remains is highly valued as food for livestock, and is shipped in thousands of tons from Dakota by way of New York, Montreal, Boston and Philadelphia to feed the herds of dairy cows in Holland, Den- mark, and England. The oil itself is a raw material for the paint factories of Philadelphia and other eastern American cities and is used wherever the painter climbs his ladder. A Possible Revolution In Linen. — By a recently perfected process it is claimed that much of the old and laborious process of preparing flax fiber can be entirely avoided by a speedy mechan- ical operation which may be likened to the threshing of wheat, or the ginning of cotton, and which extracts the fiber from flax straw in a few hours. Unfortunately the long fibers are broken into lengths of less than an inch. This must weaken the fabric and limit its uses, but a Massachusetts factory has been built for its preparation and manufacture and it suggests great re-ad- justments due to the competition of cheap flax produced upon the world's frontier grain fields and sold at a much lower price than the cotton which is yet expensively picked by human fingers and sold at ten to fifteen cents a pound. The success of the cotton picking machine and the flax decorticator, if both should come into use, will enable mankind to reap the benefit of the great industrial race to the fabric market — a cheapened clothing supply. If plant breeders set themselves to the task there is good reason to think that varieties of flax can be produced capable of yielding both seed and fiber. Hemp. — Hemp, the fiber of common cordage, is closely allied 520 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY to flax, of which it is really but a coarser variety and therefore fitted for coarser uses. It is used in almost every rope factory in the United States and Europe. The fiber is separated from the stalk by processes similar to those used in flax preparation. It grows in the same kind of climate, being produced to a small extent in Kentucky, in the north of Ireland, in Scotland, in north Italy, to a small extent on the low alluvial lands of Lincolnshire, England, and to much the greatest extent in the flax districts of northern Russia whence comes the bulk of the world's supply. Fig. 177. — Distribution of hemp in cultivation. (Original by Lyster Dewey.) The American hemp district in the Bluegrass section of Ken- tucky has for a long time had a declining output due to the com- petition of cheaper labor in other hemp-growing countries, but especially through the competition of cheap jute. Due to this influence, our present hemp import of about six thousand tons is but a quarter as great as the imports of 1880. Recently, after a long series of failures, a hemp-breaking machine has been in- vented and while it is too soon for its ultimate results to be indi- cated, it is causing the large-scale growth of hemp in northern Indiana. The growers of Kentucky, after a life-long series of disappointments with hemp machines, are slow to adopt the improvement, although the self-rake reaper is rapidly replacing the old hand-used hemp hook. FIBERS, TEXTILES, AND CLOTHING 521 Jute, the Fiber for Cheapest of All Fabrics. — This fiber is produced by two species of plants which will grow in many trop- ical countries, yet they are cultivated to a commercial extent almost exclusively in northern and eastern Bengal near Calcutta, where, along the overflowing Ganges, there is the right combina- tion of tropical climate, flooded land, and abundant labor. While adapted to all soils, most of the product is grown on the overflow land near rivers because the plants easily stand flooding. Like flax, hemp, and many other fibers that are not gummy, it is separated from the stalk by being soaked in water. After the bark is stripped off by hand, the plant tissue is washed away by beating the plant upon the surface of the water in which the la- borer stands. Jute has been long used in India where common gunny sack was first produced by hand looms. In 1835 the manufacture was taken up in Dundee, Scotland. The origin of this industry in that city is an interesting example of the chance location of industries. In the eighteenth century epoch of hand-loom textiles the vicinity of Dundee was famed for its good flax which its people made into linen. After the removal of the source of flax supply to Russia, the Dundee weavers began to import and manufacture some hemp which was grown in these new flax districts and which differed so little from flax that for some uses the two fibers were rivals. Then some hemp came from India, and with it the other Indian fiber, jute, which bore the same relation to hemp that hemp did to flax. As a. result, Dundee established a jute industry in which it had for a long time a monoply in the entire western world. By way of Liverpool and London, it exported and yet exports large quantities of gunny sacks, the cheapest of all strong fabrics — to America for the shipment of wheat and corn and the covering of cotton bales; to Brazil for coffee sacks, to Argentina for wheat sacks; and to Australia for wool bales. During the latter part of the nineteenth century, jute mills were established in other linen manufacturing centers of the United Kingdom, on the continent, in Calcutta itself, and also in Boston and Philadelphia. Calcutta is now the greatest center of manu- facture, with total exports of raw and finished products amount- ing to $100,000,000 — a greater addition to the wealth of India than the silk industry of the United States is to this country.. 522 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY The lustre of well-prepared jute makes it possible to mix it with silk for silk manufacture and it is also used to some extent in the carpet mills of Philadelphia and many other cities. We are importing from 60,000 to 100,000 tons of it per year and it costs less than four cents a pound delivered in America. Minor Fibers Called Hemp. — Several fibers rendering service similar to that of hemp have, upon their appearance in the world market, been called hemp regardless of their origin. Among these are sun hemp and deccani hemp, much used in India. Both are fibers from the inner bark of plants. In parts of New Zealand and adjacent islands the people cut two or three times a year a wild plant resembling the flag, to secure its fiber — the- New Zealand hemp or phorium of commerce. This fiber is exported to Europe and, to a limited extent, to the United States, to be used for the same purpose as hemp. But its extensive use is prevented by the fact that it is difficult to remove the fiber from the gummy substance of the leaf. The New Zealand government has recently offered a bonus of $58,400 to the inventor of a machine that will successfully decorticate this fiber. Manila hemp, the best of common rope materials, is not hemp at all, but a coarse fiber sometimes 8 to 10 feet long, found in the pithy stalk of the abaca, a fruitless member of the banana family. This plant grows wild in the Philippines and the almost uninhabitated Molucca Islands, but is cultivated only in the Philippines. It thrives best on the moist slopes of volcanic hills in a moist climate, but it will not do well in water-soaked or very dry soil. This plant conspires with the climate to keep the Filipino from steady work. Man does not usually like to work regularly and it is often not necessary in the productive climate in which fortune has placed the Filipino. He can from time to time plant a few suckers of the abaca plant, and in two or three years he can cut them down, split them into strips a couple of inches wide, scrape away the .pulp with a sharp knife and sell the long, white, shiny, fiber to travelling Chinese merchants, who gather it up and take it to Manila. They pay sufficient cash to meet the small financial needs of the tropic family for a few days or weeks until pressing need makes it desirable to scrape a little more fiber. Attempts at introducing Manila hemp grow- FIBERS, TEXTILES, AND CLOTHING 523 ing into other parts of the world have thus far failed, and it is practically a monopoly of the Philippines, where there is a great abundance of admirable, unused abaca land. The fiber has been much the most important export from these eastern possessions of the United States, and is shipped from Manila, Hong Kong, and Singapore to London, Liverpool, New York, Philadelphia, and San Francisco. It makes the strongest of rope, which is especially prized in the rigging of ships, and when worn out for this use it is ground up to make the exceedingly strong paper known as Manila. It is also much used for the manufacture of twine used in binding up the bundles of wheat in self-binding reapers, for which purpose approximately $20,000,000 a year are expended in the United States for twine made of Manila hemp, and of its cheaper rival the sisal or henequin, which is the great money crop of Yucatan. In 1907 the abaca furnished 60 per cent, of the exports of the Philippines, but in 1911 a fairly constant export had become but 33 per cent, with coprah 29 per cent, and sugar 25 per cent, crowding it for first place. In this country the use of Manila, costing 5.8 cents per pound (1911), is increasing more slowly than sisal, costing 5.1 cents per pound (1911). The rise of the henequin or sisal grass industry is due solely to the invention of a machine which effectively extracts the fibers from the long, fleshy, spiny leaves. The henequin, an agave, close kin of the century plant, is a plant of the arid land, doing well in dry, spongy soils, particularly if they are limestone. It requires no cultivation other than the occasional chopping down of rival plants, and yields an annual harvest for from six to twenty-five years. It is produced to some extent upon the limestone soils of the Bahamas, but the great center of shipment of this product is the port of Progreso, in Yucatan, from which railroads radiate over the semi-arid limestone plain. This region is so honeycombed with caves that there are no surface' streams. It produces no money crop but the sisal, and at times an insuffi- cient quantity of supply crops, of which corn is the chief. In years of crop shortage the sisal growers import corn from the United States in considerable quantities as food for both man and beast. Turks Island in the West Indies, which somewhat resembles Yucatan in soil and climate, also exports a little hene- quin; and it had been successfully introduced into Cuba, Hawaii, 524 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY German, and British East Africa, and India, so that there may be possible re-adjustments in the supply of this fiber when Eastern and Western labor come into full competition. Inasmuch as this fiber requires the semi-arid tropics and the tropics are bounded by deserts, it is plain that there are two strips of land encircling the globe in which sisal districts may be found. Hawaii with dry lands on the leeward side of her islands has one sisal plantation of 1,100 acres, regular exports, and expects the fiber to be one of her leading exports. It is suggestive of the trend toward vegetable fibers, that in a period of generally rising prices, the prices of imported sisal and Manila have dropped between 1907 and 1911 from 7.5 cents to 5.1 cents per pound for sisal, 1 and from 9.9 cents to 5.8 cents for Manila. Other Mexican Fibers. — The plateaus of northern Mexico are so dry that the people have considerable difficulty in growing enough wheat, corn, and beans to feed themselves on this rather low diet, but here, as in Yucatan, the aridity furnishes a money crop. Another member of the agave family supplies an export in the istle fiber, used to some extent for cheap cordage. A third member of the agave family, the well-known century plant, is cultivated in Mexico as a fiber plant to yield the pita fiber of commerce. Coconut Fiber. — The coconut, widely distributed along the tropic seashore, contributes to commerce the well-known hard- shelled nut, the dried coconut meat known as copra, and lastly the coir fiber, a part of the thick and spongy husk which protects the nut from bursting when it falls from its great height to the ground. By soaking the husk in water, the pithy packing between the fibers can be washed out by hand or by machinery, leaving the stiff fibers which are used for making brushes and ropes very durable in sea water, and the coarse, strong cocoa matting so often used upon the floors of public buildings. Matting. — The ordinary matting used as floor covering is practically all exported through Hong Kong. It is largely produced in the adjacent parts of China, but it is also a native product of the adjacent Tonquin or French Indo China. The 1 The dependence of one industry upon another and of the automobile upon prosperity is shown by the decline of automobiles in Merida the metropolis of Yucatan (pop. 62,000) the sisal state, from over 200 when sisal was high, to 40 after the price declined. FIBERS, TEXTILES, AND CLOTHING 525 farmers grow a special kind of straw for the manufacture of this characteristic tropic floor covering. Ramie or China Grass. — The best of plant fibers is that known as rhea in India, ramie in Malay countries, and China grass in many other parts of the world. It is twice as strong as the best Russian hemp. It excels all other fibers in its resistance to the influence of water, and is used, to make sails for racing yachts, where expense is no consideration. In appearance it rivals silk. It may be used for a host of purposes from the ship's cable and sail cloth to velvet or lace. It is much worn as summer clothing in China, and factories produce fabric from it in England and other European countries. In comparison to cotton the climatic range of the plant is wonderful. It thrives in the torrid zone and as far north as Normandy, where it is grown to a limited extent. It will thrive in many parts of the United States, is grown commercially in Mexico, but chiefly in China. The reason this wonderful fiber has not been extensively used is the great difficulty thus far experienced in separating it from the stalk of the plant in which it grows, and from the gummy substances which adhere to it. As with hemp, many announce- , ments of a successful decorticator have been made, and success in this line holds the possibility of a revolution in the world's clothing, cordage, and fiber industries. Cheap ramie, grown almost anywhere and decorticated by a machine, may, in com- bination with cheap flax, give unthought of competition to cotton even if picked by machinery. New Fibers and Process. — The probability of changes in the textile world which will enable us to meet our needs from cheaper sources is indicated by three recent inventions now in the experi- mental stage. In Germany paper yarn cloth is being made in qualities that are reported to be easily fireproofed, well suited to upholstery and curtains and possibly for some clothing pur- poses. In England a process has been devised for making cloth from the fiber of Posidonia Australia, a seaweed of the southern seas from which it is estimated that the fibers can be prepared for the spinner at two cents per pound. From Austria comes the account of a method of extracting a jute-like fiber of good quality from ordinary straw by a process of boiling which sug- gests the process by which we have taken wood, digested it by 526 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY boiling it in chemicals, thereby extracting the fiber which serves us in the manifold uses of paper. The possibility of fiber from paper, straw, seaweed, ramie, and mechanically-won flax offer suggestive vistas of conjecture. (U. S. Con. Rep., Feb. 12, Mar. 23, and May 16, 1912). 8. CLOTHING Similar Development of the Textile and Clothing Industries. — At the end of a century and a quarter of machine manufacture and world commerce, the making of clothing is now passing through an evolution similar to that which has occurred in the textile in- dustries. The cloth was at first made in the homes of the workers from materials which were given out on contract. Later the whole work was done in the large factory with the aid of machinery. Some clothing is now made by the old domestic system, some on contract in the homes of the workers, and some in factories and shops. The supplying of sailor's clothing was the start of the ready-made clothing industry. In 1850 the sewing machine opened great possibilities, which led to the widespread establish- ment of the industry in 1861-65, when the Civil War demanded ready-made clothing for millions of absent men. In the latter quarter of the nineteenth century, the industry spread and lo- cated itself in the great cities. Great abuses arose through the "sweat shop," home work in crowded apartments, often at very low wages. In recent years legislation, aided by the invention of factory machinery, has partly broken up the ''sweat shop" system and factories now make clothing more cheaply than can the most diligent workers toiling in their own homes at any fair wage. The first decade of this century was, as a consequence, a period of rapid increase in the manufacture of men's and wom- en's ready-made clothing in factories rather than in sweat shops. In the sweat shop five persons usually work on a coat, each doing a particular part. In some of the great factories, as many as a hundred persons work on each coat, and the total amount of time required to produce a given output has been reduced to one- third or even to one-tenth of that previously required before the introduction of the greater division of labor, new cutting machines, and the electric-driven sewing machines. FIBERS, TEXTILES, AND CLOTHING 527 Percentage " " New York 50.6 Why It is a City Industry. — Clothing manufacture belongs to large cities because of the double advantage of nearness to market and to labor. It is an advantage to be near the center where the product is sold, and the successful selling of ready-made clothing requires a market where vast numbers of per- sons are supplied, so that, by the law of aver- ages, all of each of the many sizes of clothing may be called for. As the market widens it permits the finer and finer subdivision of the sizes, and the greater possibility of an exact fit for each person. The large city also possesses the labor which is so large a factor in this in- dustry in which the transport of the raw ma- terial is so easy. The manufacture of clothing is concentrated to an astonishing but declining degree in the city of New York, the greatest distributing center of the United States, where it is the leading industry, with an output valued at nearly half a billion dollars per year and equal to that of all the other cities of the country. Chicago is second, Philadelphia third, Baltimore fourth, Cincinnati fifth, Rochester sixth, and Boston and St. Louis next in order. This great predominance of New York is due in large part to the unusual labor condition that exists because it is the chief place for the landing of the new immi- grant. Tens of thousands of these people know nothing of the language and little of the country, and they are accustomed to low wages and inexpensive standards of life. The clothing factory, where each person does a small operation, offers these helpless ones an opportunity to acquire in a few days the skill to make a better wage than they had in Europe. The industry in all the American centers is usually carried on by foreign-born persons newly arrived in this country. The standardizing of clothing is steadily advancing and with it new additions to the list of manufactured articles. Children's and women's clothes, Chicago 10.8 Philadelphia 5.1 Cincinnati Boston Rochester Cleveland 3.8 2.8 S.8 2.5 1.7 All others 19.9 Fig. 178.— United States clothing man- ufacture by cities. 1905. 528 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY such as shirt waists, which a few years ago were made to measure at home or in the tailor and milliner shops, are now turned out by- thousands in factories. The small tailor is also suffering from the competition of the great factory through the competition of made-to-measure mail-order business. By this innovation, a country merchant in Texas shows a book of samples to a customer, measures him, and the suit is made in a New York, Rochester or Chicago factory. Clothing Manufacture in the Old World. — The use of ready- made clothing is less general in Europe than America, chiefly because the lower wages make it less necessary to use machinery. In Great Britain, London occupies a position similar to that of New York, and the work is there done in the poorer or eastern end of that city by newly arrived immigrants of the same races of people who do the work in New York and Chicago. The only difference to point out in London and some large Continental cities is the greater proportion of sweat shops and the smaller proportion of factory workers as compared to American cities.. But factory-made clothing is steadily advancing, as evidenced by the recent opening of a factory in Barcelona, Spain, with 1,600 workers, using American sewing machines electrically driven. The increase in the use of ready-made clothing seems certain to increase, for it is attacking the market at the bottom and at the top. The people of Jerusalem, Constantinople, and Quito are reported as purchasing cheap hats, coats, and working clothes of European manufacture — Austrian, German, British, French. At the other end of the market is the well-known American advance in the quality and sale of factory-made clothes. Manufacturing of clothing is increasing in the wool-manufac- turing cities of Yorkshire. Factories here export the product to the British colonies and also make up clothing upon the specifica- tions of tailors living in other localities. The people of Guate- mala, for example, find that they can get suits made to measure in England and delivered by parcels post for only $2 more than it costs at home. It is interesting to note that as Japan's industrial evolution advances along Western lines, a factory-made clothing industry begins to develop there also. FIBERS, TEXTILES, AND CLOTHING 529 REFERENCES See General References Annual Wool Review, National Association of Manufacturers, Boston. Bulletin of National Association of Wool Manufacturers. Annual Volume, Boston. From Wool to Cloth. Booklet by American Woolen Co., Boston, describing process and well illustrated. The Supply and Distribution of Cotton, a bulletin issued at intervals by the Bureau of the Census. XI. S. Department of Agriculture has numerous publications on cotton growing. Knapp, S. A. Causes of Southern Rural Conditions and the Small Farm as an Important Remedy. Yearbook of Department of Agriculture, 190&. Dewey, Lystbr H. Fibers used for Binder Twine. Yearbook of Depart- ment of Agriculture, 1911. CHAPTER XIII LEATHER AND RUBBER i. LEATHER, RAW MATERIALS, AND MANUFACTURE Antiquity and Distribution of Leather. — Leather is made by cleaning and treating skins so that they will keep, and the skins are furnished by a great variety of animals. Naturally the domestic animals — the ox, sheep, goat, horse, and pig' — lead, but many other animals contribute their small quota to the world's leather. Among these are the alligator and crocodile, the manatee, or sea cow of tropical rivers, the monkey, the serpents, and the wolves. The skin of man himself is at times converted into excellent leather, and the white whale of the Arctic Sea yields a strong aDd water-tight skin called porpoise hide. With this great variety of sources, practically every trading people sends some kind of skins to the world's market, and even among the lowest savages skins are the chief riches. Leather is as old as trade and the industry contributes to the commerce of every nation and every people, sometimes in the form of hides and of raw materials for tanning, sometimes as finished leather, which is the raw material of shoe factories and other leather works, and, finally, in the form of shoes and other leather manufactures. The Trade in Hides and Skins. — The term hides is applied to the skins of cattle, cows, and horses; skins, to those from sheep, goats, and smaller animals. The United States leads all other countries in the manufacture of leather, and although the meat of animals is one of our greatest exports, the import of hides and skins, amounting to nearly $100,000,000 a year, is one of the greatest items of our import trade. Practically every coun- try in the world contributes some of these raw materials. Of goat skins alone we import over a hundred million a year, their 1 The difficulty of curing pork after it is skinned causes us to lose a large leather resource estimated at $3,000,000 per year in Britain alone. 530 LEATHER AND RUBBER 531 value is equal to that of the cattle hides and they come chiefly from India (32 per cent.), China (15 per cent.), Mexico (9 per cent.), Brazil (7 per cent.), Morocco, and South Africa, all of which countries have the arid conditions in which the goat thrives better than any other domestic animal. The hides of cattle come largely from the Argentine Republic (34 per cent.), a great cattle range like our own western plains, and from the Canadian and Mexican (12 per cent.) extensions of the American plains and plateaus comes another large part of our hide supply. We also draw by forwarding from United Kingdom, France, and Germany, and from every country in Central and South America, because dried or salted ox hides, proof against rain, dirt, and blows, baled in any size or form, carried by any means, are one of the safest and most convenient commodities that can be carried over rough and difficult pack trails. The raw hides export much more easily than leather and the lack of indus- trial development in those countries makes tanning impossible there. In addition to the importation of hides from the rough, the arid, the poor, and the undeveloped countries, which cannot tan, we also get them from the richest and greatest manufacturing nations in the world — England, Germany, France, and Russia — where the fuller utilization of resource, due to a dense population, has produced a scarcity of tanning materials in which the United States is the richest country in the world. The Tanning Process and Materials. — Tanning usually con- sists in treating the skin with a strong astringent, tannin, a very common vegetable substance which unites with certain elements in the hide and changes it from a material prone to decay, to one of great durability. Tannin, like sugar, is widely distributed among plants and is found in workable quantities in all conti- nents. Its usefulness in tanning seems to have been discovered independently, long ago, in many parts of the world. Columbus found the American Indians with leather of excellent quality, and about the only people who do not know how to tan it are the central African tribes south of the Soudan. Until a half century ago, the peoples of Europe and America depended for tanning almost entirely upon the bark of oak in southern, and hemlock in northern, locations. The growing scarcity of forests and the increased supply of hides whjch 532 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY world commerce produced, has created a lively trade in other tannin-producing materials, so that now no less than fifty of them are in use. With the increase in transport, there is a growing tendency to ship these materials in concentrated forms, thus lessening transportation costs. The concentrates were formerly made only in tanning factories where used, but now they are to a greater extent made near the centers of production. Thus the oak bark which England imported from Holland, Belgium, Austro-Hungary, and Italy contained from 10 to 12 per cent, of tannin, while the concentrated form now shipped has about 30 per cent. The oak wood itself, which has from 2 to 5 per cent, of tannin, contributes its share through extraction from saw dust and waste scraps yielded by the saw mills of Hungary and Italy. In central Europe tannin is also extracted from the bark of Norway spruce for shipment to the tanners of England and Germany. England gets from India another tanning material known as myrobolans, the dried fruit of a leguminous tree growing abun- dantly in the region of Agras and central India and furnishing the chief tanning material of that large country. Sumac is a shrub or small tree growing wild in Austria and the Balkan States of Europe and in the Appalachian region of the United States. In Sicily, it is cultivated for its leaves, which, from the standpoint of the producer, are a crop not unlike hay, being regularly cut and dried, and shipped to the tanneries powdered and in sacks. Some wild sumac is gathered in Virginia and other Appalachian districts of eastern United States, but competition of other tannin materials and the rise of wages in Appalachia have checked for a time the American sumac industry. The Sicilian sumac industry fits well into the industrial conditions of that overpopulated island. The plant grows without tillage on land too dry and rough for other crops, and it affords employment when other work fails and other crops do not need attention. Valonia, a rich tannin material, is nothing more than the acorn cups of the valonia oak, picked up by women and children in the forests of Turkey, Asia Minor, and the Balkan Mountains, and shipped to England where it has largely replaced the use of oak bark now so scarce in that country. LEATHER AND RUBBER 533 Australia exports the bark of the black wattle tree, a member of the acacia family, with bark yielding as much as 40 per cent, tannin, this making it the richest of all tanning materials. In Natal this tree is planted for its rich harvest of bark which it yields in from five to twelve years. The most important development in the tannin-extract indus- tries is the rapid increase in the production of quebracho extract in the Argentine Republic. The quebracho tree (the name means axe breaker), is a medium-sized tree with a very hard wood' containing 20 per cent, or more of tannin which renders the wood almost indestructible in the ground, thus making it very valuable for railroad ties. Its richness in tannin has caused a rapid increase in the shipment of the extract to the tanneries of England, Germany, and the United States, over 80 million pounds now being used annually in this country. There is a great supply of quebracho in the Argentine Republic, as it seems to be found throughout a large part of Gran Chaco — an extensive, unsettled tropical forest in the northeastern part of that country. One company here employs 30,000 workmen and also raises cattle, a fact that indicates the destruction of the forests. Since the wood is heavier than water and is very difficult to get and transport, the extracting plants are, like saw mills, located as near as possible to the place where the trees are cut. When used alone the quebracho extract makes inferior leather, but in combination with other materials, its results pass in world's commerce. In the Mediterranean countries, where the chestnut is common, this wood is furnishing an extract, and the same industry has recently been established in the Appalachian districts of the United States. While this wood is much poorer in tannin than quebracho, it is light and soft, grows in open forests and is vastly easier to get to the mill than the heavy tropical wood. The chestnut tree increases in tannin content with age, and in America, at least, with lower latitudes. In New York the tannin content is about 4 per cent., in southern Pennsylvania about 6 per cent., at Lynchburg, Va., about 12 per cent., in Tennessee, 14 per cent., and even higher in north Georgia. After the chestnut has been cut to bits and the tannin digested out of it the pulp that remains is used for the manufacture of low-grade paper. The imports of tanning materials into Germany, the greatest 534 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY importer of these materials, show well the widely scattered origins of tannin. GERMAN IMPORTS OF TANNING MATERIALS, 1910 Extracts Tons Oak, pine, and chestnut 29,076.7 Whereof from France 19,251 .8 Quebracho 9,742.9 Sumac 629.2 Quebracho and other woods 141,060.8 Algarobilla and bablah (from Chile) 481 . 7 Dividivi (from Colombia and Venezuela) 6,696 . 8 Myrobolan (from India) 17,578. 1 Acorn cups, galls, and valonia (chiefly from Asiatic Turkey) 24,092.8 Gallnuts (chiefly from China) 3,123 . 6 The United States, with its large domestic supplies, imports a small quantity of tanning materials. The Making of Leather. — The United States makes over $300,- 000,000 worth of leather per year. The industry, which gives employment to 50,000 people, is one that has had greater changes in material than method. The common method is to put layers of bark between the hides and then soak in water while the tannin does the work. The supply of oak bark, which was the chief dependence of Europe until 1850, lasted longer in the United States, because of our great forest resources, so that the forest with its bulky bark located the American tanning industry down to the end of the nineteenth century. The valuable hides and leather were easily portable. Tanneries were small affairs like the little country grist mill, and were scattered in rural hamlets and mountain valleys throughout Appalachia and New England. Hundreds of thousands of acres of oak and hemlock forests were bought by tanners who cut down millions of good trees simply to strip them of their bark and let the logs rot because bark could be carried from rough nooks whence it was unprofitable to move the logs, and bark could be used in localities where there was no market for such a bulky commodity as lumber. The tanners often kept a team busy hauling hides and leather to and from some port, as Alexandria, Baltimore, or Richmond. LEATHER AND RUBBER 535 Percentage " Pennsylvania 83.8 Wisconsin 13.6 Massachusetts 12.2 New Jersey 8.7 New York 8.4 Michigan 4.7 Illinois 4.5 All Others 24.1 Million Dollars 77.9 Since 1870 we have had a remarkable diminution in the number of leather-manufacturing establishments, six-sevenths of the total having disappeared. The old tannery has followed the country grist mill. Many an Appalachian county that once had five or ten tanneries, now has none. But the capital invested in tanning has increased four fold since 1870 and the value of the product has increased 60 per cent. Bark tanneries are still dependent upon the location of forests, but the building of railways has made it economical to carry bark by rail to a large tannery rather than to have many small tanneries away from the railroad. We have, therefore, two bark-tanning belts, one reaching the whole length of the Appalachian Moun- tains from New York to Georgia and including Virginia on the east and Ten- nessee on the west, the other in the hem- lock region running from Massachusetts to Wisconsin, both of which are important leather states. Chemical Tanning and Its Effects. — Fortunately for the forest resources of the United States and the world, a new tanning industry has arisen practically independent of wood materials because it depends upon chemical compounds of chromium. This chrome process was first developed in Philadelphia, where it has grown with great rapidity and helped to make that city the greatest leather- manufacturing center in the world. The chrome leather industry, depending on factory products, labor, and markets, tends to locate in manufacturing centers rather than forest districts and since it depends almost entirely upon imported goat skins for its raw material, there is some advantage in being near the ports of entry. While still importing small quantities ($5,000,000 in 1911) 44.7 40.0 28.4 27.6 15.3 14.9 79.1 Total 327.9 Fig. 179.— Leather tanned, cured and finished in United States, 1909. 536 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY of special European makes, the United States is doubling its leather export ($40,000,000 in 1911) every ten years. Two fac- tors explain our leather export. One is the forest for the un- rivalled bark-tanned sole leather. The other factor is the new chrome process, particularly in connection with several patented processes for leathers of especial finish such as glazed, enamel, patent, and vici kid. The bark is a natural monopoly, the new processes are covered by patents. Thus we have the unusual spectacle of raw materials forwarded to us via Hamburg and Mar- seilles and Liverpool, and the finished product sent back to the same countries. France takes one-sixteenth, Germany one- eight of our leather export, and the United Kingdom nearly one- half of it including three-fourths of our sole leather and two- fifths of our glazed kid. Japan is also an importer of American leather. Leather Making in Europe. — Germany is the greatest leather- manufacturing country in Europe, the German specialty being colored leathers. Among the European nations France is next to Germany, and each of those countries exports twice as much leather as does Great Britain. British imports of leather (nearly $50,000,000) are the largest in the world and she also imports some hides for tanning. England buys nearly all of her hides from India, which country (with more cattle than any other) is even beginning to export leather as well as hides to the mother country. In France, as in Holland, Belgium, and parts of Germany, we see in the leather industry an interesting adjust- ment to the density of population. The scarcity of forests long ago caused the establishment of willow plantations so trimmed as to grow long slender twigs for weaving the baskets that replace the boxes and barrels used in this country for the shipment of agricultural and manufactured products. These same basket willows yield a bark suitable for tanning a leather especially adapted for glove making. The dense population of France, Germany, and Belgium gives the labor supply to turn these good leathers into a large glove output. The position of Paris in the world of style enables France to lead all other countries in the export of gloves, of which vast quantities are sent to both England and the United States. Germany, however, is rapidly gaining on France as a glove maker and exporter. Russia still manu- LEATHER AND RUBBER 537 Percentage New York 19.8 Illinois 8.5 Missouri 6.2 Wisconsin 5.2 Ohio Vermont Massachusetts Texas New Jersey 4.7 4.3 4.2 4.1 3.8 Million Dollars factures, at the city of Kazan, the famous Russian leather with its peculiar odor due to the oils of the birch bark in which it is tanned. Morocco is the name applied to a special variety of goat-skin leather first made in Morocco and then introduced into Cordova, Spain, where it gave that country great fame in the world's leather market. But both of these are now relatively unimportant because of the much greater production of this kind of leather (leathers bearing the same name) in Alsace, France, and in Philadelphia. Morocco is still unexcelled in the fine quality of its leathers made in many colors, each hue the result of some par- ticular vegetable tannin. Scattered Local Leather Industry. — There is some leather produced in almost every country of the world, because it is a simple manufacture which almost any people can carry on to a limited extent for home use. Leather is thus produced in the interior of Colombia near Bogota, in Mexico and central Asia. About the only leather export from the southern hemisphere is that from Australia and a little from the German settlements in the forest regions of southern Chile, where good sole leather is made. %. Leather Manufactures. — Leather manufactures included belting for driv- ing machinery, harness, and finishings for carriages and automobiles. It is also used for a host of small trinkets and many industrial purposes, but the mak- ing of boots and shoes is much the most important use. The Old and New Systems of Shoe Making. — During the first half of the nineteenth century the shoemaker, with his kit upon his back, was an annual visitor to thousands of households in the eastern United States where one or two tanned hides awaited 8.9 6.5 5.4 4.9 4.5 4.4 4.3 4.0 41.1 Total 104.7 Fig. 180. — Leather goods other than shoes manu- factured in the United States, 1909. 538 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY his coming to be converted into the family shoe supply for the ensuing year. The wandering shoemaker competed with the local shoemaker who had his shop beside the country store and had his regular customers as the physician had his patients. The old order is rapidly passing away before the development of the shoe factory, which, during the last quarter of the nineteenth century, began to roll out shoes through the aid of very complex machinery and a minute division of labor in which dozens, some- times scores, of persons worked on each shoe. This division of labor and factory manufacture gave the industrial center an ad- vantage over the skilled shoemaker and has caused his almost entire disappearance, despite the superior wearing quality of his product. The passing of the roadside shop was followed by a surprising concentration of manufacture. The state of Massa- chusetts produces three times as many shoes as any other state. The two cities of Brockton and Lynn together produce about as many shoes as any two states outside of Massachusetts, while Haverhill, Marlboro, and Boston are other important shoe centers. Manchester, New Hampshire, and Auburn, Maine, are really a part of the same shoe district, which sends shoes to every state in the Union and to many foreign countries. The shoe factories of these New England towns use soles stripped from Texas cattle in Chicago slaughter houses tanned in Tennessee with Appalach- ian chestnut oak. The upper parts of the shoes are usually made of imported goat skins tanned in Philadelphia. The shoe indus- try of the United States employs 220,000 people and produces 250 million pairs per year (1909) worth over $500,000,000 of which about two-thirds is the cost of the expensive raw materials. As with the ready-made clothing, so with ready-made shoes, a wide market and large sale make possible the production of a great variety of shapes and sizes so that greater and greater num- bers of people can be fitted with the factory product. This factor in combination with the great cheapness of machine in comparison to hand output, helps to explain the great and quick concentration of the industry. The Foreign Trade in Shoes. — Shoe machinery, developed in the United States, brought the product up to the point where the machine-made shoe would fit a large proportion of the people. As a result, American shoe exports, of which the greater number LEATHER AND RUBBER 539 go chiefly to Cuba (one-fourth), Great Britain, Mexico, and Canada, are now of more value than those of any other country, having recently surpassed those of England. The total, however, amounts to the comparatively small number of 6 or 7 million pairs of shoes per year. The superior fit and comfort of American shoes is appreciated and a few years ago a large trade seemed to be in prospect, but the export of American shoe machinery to Europe has been followed by the ability of Europe to compete in the one respect in which they were lacking — style. This in combination with preferential tariffs has cut down the American shoe export to New Zealand six-sevenths in six years. The world's commerce in shoes is much less important than that in any other form of clothing. In this connection, the tropic habit of going barefoot should not be overlooked. Shoes are almost unthought of by races that buy cottons by the million yards. Many nations that buy nearly all their cotton and woolen goods make nearly all their shoes. Then too, styles differ, styles change, and man wants a shoe to fit his foot and the style. Tendency of Shoe Industry to Spread. — High freight rates and the heavy expense of shipping a valuable commodity like shoes make it advantageous for every large distributing center to have its own shoe factories. This helps to explain the advance of St. Louis, between 1900 and 1905, to the third shoe center of the United States, and the advance of shoe manufacturing in Rochester, New York, Cincinnati and Columbus, Ohio, these cities being nearer to the western markets and practically as accessible to the source of raw materials. The shoe industry in St. Louis was established by the aid of Massachusetts foremen taken thither at extra large wages. Glove Manufacturing in the United States. — While many fine gloves come from France, Germany, and England, there is a pro- duction, chiefly for home use, of something like $20,000,000 worth in this country. The glove industry is remarkably con- centrated, the two towns of Gloversville and Johnstown, in Fulton County, New York, neither of which has 20,000 people, make nearly half of the gloves in the United States. There appears to be no reason for this other than that more than a century ago some Scotch people, members of the Scotch glove- makers guild, settled here and the house and village industry 540 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY has been handed down from generation to generation until the sewing machine and the factory made it possible for these cities that had the start to maintain the leadership in this branch of manufacture, for which they have no natural advantage over a thousand other towns. Harness and Saddles. — The English people have for centuries been the greatest lovers and breeders of horses in the world, and it is quite natural that harness and saddles should be exported from this more than from any other country. In general it may be said that harness making is an industry that tends to be located in cities and small towns everywhere in the United States and Europe, no great centers having yet arisen. The Future Supply of Leather. — There is no sign of any diminution in the demand for leather. As standards of living rise, the people of Holland, Belgium, and Germany tend to lay aside wooden shoes, as do the Chinese and Japanese their leather- less foot gear of straw, cotton and wood. But leather is rising in price because it depends on animals and animals are now becoming relatively scarce. The world does not possess the leather to make western shoes for the Chinese. In the United States, which draws upon the world, the number of hides and skins used increased 16 per cent, between 1899 and 1909 and their cost increased 59 per cent. Leather substitutes should be welcomed. The Origin and Utilization of Rubber. — While primitive man long ago learned to use the tannin from many plants, the rubber that many other plants contain had to wait for the modern man with his laboratory. The coagulation of the sap of trees into a sticky or gummy substance is a familiar occurrence on many of our common trees including some of the conifers and fruit trees. Similar milky, coagulated sap of many tropic trees produces the chemically complex substance we call rubber. For eighty years after 1736, when the attention of Europe was first called to it, its only use was as the eraser; hence the name "rubber," for which extremely small quantities sufficed. In 1823, a Scotchman, named Mac- intosh, used caoutchouc or rubber to waterproof cloth (which yet bears his name), but in hot weather the gum got sticky and in cold weather it grew brittle and broke. In 1842, Goodyear, LEATHEE AND RUBBER 541 542 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY an American, discovered that the process of vulcanizing, or mix- ing rubber with sulphur, remedied these faults and gave it the qualities so suitable for waterproof clothing, shoes, and boots. A large percentage of sulphur makes the hard rubber used for combs and a great variety of electrical and industrial articles. Percentage Brazil 44.3 West Africa 17.0 Plantation 15.9 Guayule 10.5 All Others 12.3 Percentage United States 34.4 39,000 15.000 14,000 9,300 10,800 Germany 14.2 35.9 United Kingdom 13.7 34.6 France 11.2 28.3 Belgium 7.9 20.0 Russia 6.5 16.3 Netherlands 2.7" 6.9 All Others 9.4 22.9 Million Pounds 86.8 Total 88000 Total 251.7 Fig. 182. — World's production of rubber, Fig. 183. — World's india rubber im- 1911. (India Rubber World.) port, three-year average, 1908-10. The Recent Increase in Rubber Consumption. — Goodyear's invention started the rubber boot and shoe industry which has for half a century supplied what was considered at first a luxury for the well-to-do. Now they are a common necessity so that their manufacture in the United States now amounts to about LEATHER AND RUBBER 543 one-tenth the value of the leather boots and shoes. The import of crude rubber and gums has gone up rapidly from 5,000 tons in 1870 to 17,000 tons in 1891 and 72,000 tons in 1911; of india rubber alone we import 50,000 tons. About the year 1890, rubber consumption entered upon a period of great increase due to the adoption of the pneumatic tire. The resulting sudden and large development of the bicycle industry, to which rubber is an essential, promptly followed. A few years later came the automobile with its still larger demand for rubber in heavy tires. There has also been steady increase in the amount of rubber used for electrical insulation and other new industrial work and the enlarged demand for raw rubber has raised its price to phenom- enal figures, and caused it to be supplied by many countries where its production had previously been almost unknown. The Rubber Climate. — Rubber grows naturally and is pro- duced over a very wide area of the earth's surface. In this respect it resembles tannin. All of the commercial rubber plants with a single exception require the heat of the torrid zone, most of them require heavy rain, but some are adjusted to dry climates, so that rubber can be produced in most parts of the torrid zone where conditions permit the production of food crops. All the forested part of the tropics and some of its un- forested areas thus become a potential rubber zone. Para Rubber Region. — The rubber which for several decades has supplied half of the world's supply and set the standard of excellence is known as Para, because it is shipped from the Brazilian city of that name at the mouth of the Amazon River. This city, practically upon the equator, is at the outlet of a valley, reaching from the Atlantic to the western wall of South America, containing the world's largest forest and producing rubber over an area probably two-thirds as large as Europe. This rubber-yielding forest includes about half of Brazil and those large parts of Bolivia, Peru, and Ecuador which lie east of the Andes and receive the heavy rains brought by the trade winds from the Atlantic. Colombia also has a part of her terri- tory in this basin. Throughout the length and breadth of this enormous valley from Para to the Andes, and reaching beyond it into Venezuela and Guiana on the north and Paraguay on the south stretches one continuous forest through which the traveler 544 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY must fight his way with knife and axe. Scattered here and there in this gloomy jungle are trees of the dozen or more varie- ties from which the natives gather the rubber to ship down the Amazon. Being shipped from Para, it bears the name of that city and is sometimes credited as being entirely the product of Brazil. The only transportation facilities through this continent- filling forest are furnished by the navigable streams. The Amazon and its many branches afford altogether several thousand miles of navigable waterways — and the amount might be largely increased by the removal of trees which overhang, fall into, and choke up the smaller streams. The native and half-breed rubber gatherers have to work in a fearfully unwholesome climate in a jungle full of insects, serpents, and wild beasts. These defence- less workers, 3,000 miles inland, virtually beyond the reach of law, have of late been subjected to such barbarities in the Peru- vian forests that the governments of the United States and the United Kingdom have interfered in their behalf. The greatest difficulty in gathering this rubber is to cut paths from one tree to another in the tangled jungle. A few miles back from the navigable streams the jungle shuts out man by a tangle through which he cannot afford to cut even with rubber at the unreason- ably high prices of 1910. 1 For this reason the vast areas of South American forest with its sprinkling of rubber trees cannot be taken as an indication of vast yield of rubber in the future if present methods are to be followed. After the rubber tree is found, the tapping of it is simple. The bark is cut with a knife, the sap is caught in a vessel, brought to camp and coagulated in the dense smoke of a fire made of a certain palm nut. A paddle that has been dipped in the thick sap is held in the flames and the acetic acid and creosote of the smoke cause the juice to harden into rubber. The process is repeated until a lump of rubber about the size of a man's head is formed on the paddle. It is then ready for shipment to market, where it has long been known as the best grade. Com- merce in rubber and the supplying of the rubber gatherer's wants is the chief reason for the existence of Para, at the mouth of the Amazon; of Manaos, a thousand miles up the river; and "For a short time it was $3 per pound. LEATHER AND RUBBER 545 of the little city of Iquitos in eastern Peru, to which small ocean steamers regularly ascend. The Para Rubber Tree. — The Para rubber tree, known as the Hevea, reaches 2 or 3 feet in diameter, and 60 feet in height. It requires a rainfall of 80 to 120 inches with the full torrid temperature which ranges from 75 to 90° each day. This means, therefore, that the tree is at home in the equatorial rain belt at elevations below 2,000 feet. In the year 1876, about the time of the invention of the bicycle, the hevea was introduced into the National British Botanical Gardens at Kew, near London, and distributed thence in 1881 to India and Ceylon, where it grew and seeded. It has. since been introduced and found to do well in the Malay Peninsula, Eastern India, British Burmah, Northern Queensland, the Fiji Islands, some of the West Indies, the Sey- chelle Islands in the Indian Ocean and the west coasts of Africa and there is good reason to believe that it will be as much at home in the forests of the equatorial Congo as in those of the equatorial Amazon. Central American Rubber Tree. — Another kind of rubber, known as Central American, far less famed at the present time than the Para, is the product of the Castilloa tree which grows wild in the tropical forests from the Tehuantepec region of Mexico throughout the Central American countries, Panama, western Colombia, and Ecuador, to Peru. The tree grows to great size, reaching 150 feet in height and 6 to 8 feet in diameter. The usual method of the native rubber tree hunter is to cut down the tree to get all the rubber at once. By killing the tree and thus destroying the future resources, he gets several times as much as one tapping would yield, and he gets it, which might not be the case if he let the tree live. A tree 5 feet in diameter will yield when cut as much as 50 pounds, and there are rec- ords of a single tree in Nicaragua having yielded 350 pounds of rubber. Such a tree is an easily acquired source of income, for it is a product of nature, free to be hunted, like game, by the forest dwellers of every country from Mexico to northern Peru. It is exported in small quantities from all these countries to the United States and Europe. This tree also has been introduced to practically the same countries as the Para tree. Asiatic Rubber Tree. — Asia has been supplying a small pro- 546 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY portion of the world's rubber, of a variety known as Assam, produced by a member of the fig family, ficus elastica. This tree, whose product gave us the name "india rubber," also requires heavy rain and a warm climate; and thrives naturally along the low southern slopes of the Himalaya Mountains north of Calcutta and north of the Brahmaputra River in the provinces of Sikkim and Darjeeling, and in Burmah in latitudes as far as 26 and 27° north, where the climate is much too cool for the equatorial Para rubber. It thrives also in Java and Sumatra, and has been introduced into some other parts of the world. African Rubber. — Africa, with the largest of all tropic areas, also has many species of rubber trees and of late has increased rapidly as a rubber exporter. The Lagos rubber tree, known as the Kicksia, grows along the western coast from Liberia, just below the Sahara, to the Congo upon the equator and eastward to Uganda upon the great lakes. The rise in the value of rubber and the spread of the art of gathering it have of late caused great activity among the native African rubber hunters, and the rubber output is consequently increasing all along the coasts of the Gulf of Guinea. This product alone far outranks in value all other exports of the Belgian Congo territory, amounting to 78 per cent, or $15,000,000 in 1910. Important among the many other rubber plants of tropic Africa is the Landolphia vine, a creeper climbing in great festoons to the tops of the forest trees. There are many other species of these rubber plants in both eastern and western Africa, and in Madagascar. The Rubber Tree of Dry Regions. — One of the small states in the highland region of Brazil, near its eastern point, produces an interesting kind of rubber called Ceara, after the name of the state. The Manihot tree from which this rubber is derived grows very rapidly, attaining a height of 10 feet the first year and 30 feet the second, and is ready to tap in four years. It differs from other rubber trees in its ability to grow on a dry rocky soil which is in some cases useless for the production of food crops. The tree is even reported to survive those unusual Brazilian seasons in which there are no rains. It is the source of but a small proportion of the Brazilian rubber export, but owing to the more wholesome climate in which it will grow, it appears to have great possibilities as a rubber producer under LEATHER AND RUBBER 547 cultural conditions. Its culture is not, however, receiving much attention at the present time. Guayule. — The last of the rubber plants is the unique guayule, an herbaceous plant from a few inches to 3 or 4 feet in height, growing over the prairies of northeastern Mexico and even the southwestern part of the United States, oftentimes in regions so dry that there are no forests and all ordinary agricul- ture must depend upon irrigation. Guayule has sprung into sudden importance since the automobile put up the price of rubber. In 1904 it was in the experimental stage and in 1911 our imports of it, entirely from Mexico, were one-fourth as great as our imports of the so-called "india rubber." The extraction of this gum, which is produced by a member of the sunflower family, differs from all the others in that the plant must be taken to large factories for the extraction, which requires large quan- tities of water. Two things about this rubber industry are very suggestive for the future era of rubber cultivation. First, it is a small herbaceous plant offering the possibilities of a crop with steady returns once in eight or ten years. Second, it grows in a region where white men can live and work. The largest factory, employing 700 men and turning out 6,000,000 pounds in 1911 is at Torreon on the Mexican plateau in the latitude of the mouth of the Rio Grande. In the states of Durango and Cohuila land which was con- sidered absolutely worthless and not even fit for pasture of cattle has in the last few years produced fabulous sums from the sale of Guayule shrub which rose from $5 to $50 per ton between 1904 and 1910 (U. S. Con. Rep., August 10, 1912). It thrives in a rainfall of 14 inches or even less and grows up to altitudes of 6,000 to 8,000 feet. The plant contains from 10 to 14 per cent, of rubber and the cost of extraction is from ten to forty cents a pound. The Shifting Source of Our Rubber Supply. — The present sources of our rapidly increasing supply are no index whatever to the future because it is an industry in transition, and the countries at present supplying it are liable to severe readjust- ments of rank. It is now the product of a hunter, not of a pro- ducer in the industrial sense. In practically all rubber countries from Ecuador to Para and Assam, the native gatherer goes into 548 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY the great unclaimed forests; and, finding a rubber tree which may yield a few pounds of rubber each year if properly cared for, or a good many more pounds this year if bled as much as possible, he reasons that it would be foolish to leave the tree for someone else; so he kills it for the immediate supply. The more rapidly the killing goes on, the greater is the yield until the trees approach extermination. In some parts of Central America the castilloa plant has been almost exterminated. The same thing is happening where the Africans are seeking the rubber trees for their newly discovered value, and the fact that rubber is the chief export of the Congo is a record not of an industry, but of the destruction of their rubber resources. The Amazon Valley output holds out so well because the rubber hunters are going ever farther up stream into Peru and Bolivia. It is true that other trees will grow again in the future if the seed trees are not all destroyed, but the process is slow and not the proper basis for an increasing industry. Rubber Cultivation. — The greatest change in rubber supply is likely to come through the shifting of production from the iso- late dying tree, to which the rubber hunter has laboriously cut his path, to the great scientifically managed rubber plantations in which tens and even hundreds of thousands of rubber trees will yield an annual crop. Since the opening of this century when the automobile made high-priced rubber and a famine threatened, there has been tremendous interest in rubber cultivation through- out the world. In the spring of 1910 the high price of rubber helped to cause an excitement over rubber shares in London that rivalled the classic South Sea Bubble, both in the high prices of stock and the following collapse. Wherever soil, climate, and labor conditions are most promising, rubber growing is being, or is soon likely to be, tried. The variety of soils is considerable and the possible rubber region is very large indeed, including the equatorial rain belt which encircles the world; while the cera rubber tree has demonstrated its ability to thrive on dry, stony tropic uplands, and the guayule bush of north Mexico, in the latitude of Texas and a climate of frost, grows and produces rubber in lands too arid for a forest or even the tilled or pastured field. LEATHER AND RUBBER 549 Many products have passed through this transition from a free product of nature to a cultivated plant, and rubber cultiva- tion has succeeded in the equatorial rain belt. There is now prospect of very keen world competition in rubber, a competition which is made easier by the simplicity of the business. Coffee and rice growing require rather expensive cleaning machinery, but rubber requires only a few trees, a knife, and a tub, for the practice of simple methods of gathering and coagulating the juice. Already there are large plantations of the castilloa rubber tree operated by American capitalists in the lowlands of Mexico, Nicaragua, and other Central American countries. In Hawaii one company has 40,000 trees large enough to tap at the beginning of 1913. The English and the Germans, ever desirous of making their Old World colonies productive, are cultivating the Kicksia rubber tree in their west African and East Indian colonies in the rubber zones. There are rubber plantations in Borneo, in India near Madras and in Mozambique. The Japanese are planning to cultivate rubber in Formosa, the French in Indo China, and the British Government has plantations of Assam rubber in the northeastern provinces of India. But it is from the East Indian Islands and the Malay Peninsula that we may expect the greatest developments of rubber cultivation. Over this whole region the Para rubber (hevea) tree thrives exceedingly well, there is abundant labor supply and skilled European supervision. The hevea was first successfully cultivated in Ceylon. The most careful and scientific methods are there being applied to it, with the result that the export of cultivated Ceylon rubber already bears a better reputation and brings a higher price than that from Para itself. It has been found that a tree ten years old can be depended upon to produce annually from 1 to 3 pounds; 25 pounds have been taken from a single tree without injuring it; the tapping of the trees does not hurt the yield, which has actually increased with the age of the trees. It is the present practice to plant 100 trees to the acre. Ceylon, in addi- tion to its moist climate and heavy rainfall, has a dense popula- tion, and, moreover, is able to draw tens of thousands of laborers across the straits from India. Rubber is being planted out in 550 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY some tea plantations so that the rubber trees will convert the declining tea plantation into a rubber orchard without cessation of income. The Malay Peninsula is quite as good as Ceylon. It has a rainfall of from 100 to 200 inches, and the almost daily shower of the monsoon season in combination with the steady heat and humidity of the equatorial latitude sometimes produces, in three years a Hevea tree 60 feet in height. These orchards can be grown with side crops of banana, corn, or even cacao. Rubber land exists in indefinite quantity in these eastern archipelagoes with their thousands of islands, and hundreds of thousands of square miles over which the black-green forest comes to the very water's edge, and several varieties of rubber will grow. The labor supply of Malaya is unique. The straits settle- ments (British) are a few settlements along the Straits of Malacca comprising a small fraction of the land area of the Peninsula. Here the British Government has kept the ferocious natives in order, so that the Chinese, industrious, quick to seize opportunities, have gone there for the business opportunities in a climate which they can stand better than Europeans. In 1911 the population (total 714,000) consisted of 7,200 Americans and Europeans, 8,000 Eurasians, 370,000 Chinese, 82,000 natives of India, 40,000 Malays, and 200,000 other Asiatics. In the native states under British control are 400,000 more Chinese. These Chinese laborers are doing the work on the rubber planta- tions. This makes Singapore, the metropolis of the Straits, the natural rubber metropolis in the cultivation era which is coming. Within a comparatively short distance of Singapore are the enormous labor supplies that can upon demand be furnished by the millions of China, of Java, and of India. The fare from China to Singapore was for years $2.50 per workman. These coolies are good workers and are at present content with twelve to twenty cents American gold per day, with the worker boarding himself. This kind of labor supply tropic America does not possess, and the feverish efforts of Brazil to enter upon the cultivation of rubber seem destined to poor success unless she imports Chinese laborers into her empty Amazon lands. At present the Brazilian states of Para and Amazonas are offering free land in blocks of 50,000 acres and various other subsidies LEATHER AND RUBBER 551 to responsible companies, who will undertake rubber cultivation. In the meantime, the unsubsidized cultivation of rubber on the Malay Peninsula and adjacent lands has already assumed large proportions. At Malacca, in the Straits of Malacca, a single Chinaman in 1906 owned an orchard of 300,000 Para trees. A few dozen such plantations would supply all the rubber required in the United States. PLANTATION RUBBER OFFERED FOR AUCTION IN LONDON MARKET (From report on 1911 by Gow, Wilson, and Stanton, of London) Year Ceylon Malaya Total Average price Tons Tons Tons Per lb. 1906 98i >'--250i 348J $1.34 1907 192| 62.11 814 1.17 1908 290 1005J 1295J 1.00 1909 432 2252 2084 1.59 1910 76H 4432J 5193J 1.86 1911 1622 8077 9099 1.23 While the above changes were occurring, the output of Para rubber declined a little. The rapidly increasing output of planta- tion rubber is suggestive of the shift in supply and most of the orchards have not yet come into bearing. In 1911 100,000 acres in Malaya averaged 200 pounds of rubber per acre. The 85,000 acres of Hevea in Java sent only sample shipments and it is reported that half a million acres were planted in the Far East in 1911. Sixty-seven leading companies in Malaya in 1911 averaged 1997 1/2 acres of rubber each at a capital cost of $190 per acre each. One of the oldest companies has shares with par value of two shillings and selling at forty-two (Jan., 1912). One of the most suggestive of factors in the rubber situation is the receipt in London during 1911 and early 1912 of regular shipments from, east Africa of the Manihot rubber, the product of the Ceara, or arid land tree of the Brazilian uplands. This grows in a climate that is much superior to that of the humid Malayan jungle. We may, therefore, expect to see an entire re-adjustment in the source of rubber, supply and probably great. 552 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY reduction in price consequent upon such systematic, scientific production with cheap labor and European management. The industry will doubtless have its troubles. Being a new industry, there is much to learn and many companies have already failed from using wrong locations, wrong varieties and from mis- management. Many of the plantings due to the great boom of 1910, during which year rubber fluctuated from $1.25 to $3.12 per pound, will be overgrown by the bushes in which the trees are planted. While the method of cultivation is simple, often merely chopping down other growth as it starts up, this dead vegetation is good material for a fire and even in Malaya there comes a dry season during which fires have run through and destroyed planta- tions. Then it is the usual experience that the domestication and crowding of any plant tends to develop diseases. Laboratory Rubber. — It is quite possible that a decade hence we may find the rubber plantations sore pressed by the product of the chemical engineer turning out cheap, synthetic rubber in European, American, and Japanese factories. A process has been discovered (U. S. Con. Rep., July 11, 1912) whereby vegetable starch, costing two cents per pound, is converted by fermentation into fusel oil, this by chemical processes into isoprene, this by treatment with mineral sodium into rubber, "comparable in every respect to the natural rubber," according to laboratory tests. It has not been made in industrial quan- tities. It remains for the chemical engineers to perfect the processes of manufacture, but it is claimed that there is a proba- bility of making rubber at sixty cents per pound and possibly at twenty-four cents per pound. Few things seem more certain than that, between the output of orchards and factories, our rubber-using industries are upon the eve of a new era in raw materials. 4. Rubber Manufactures. — The prospective cheaper and larger supply of raw materials will be fortunate for the United States. Already our rapidly growing rubber industries take nearly a pound of rubber per capita for all the people in this country. The enormous increase in the automobile industry promises to demand much more. The rubber boot and shoe, the best known of our rubber products, are produced almost entirely in the factories of southern New England. Unlike LEATHER AND RUBBER 553 leather shoes, rubber shoes do not permit of manufacture by a single worker. They require much machinery and have always been a factory product. The factories of Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island make nearly nine-tenths of the entire American output of rubber boots and shoes, but the industrial uses exceed foot wear in the quantity of rubber used in the United States. Rubber tires are everywhere manifest. Rubber hose is a universal necessity, filling a thousand uses; the air-brake system of every train requires it. Rubber packing in engines, pumps, and valves, and rubber electrical supplies, show how universal is the distribution of manufactured products of rubber which thus go wherever steam goes and water is lifted. For these purposes the products of American rubber factories are sent to every country in the world. Our well-nigh universal use of rubber shoes and cloth, and our extensive mechanical use of rubber make this country the largest rubber user and the largest rubber manufacturer in the world. The countries next in importance are Great Britain and Germany, but our rubber consumption exceeds that of any two countries. Our exports of rubber manufactures amount to over $8,000,000, going chiefly to United Kingdom (three-tenths), Canada (one-sixth), France (one-ninth). REFERENCES See General References Rubber Workers of the Amazon. Bulletin, American Geographical Society, January, 1911. CHAPTER XIV THE MACHINERY, SHIP-BUILDING, AND METAL INDUSTRIES i. FACTORS OF LOCATION Ship-building must be done where the ships can be launched, but the location of other classes of machine building is influenced by two factors which often tend to conflict but which sometimes coincide — labor and the market. Machinery of all kinds is made primarily of metal, mostly iron and steel, and secondarily, of wood. It is easy to see how a carload of iron, steel, or wood is much less bulky than the same materials made up into machin- ery. It is therefore a transportation advantage to have the factories located near to the market rather than near to the raw material. On the labor side it is true that the distant market is often in a region of small purchases and high wages so that there is an advantage in labor cost if the machinery is made where the labor supply is abundant, the wages low, and a large product can be marketed. In some classes of machinery, such as agricultural machinery, the transportation cost is heavy in proportion to the weight, and the dominating influence of the market is strong, tending to locate the industry. In other classes of machinery such as clocks and watches the freight element in the cost to the ultimate consumer is relatively small and the labor element is large, with the result that the labor element has strong influence in the location of the industry. Another important difference to be observed among the different classes of machinery is the narrowness or wideness of the area of consumption. In this respect equipment machinery of the class used in textile or sugar factories is much more restricted than clocks, firearms, or vehicles which are for general consump- tion rather than for equipment of restricted industries. 554 MACHINERY AND SHIP-BUILDING INDUSTRIES 555 MACHINERY EXPORTS OF LEADING COUNTRIES Commercial America (Phila. Commercial Museums) Countries 1890, millions 1910, millions Great Britain $80 15 15 9 8 4 3 5 $142 119 Germany United States 110 France 20 Belgium 12 Switzerland 14 Netherlands 6 All other 43 Total $140,000,000 $468,000,000 EXPORTS OF MACHINERY FROM LEADING COUNTRffiS Articles 1910, Great Britain 1911, United States 1910, Germany Prime movers of all kinds, steam and traction, in- cluding locomotives. Machine tools $ 8,000,000' 3,475,000 $ 16,046,000 $ 29,500,000 Metal working machinery . . . 9,625,000 1,827,000 14,200,000 3,000,000 12,300,000 10,200,000 5,200,000 Textile machinery 37,050,000 8,400,000 13,071,000! Sewing machines, and parts of typewriters Parts of agricultural ma- / 9,039,000 \ \ 9,800,000 / 24,670,000 11,400,000 2,854,000 7,010,000 8,025,000 chinery, and other agricul- tural implements. Printing presses and ma- 4,000,000 chinery. Mining machinery 6,230,000 8,000,000 Electrical machinery Sugar machinery 2,300,000 Shoe machinery 1,633,000 27,271,000 1,500,000 All other 58,224,000 33,000,000 Total $142,500,000 $129,200,000 $119,000,000 ■ Including traction engines. 556 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY The manufacture of machinery is nearly always a sort of second stage in industry, the first stage being the prosecution of the industry, using the machinery, and developing the market for it. The order of development is somewhat as follows, as shown, for example, by Russia — first agriculture, then after im- porting agricultural machinery for a time its manufacture begins, but in factories equipped with machinery from countries more advanced in manufacture. The manufacturing of machinery to make machinery is a yet more mature stage of industry. With world commerce the use of machinery is spreading into the remote corners of the world, hence a rapidly increasing export from the manufacturing countries. 2. THE MANUFACTURE OF AGRICULTURAL MACHINERY The Origin of Agricultural Machinery. — Large areas of cheap land in combination with the consequent high wages have domi- nated industrial conditions in the United States and made it impossible for the farmers, under the old system of hand labor and simple devices, to cultivate as much ground as they could easily secure. Necessity has in this form been the mother of the inven- tion of agricultural machinery, which has been perfected to a greater degree in this country than in Europe. The decades beginning with 1840 and 1850 saw the settlement of the American prairie, a natural home of the farm machine, going on in good earnest: and it was in 1851 that the first reaper was made. After this beginning the new machinery came rapidly. These inventions and the great demand for the machinery have given rise to an important manufacturing industry, and the excellence of the product has led to a large and growing export to the agri- cultural countries of the world. The thoroughness of our invention and the scope of our agricultural machine works is shown by the virtual absence of imports of machinery of this class, while we have exports far greater than any other country. The Service Rendered by Agricultural Machinery. — In 1850 we produced 1 ton of cereals per person. In 1900 with a smaller proportion of the population engaged in agriculture, we pro- duced 11/2 tons of cereals per person. This increase in the efficiency of the producer of breadstuffs is due largely to the ma- MACHINERY AND SHIP-BUILDING INDUSTRIES 557 chinery he has used. The inventors and manufacturers of agri- cultural machines have produced many devices to do each impor- tant agricultural process. Thus agricultural machinery has replaced hand labor in production as the locomotive has replaced the wagon in transportation, and the two classes of machinery together have given the world cheaper food and raw materials than it ever had before. It would be a great error to think that this process of machine improving has ended or that its results are all in sight. The census of 1910 showed astonishing changes due to agricultural machinery. Within 10 years 1 the rural population of Ohio, Fig. 184. — Percentage of counties losing population in nine great agricultural states 1900-10. Iowa probably leads all states in its exclusive dependence upon one of the most modern types of American agriculture. Indiana, Illinois, and Iowa declined 6 per cent. This means an increased use of machinery which increased 50 per cent, in value. It was accompanied by an increase of 5 acres in the size of the average farm, an increase in the number of horses and a decrease in the number of people per farm. Agricultural machinery removes man from the land, as shown by a population of seventy- one persons per 1,000 acres on the best level Ohio land and seventy-four per 1,000 acres on the poorer hilly southwestern Ohio. In Illinois the corresponding figures were thirty-eight and forty-five per square mile. Manufactured Near the Market. — Agricultural machinery is very bulky; freight rates are therefore high, giving a great 1 B. H. Hibbard, paper before the American Economic Association, 1911 Meeting, Washington. 558 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY advantage to the factory located as near as possible to the place where it will be used. Therefore, this industry has always kept close to the edge of the great farming region, especially the grain belt. For a time the leading manufacture was in central New York where the Erie Canal gave easy transportation to both east and west. Even yet the industry is still the leading industry in the city of Auburn, New York, but the center of the industry has moved west with the westward movement of agriculture. The first centers beyond the Alleghenies were Columbus and Springfield, Ohio, on the edge of the vast level plain of the corn belt, which has been the compelling force to make men use farm machinery. With the further westward movement of the market, the industry centered in Chicago, the greatest agricultural market in the world, the greatest railway center in the world, in the hearts of the corn belt, the hay belt, and of the oat belt, and also near to the wheat regions. Here are the best facilities in the United States for reaching agricul- tural districts, and here the Harvester Trust located its plants. These influences have made Chicago's manufacture of agri- cultural implements five times greater than that of any other city in the country, although in 1880 it was but half as great as that of Springfield, Ohio. All the other centers of importance are located in states near or bordering on the Great Lakes. Lake shore localities have as favorable conditions for the assem- bling of raw materials as are to be found anywhere. On or near the shores of these lakes are abundant supplies of wood and iron, the chief raw materials used. Some firms have devel- oped so far as to own forests and saw mills in Missouri and Arkansas, iron mines on Lake Superior, and blast furnaces at Chicago for the manufacture of iron and steel. Important centers in a position to share Chicago's advantages are South Bend, Indiana, and Racine, and Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The westward trend of the industry is shown by the fact that Springfield, Ohio, once the second city in importance, has been recently surpassed by Moline, Illinois — a town on the banks of the Mississippi River distinctly to the west of the important manufacturing part of the United States, a fact reflected in its present great dependence on the manufacture of agricultural implements. Peoria, Illinois, and Richmond, Indiana, are MACHINERY AND SHIP-BUILDING INDUSTRIES 559 other important centers. Thus far the export trade has not led to the manufacture of this machinery in seaports convenient to the place of shipment, nor is there any apparent prospect. The export is a by-product of the home industry which amounted in 1910 to nearly $150,000,000. Interchangeable Parts. — The manufacturing of agricultural implements has received a great impetus from the practice of making machines with interchangeable parts, so that one machine in the factory turns out one piece which will fit any one of thousands of a given kind of completed machine in the field. Before this practice was established, a breakdown in the field meant that the machine had to be taken to some nearby expert mechanic to be repaired. With interchangeable parts, the owner of the broken machine can get quick repairs, by ordering a new piece by catalogue number from some nearby warehouse — an ability which has made possible the easy use and prompt repair of Chicago reapers and Moline plows in the wheat fields of Argentina or Russia, thus greatly stimulating our foreign trade. The interchangeable part, by emancipating the user from the limitations that follow distance from the factory, has enabled the American manufacturer to reap the advantage of the adjust- ment of his product to the environment. American agricultural machinery has, as the result of numerous inventions and speciali- zations, been made to fit the great variety of conditions existing in the United States, and for this reason it also suits any other country. Each kind of land and of farming has had machinery adjusted to it, thus we send machines of the so-called "stump jump" types to the newly cleared Australian "Bush." In contrast to American adjustment to special needs, the English have long prided themselves on the substantial character of their manufacture. The American agricultural machinery is much of it lighter in weight, less durable, but less expensive, and for these reasons it appeals strongly to the frontier bonanza grain farmer with his limited capital, whether he be on the plains of the United States, Canada (taking 13 per cent, of this export), Argentina (21 per cent.), Russia (18 per cent.), or Australia, in all of which countries our machinery is much used. This combination of patents, adaptation, and prices gives us one of 560 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY the few branches of manufactures in which America has out- stripped foreign countries with cheaper labor and approximate equality of raw materials. We are even exporting over a million dollars' worth of agricultural machinery per year to the United Kingdom, long our chief rival, while France and Germany together take over one-eighth of our total shipments. 2. CARRIAGES, WAGONS AND AUTOMOBILES Relationship, to the Agricultural Implement Industry. — The wagon and carriage industry of the United States, which more than supplies the home market, is greater than that of any other country in the world. Our home market is larger than that of any other nation, our scattered agricultural population has to haul its product over the worst roads possessed by any wagon-using country with the possible exception of Russia. The badness of the roads wears out the vehicles, which the factories must supply. The carriage and wagon output exceeds the agricultural implement output, and the two industries have a kind of economic kinship. Wood and iron are the raw materials in both; both are relatively bulky when completed, and, therefore, need to be made near the market, which is located primarily in the same region. Every farmer must have one or more wagons, but the inhabitants of a manufacturing town use them to a relatively small extent in their business. Every farmer needs a carriage, but the trolley, the omnibus, and the train serve the city dweller. The chief market, therefore, for these vehicles is in the same region as that for agricultural implements, making evident the fitness of the North Central States for leadership in both industries. The Raw Material — The deciduous trees furnish nearly all our carriage material. Second growth hickory, which was picked out by Peary to make the sledges for his dash over the Arctic ice fields toward the north pole, is one of the monopolies of the United States. This wood, unrivalled for strength combined with elasticity, grows from New York to Georgia and Missouri, and is almost universally used for making the strongest parts of light carriage wheels. Heavy wagon wheels are made of oak, the beds are made of the light poplar or tulip wood, and the MACHINERY AND SHIP-BUILDING INDUSTRIES 561 light and strong ash is used for the framework and tongues. All of these woods are widely distributed in the region adjacent to the North Central States, being found in greatest amounts in the Appalachian District, Kentucky, Tennessee, Missouri, and Arkansas. Chattanooga and Memphis are the greatest hard- wood markets in the country. Ohio and Indiana have for several decades been exporters of the best oak wood, although their supply is now nearly exhausted. Michigan and Wiscon- sin, which predominantly produce pine, also have considerable quantities of carriage woods. Westward Movement of Carriage Industry. — The carriage in- dustry, like the manufacture of agricultural implements, has moved westward with the centers of agriculture and population. It has actually declined in New England; remains nearly station- ary in New York and Pennsylvania; and has greatly increased in the West where six states — Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Missouri — manufacture more than one-half of the total product of the country. The industry is still moving toward the raw materials, the greatest rates of increase being found in North Carolina, Kentucky, Missouri, and Georgia, i.e., in those states which are nearest to the predominant raw mate- rial, wood. Cincinnati is the leading wagon and carriage manu- facturing city in the United States; St. Louis, near to the Ozark lumber and the prosperous southwest is second; while South Bend, Indiana, a part of the Chicago manufacturing district, is third. Of the seventeen cities having over a million dollars of output in 1904, only three, New York, Philadelphia, and Watertown, N. Y., were east of the Allegheny Mountains. Four of these cities were in the lower peninsula of Michigan; two, Louisville and Owensboro, were in Kentucky; three were in 'Indiana, and two, Chicago and Moline, in Illinois. Concentration and Revolution of Carriage and Wagon Making. — The manufacture of carriages and wagons has gone through the process of concentration similar to that which has occurred in the shoe and textile industries. Two generations ago the country blacksmith and wheelwright had their shops side by side. One did the wood work and the other the iron work, and they manufactured wagons for their neighbors as the shoe-maker next door made the shoes. As shoe machinery has replaced the 562 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY shoe-maker, so automatic wood working machinery has displaced the country wagon-makers whose hand-made output can no longer compete with the cheaper product of the factories in the North Central States, which send their output to every state and county in the Union, and, in limited amounts, to foreign countries. Our chief exports go to the Argentine Republic (26 per cent.), Canada (25 per cent.), Mexico, Great Britain, and her colonies Australasia (12 per cent.), and South Africa. These are coun- tries whose physical conditions resemble our own and our vehicles are suited to them. The Automobile Industry. — The automobile affords the newest of the important industries in the United States. The first modern automobiles were made in France in 1891. By 1900 they had proved their efficiency and the new industry was established in America, increasing since that time with astonish- ing rapidity. The American output for 1910 is estimated at 160,000 machines each worth $2,000, and the total product exceeds in value all the other vehicles and agricultural imple- ments combined. The automobile is akin to the carriage in its uses, and in the materials and processes of its manufacture. It differs, however, in being much more predominantly of iron and in being much more complex. Its parts are numerous, they must be of exact material and proportions, and are there- fore difficult to make. Each factory turns out but a limited number of machines in a year, consequently it is inexpedient for each plant to make all its parts. For example, such an item as the ball bearings require for their manufacture a large and expen- sive plant, one in Philadephia, extending for two city blocks, is capable of making enough ball bearings for dozens of automobile works. Similar expensive plants and careful processes are neces- sary in making many other automobile parts, so that the industry is, to a considerable extent, an assembling industry — that is, many of the parts, sometimes fifty or one hundred or more are bought and combined with others made at the factory to form the completed machine. It was very natural for the carriage makers of the agricultural Middle West to take up the manufac- ture of this new kind of carriage. It is apparent that they are dependent not so much upon the lumber of Tennessee as they are upon the machine shops of New England, New York, and the MACHINERY AND SHIP-BUILDING INDUSTRIES 563 North Central States. Therefore, this species of vehicle-making clings to the northern edge of the region that has long manufac- tured our carriages and wagons. Detroit and Cleveland, to- gether producing over a third of the entire output of the United States, are the leading centers. The three other cities next in importance — New York, Buffalo, and Indianapolis — are also located on main lines of railroad between New York and Boston and Chicago. There is some automobile manufacturing in Connecticut, Massachusetts, and eastern Pennsylvania, and some in and around Chicago. Owing to the infancy of the industry, rapid changes, such as that which caused Michigan and Ohio to rapidly outstrip Connecticut in the few years immediately following 1900, may be expected. The great dependence of the automobile factory upon other factories gives a strong tendency for these industries to cluster round one great center. This seems to be occurring at Detroit, which is now far ahead of all other cities, and the rapid increase in the allied industries in and about the city tends to make it the most favorable place in the country for a new factory to locate. Some automobile works are even moving there. Foreign Trade in Automobiles. — The automobile was first made in France, but the Americanization of the industry has been complete. This is shown by the fact that, as a result of our rap- idly increasing industry, our imports, at first largely from France, have decreased and our exports increased until our export of 12 million in 1911 is greater than that of all other countries in the world combined. Canada (38 per cent., 1911) and the United Kingdom (17 per cent., 1911) are the largest importers of American machines, with Australasia next in importance. This dominance of America in export is scarcely likely to continue. The export of other countries, especially Germany, is increasing rapidly and our export appears to be due largely to the factors that have operated in the export of agricultural implements — cheap construction through interchangeable parts and the adaptation through rapid invention of our automobiles to hill climbing and bad roads, both of which are important factors for American automobiles. The automobile industry has sprung into importance so suddenly because it combined a number of factors. It began as 564 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY the most widely prized pleasure vehicle and so continues. The high price of horses and the rapidly rising price of grain have combined with technical improvement to make it the most economical kind of vehicle for many kinds of hauling along the common highway where roads are good. This is especially true where the distances to "be covered are considerable and the replacement of the horse-drawn vehicle is in rapid progress in both Europe and America. In Jamaica the motor truck carries bananas from the plantation, as in the north temperate zone it carries farm products to the market, and merchandise to the house of the consumer. These industrial factors will probably preserve the automobile from any slump so surprising as that which overtook the bicycle industry. This machine, owing to its popularity, was exceedingly important between 1893 and 1900, and gave rise to an important industry in Connecticut, Massachusetts, New York, and Ohio. The spread of the trolley- lines hurt its usefulness, the automobile helped to put it out of style, and the decline of this industry was as sudden as its rise, the output of $22,000,000 in 1899 having been reduced to $3,000, 000 in 1905, and $2,500,000 in 1909. At this latter date the motorcycle output was of greater value ($3,000,000) than the bicycle. Fifteen hundred motorcycles are in use in Johannesburg and among the scattered mines of the Rand — an evidence of the usefulness of this new type of vehicle. European Automobile Industry. — The European automobile industry resembles that of America in its rapid growth, but the speed of its increase has been somewhat less than that in the United States because the proportion of the European popu- lation who can afford autos is not so great as that in America. The fact that European roads are much better than those in America has caused the evolution of somewhat different types of machines. 4 . MACHINERY FOR MANUFACTURING The manufacture of machinery for manufacturing tends to occur near to the place where used. Aside from the advantages of freights and transportation there is a great convenience resulting from the increased ease of running back and forth MACHINERY AND SHIP-BUILDING INDUSTRIES 565 to see that specifications are carried out and repairs promptly delivered. Textiles, our oldest modern industry, give ample illustration of these factors in the location of their machine supply industry. The bulk of the English textile machinery is made in Manchester, Bolton, Oldham, Accrington, and Rochdale, all of them in the Lancashire district. As this district has led the world in making cloth, so it has led the world in the export of textile machinery, in which Britain far exceeds all other countries together. The distribution of British exports of textile machinery is almost a record of the geographic distribution of the textile industry. EXPORT OF TEXTILE MACHINERY FROM GREAT BRITAIN (1910) TO SPECIFIED COUNTRIES Country Amount India United States Russia Germany Belgium Japan Brazil Italy Austria Holland China Spain Mexico Millions $5.9 5.5 4.2 4.0 2.3 1.7 1.7 1.1 0.7 0.7 0.6 0.6 0.5 It should be noted, however, that this table is not a record of the size of the industry in the importing countries, for leading textile-making countries are making this class of machinery, and the British export is not increasing. In Germany its manufacture and export are important in the Rhine Valley textile districts of Alsace and Baden, and in the United States similar facts appear. 566 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY Worcester, Massachusetts, near the center of the New England textile field, is the leading American city for the manufacture of textile machinery. Other cities of southern New England, especially Massachusetts and Rhode Island, share in this manu- facture, and as the textile industry is growing in Philadelphia, so also is the manufacture of textile machinery springing up there. Importance of Machine Tools. — The machine tool is the key- stone of machinery manufacture. It is a recent invention for the easy shaping of the wood and iron parts of the machinery upon which manufacturing depends. The fashioning of wood and metal can be reduced to a few simple mechanical operations — ■ planing, boring, turning, milling, and slotting, which have for ages been done by hand or by very simple mechanical aids. For each of these operations large, heavy, expensive, but exceed- ingly efficient machines have been devised. Planing machines will, when once set and started, work for hours smoothing one side of a piece of metal as big as the floor of one or two small rooms. Boring machines will make holes as desired, milling machines will cut notches upon the outside of pieces of wood or iron, and by this process will take a smooth, round disc of metal, and, with no attention whatever from the operator, grind away for hours leaving it a completed cog wheel. Lathes make pieces of wood or metal almost any shape that a pattern may prescribe, even when the pieces are as thick as a man is high and as long as a telegraph pole. The irregular shaped handles of axes and hatchets are good examples of lathe work, and even the last for a shoe is a product of the turning lathe. The fifth of these fundamental machines is the slotter which cuts any kind of grooves in metal or wood, and like the other four works by mechanical power and needs little attention from the operator. These mechanical units have been combined into a class of machines called turret lathes which perform a number of different operations by having tools arranged on a rotating wheel, each of which automatically comes in turn to do its part of a finished whole. Thus a rod will be cut into a series of perfect bolts, nuts, or screws of exact dimensions. These mechanical means produce the many parts which, upon being put together, make the complex, efficient machines of the modern factory. Many of these machine tools have been improved to the point MACHINERY AND SHIP-BUILDING INDUSTRIES 567 where they become automatic. This condition is attained when a machine will take pieces of material and turn out a uniform product. Thus a roll of wire is fed into one end of a machine and finished wire nails come out at the other; a roll of brass or steel wire is by these processes converted into a screw and each of the three processes is done by a machine that takes the blanks by the bushel and works them up. The Manufacture of Machine Tools. — The machine shop is the market for machine tools, and the machine shop is located where machinery is to be repaired or made. It is plain that repair shops, even more than plants for new construction, must cling to the places where machinery is used. The machine-tool in- dustry is therefore located by the machine users, and interesting responses of location result. It is an industry without any great center. In seeking its market it tends instead to scatter itself over the whole region of manufacture. It started in New England, has moved west with the movement of manufactures, until Ohio now leads with a product one-third as great as all the rest of the country put together. Ohio leads in this industry because she is in the iron and steel district, which gives abundant raw materials, and, moreover, requires much machinery. Ohio is also central to the region for the making of agricultural implements, wagons, carriages and auto- mobiles, and has excellent transportation to all manufacturing centers by lake steamer, river steamer, and the trunk-line railroads which thread the state in every direction. Cincin- nati and Cleveland have therefore become the greatest ma- chine-tool manufacturing cities in the United States, Hamilton and Dayton also being important points. Philadelphia is another center for this line of manufacturing, because of the need of her textile mills, her engine factories, her locomotive works, and the shipyards of Camden, Chester, and Wilmington upon the Delaware. Chicago, the heart of a rapidly increasing manufacturing district, is also rising in importance in the manufacture of machine tools. In New England, the mother of our manufactures, machine- tool making is important in Worcester, Massachusetts, and sur- rounding towns, for without them the manufacture of textile machinery, automobiles, fire arms, and other metal products, 568 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY could not well go on. Machine tools are also made largely in Providence, Rhode Island, and New Bedford, Massachusetts, both of which are textile centers, and in Hartford, Waterbury, and New Haven, Connecticut, close to the varied manufactures of southern New England. Engines and Motors. — Engines or electric motors are used in almost all kinds of factories, and also in nearly all mines and on many farms. Their market is not quite so restricted as that for machine tools, but their manufacture is located by the same factors and is distributed in the United States from Lake Michi- gan to the Atlantic and southward to southern Pennsylvania. Some of the heaviest engines in the United States are made at Milwaukee, Wisconsin, which is conveniently located to dis- tribute them by boat to all manufacturing cities on the Great Illinois 1890 - 55.2 1900 - 45.7 1910 - 38.3 New York 1899 - 35.0 1900 - 27.1 1910 - 21.2 Pennsylvania 1890 - 51.4 1900 - 45.3 1910 - 39.6 Fig. 185. — Urban population: per cent, of totals. The competition of western machine-made agricultural products has combined with the factory lure to cause an abnormal condition in the rural East. Lakes and by rail to the North Central States and the min- ing regions of the Rocky Mountains. Further east, Pittsburg with its huge iron-manufacturing plants, requiring so much heavy machinery, is an important center for the manufacture of heavy engines and electrical machinery. Philadelphia, New York and environs, and southern New England have other important engine manufactures. At Schenectady, New York, on the main line of railway from Boston and New York to the West is one of the greatest electrical manufacturing plants in the world. In the manufacture of engines, Germany is the leader on the scientific side. Science is respected more and taught more MACHINERY AND SHIP-BUILDING INDUSTRIES 569 there than in any other country, and new types of engine are primarily the result of a great amount of scientific study and experiment. Another force driving to this result is the German scarcity of good fuel, a fact which places a premium on economical power generators. It is from Germany that we get our processes of utilization of the by-products of coal and coke, leading makes of gas engines, including the promising new Diesel engine. It is a natural result of Germany's science that she is exporting more engines than the United States and the United Kingdom combined. 5. MACHINERY FOR TRANSPORTATION Railway Cars. — Transportation, which plays so vital a part in this country, employs an enormous number of people. The mere building and repairing of the 2 million freight cars employs as many laborers as does the woolen industry in Great Britain, and the number of workers, 300,000, far outranks the 175,000 in the American woolen industry. The annual value of this work is valued at over $400,000,000, an amount greater than the value of the product of the American blast furnaces in the same year. Although every railroad has repair shops scattered along its lines at junction points and at ends of divisions, this work is, so far as possible, concentrated in the best locations. Illinois, with Chicago, the greatest railroad center in the world, leads all the states in the Union in the manufacture and repair of cars. In addition to having a great many railroad repair shops upon the numerous lines which have their headquarters in Chicago, there is at Pullman, a suburb of that city, one of the largest car factories in the world, devoted almost exclusively to the manufacture of parlor and sleeping cars. The recent rapid change from wood to iron as the material for car making tends to locate car manufacturing in the iron belt, and the Pittsburg district of western Pennsylvania is now a great center for the manufacture of steel cars. There are also important manu- factures of this product in western New York, southern Michigan, Indiana, and Missouri. St. Louis, the great railroad center for the southwest, is an excellent place for the manufacture of this class of railroad equipment and it also has one of the two 570 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY largest trolley-car manufacturing plants iD the United States, its only rival in size being in Philadelphia. Owing to the violence of their use, the repairing of cars in the United States employs six times as many men as their construction, and the cost of new cars is less than one-third the cost of the repairs. With street-railway repairs the ratio of repairs to cost is over four to one, but the total of both repairs and cost is only one-thirteenth as great as for the steam cars. Manifestly the repairing of electric cars must be in the localities where they are used. Locomotives. — In the manufacture of locomotives, Philadelphia leads every city in the world. One plant there makes about one-third of the output of the country, and, with the assistance of plants at Pittsburg and Scranton, gives to Pennsylvania one- half the entire output of the United States. Philadelphia's leadership is due to no one cause. It is an industry which, so far as the general situation is concerned, is almost equally at home anywhere between Chicago and New York. The Philadelphia plant has a unique labor organization, the city has excellent supplies of coal, is reasonably near the sources of iron, and, being a city of homes, has an abundant supply of workmen for the plants. The great locomotive works of Phila- delphia have outgrown their city location and are gradually moving to a more roomy suburb on the banks of the Delaware. New York state produces one-fourth of the locomotives of the country, the most important center of manufacture in that state being in the city of Schenectady, which also produces so much electrical machinery. The ease with which a locomotive can run to its place of final delivery on the American railroads makes this branch of machinery manufacture less dependent upon market and more dependent upon labor than are most kinds of machine manufacture. Few important industries approach locomotive manufacture in the extreme degree of fluctuation in prosperity. In periods of promising traffic and easy borrowing, the railroads order loco- motives, and at other times they do not. The booming pros- perity of 1906 resulted in the manufacture that year of 6,592 locomotives in the United States. After the panic of 1907 the output of 1908 fell to 2,342. The census of 1905 showed an output for 1904 of $59,000,000. In 1909 it was $31,000,000. MACHINERY AND SHIP-BUILDING INDUSTRIES 571 6. EUROPEAN MACHINE MANUFACTURE The European manufacturing districts have in their midst a machinery manufacture similar to that of the United States. The most important manufacturing region in this country, bounded by a line connecting Chicago, Boston, Baltimore, and St. Louis, thence back to Chicago, has its counterpart in Europe in a line connecting Edinburg, Berlin, Vienna, Florence, Lyons, Dublin, and thence back to Edinburg. This European manu- facturing district is older, its industries are in some respects more advanced, more mature and more refined than those of America. One of the most conspicuous differences between American and European machine manufacture is the greater element of labor value in much of the European output. This arises naturally from the cheaper labor of Europe. The high cost of labor in America has driven us to the second difference, the greater degree of inventiveness which shows itself in the excellence of our automatic machines and the superior design of many of our machine tools. It is manifestly design, rather than cheapness of material or skill of workers, that causes the great Swiss firm of Sulzer, manufacturers of engines, pumps, and refrigerating machinery, to secure 40 per cent, of its machine tools in the United States. The increasing excellence of German machines of this type is leading to the prediction that our leader- ship through patents is temporary, and that we may lose some of our machinery trade as we have lost much of our bicycle export. As further evidence of this increasing European simi- larity of industry is the opening of an Italian thrashing-machine factory that has cut off the import of those machines. Most suggestive of all is the opening in various European countries of branch plants by American companies. This has long been the case with sewing machines, and recently an American agricultural implement company opened a branch near Moscow to employ 1,100 men and make mowers and reapers. The European machine plants are usually smaller than those of the United States. As the home market is usually the main dependence there as elsewhere, the possibilities of market have been much smaller than in America, and the rapid expansions so common in America are not common in Europe. Thus the 572 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY leading Swedish locomotive works recently celebrated the completion of its one thousandth locomotive, and the leading American plant celebrated the completion of its thirty thousandth, and can make nine locomotives a day. It will be noted that there is a fairly close ratio between the output of the Swedish and American locomotive works and the locomotive needs of the two nations. Sweden is, as a matter of fact, like Switzerland and Germany, making rapid strides in the development of high- class machine manufacture. The Swedish specialty is dairy machinery — Sweden being a dairy country. 7. SHIP BUILDING How Ships are Built. — The ship is the largest object that man can move, the most complex of all his devices, and the one with the most thoroughly correlated parts. The usual method of building a ship is to lay down its keel or back bone upon a series of inclined blocks called a "way," from which the ship is finally allowed to slide into the water when the hull is completed. As it lies in the water the masts and machinery are added and the finishing work is done. In some places the method of building is varied by laying down the keel in a large dry dock, from which the water is pumped but into which it is allowed to run to float the ship when it is finished. Sometimes for repair work, especially of war vessels, floating dry docks are constructed which can be taken from place to place and do repair work where needed. In 1904 and 1905 such a dry dock, with ability to lift clear of the water a ship weighing 20,000 tons, was built in the United States and successfully floated by strong sea tugs to Subig Bay, Philippine Islands, for the use of the American Navy. The method of ship construction shows the necessity of locating ship yards upon deep, quiet rivers with an abundance of available land along the shore. It is better that the ship- building river have fresh rather than salt water, because it is less injurious to the hull of the ship. All of the important ship- building localities are near to iron- and steel- and machine-manu- facturing districts. Influence of Different Ship-building Materials. — The American ship-building industry has had its ups and downs; due partly MACHINERY AND SHIP-BUILDING INDUSTRIES 573 to the influence of the change in building materials. From 1800 to 1850 the world's ships were wooden sailing vessels, for which New England, with her pine forests, not far from the oak supplies of the Middle Atlantic States, had the best and cheapest material in the world. All along her coast, especially in Maine, many shipyards were turning out vessels that were better and cheaper than those built in Europe. About the middle of the nineteenth century it was discovered that iron • . y> *T» . JJ L / y> \ fmi L^^ . ^flff 1 1/ Fig. 186. — Steamer in dry dock at Fifty-fifth Street, Brooklyn, after collision off Massachusetts coast. Steel construction preventing shivering of ship and water-tight compartments prevented filling and sinking. ships were better for most purposes than wooden ships, and their use rapidly increased. Iron was later replaced by steel. In the supply of the raw material for this new type of ship, England, with her leadership in the iron industry, was far ahead of the United States, so that in 1900 or 1910 England was as much ahead of the United States in cheaply building the standard ocean vessel, namely, the steamer, as America had been ahead of England in 1840 in building the standard ocean vessel of that time, the sailing ship. The working of the same changes is seen in the United States. In five years, 1857-61, the output of the New England yards 574 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY was nearly twice that of the Middle Atlantic and Gulf coast, but the latter, adjacent to iron and steel supplies, had triple the New England output in five years, 1907-11. The most significant fact of all is that during that half century when industries were multiplying by ten- and twentyfold, the total amount of ship-building on those coasts had not increased and had remained at a figure that is about 10 per cent, of the British output of 1911. Britain's Efficient Methods of Ship-building. — England's leadership during the latter part of the nineteenth and early part of the twentieth century is due partly to cheaper raw material, partly to cheaper labor, partly to abundant capital and the desire to invest in ships, and partly to the economy which comes from the great size of the industry. In America and on the continent of Europe, vessels are commonly built one or two at a time, but in the large shipyards in the British ship-building centers upon the River Clyde in west Scotland, the Tyne in northeast England, and the Irish harbor of Belfast, a half-dozen or a dozen steamers all alike are built at one time. As each part is duplicated several times, the cost for each ship is less than when built singly. The British ship-building industry is a good example of con- centration. The single city of Newcastle on Tyne built over a third more shipping (412,000 tons) in 1911 than the whole United States (291,000 tons) in the same year. Within 30 miles of Newcastle and spread along the eastern edge of the north- eastern coal field are Sunderland (286,000 tons, 1911) Middles- borough Hartlepool (135,000 tons). On the Clyde, Glasgow produced 334,000 tons, and Greenock 206,000 tons, putting the output of the Tyne far above that of the United States. At Belfast (180,000 tons, 1911) is one of the greatest plants in the world. As it belongs to a Trans-Atlantic company engaged in the passenger trade, it builds vessels of great size. In March, 1912, twenty-six ships were under construction there with a tonnage of 328,000 tons. For some decades England has been the chief source of supply for the shipping countries carrying the world's ocean freight. Thus Norway, a land of sailors for fifteen centuries past, has had to turn to British yards for ships now that steel instead of MACHINERY AND SHIP-BUILDING INDUSTRIES 575 Norwegian pine is the prevalent material. In 1911 Norway- took an amount of British shipping equal to more than 25 per cent, of the total output of American yards. The navies of many foreign countries from Japan to Chili depend upon British yards for their vessels, and large amounts of partly used British shipping are annually sold to foreign owners. England's ship- building output is five times that of her nearest rival, Germany. Her leadership in ship-building may be better appreciated by examining the table of the world's mercantile marines of which she has built all of her own (46 per cent, of total), and a part of many other nations. WORLD'S MERCHANT MARINE (Bureau Veritas, 1910-11) Country- Tonnage in thousands British 18,873 (46 per cent, of total) German 4,306 American 3,249 French 1,898 Norwegian 2,004 1,281 Italian 1,350 Dutch 1,046 1,366 989 765 790 742 639 296 270 185 160 Turkish 310 90 113 Total for all countries 41,046 576 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY Ship Building on the Continent and in Japan. — The rise of the German iron industry, the German merchant marine, and the German navy, have caused the establishment of fine ship- yards in the German ports, especially at Stettin, so that that empire is now nearly able to supply its own ships. In 1911 the German ship output was slightly larger than that of the United States, supplying nine-tenths of the German demand of that year. In France there are shipyards in Marseilles, Havre, and Bordeaux; in Italy, at Genoa, Naples, and Venice, but the Italian output does not exceed 5 per cent, of the British. Austria-Hungary builds a few ships in her two ports, Trieste and Fiume upon the Adriatic; Russia has great naval stations at Sebastopol, on the Baltic Sea, and at Cronstadt near St. Petersburg, but most of the commercial or merchant ships that carry the commerce of Russia, of Austria, of Spain, of Australia, of all South American countries and most of the foreign com- merce of the United States are built at the English ship-building centers of Glasgow, Dumbarton, Sunderland, Newcastle and Dublin, and the German port of Stettin. The shipyards of all the world have to pay more for their raw material than it costs the British. A recent Russian commission decided that owing to the adversities of yards remote from coal and iron and with tariff on imported materials, the government ought to pay a bounty of $38 per ton on shipping built in Russia to put it on a parity with foreign competition. The Russian handicap, amounting to three-fourths of the British cost, serves to explain British dominance in ship building. Many foreign shipyards would not exist but for the favoring influence of governments providing for a naval necessity. Thus Japan, with no iron industry worthy of the name, is now building three battleships complete, 14-inch guns and all. The yards that build them can repair them in time of need. Influence of American Navigation Laws upon Shipping and Ship Building. — In order to afford protection to American ship- yards, all vessels that engage in the United States coasting trade and all vessels of the American navy, are required by law to be built in this country. These two classes give employment to our shipyards. Our navigation laws compel vessels flying the American flag to have American citizens for a certain pro- MACHINERY AND SHIP-BUILDING INDUSTRIES 577 portion of the crew and further require that the men shall have better food and quarters than are provided on the ships of other countries. As the tariff protection to the iron and steel industry gives us high-priced steel, the American ships cost more both to build and operate than do foreign ships, and they cannot compete on the open sea. Thus practically all our foreign commerce is carried in foreign-built vessels which also bear a foreign flag. Our ship-building industry, therefore, has little to do with the foreign trade, and our large coastwise com- merce and our increasing navy do not keep it in an increasing condition. While the cost is high the excellence of our war vessels caused American yards to secure the contract early in 1910 to build two battleships for the Argentine Government at a cost of about $20,000,000. The Shifting of American Ship Building. — Our ship building has had a revolution in material which has tended to shift the location of the industry. Of the ships built in 1880 those made of wood were three times as valuable as those made of iron, but in 1905 those made of iron were five times as valuable as those of wood. This revolution has changed the character of our shipyards and changed the relative fitness of different regions for ship building. While the building of a wooden ship is largely a matter of carpenters and workmen, the building of the iron ship requires a large amount of expensive machinery and equip- ment. This gives a tendency to increased size of shipyards. Thus between 1850 and 1905 there has been no increase in the number of our ship-building plants, while the product has in- creased four-fold and the invested capital twenty-one-fold. The modern shipyard is so costly and of such great extent that the building of one large yard at Newport News near the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay in Virginia practically gives that state leadership in the amount of capital invested in this industry. New England, with its many yards for building wooden ships, is not so well located to build iron ships as are cities in the Middle Atlantic States. Two New England ports, Bath, Maine, and Quincy, Mass., have the equipment to build the largest vessels, but the many yards at Brooklyn and other points upon the waters of New York harbor, make that the greatest single ship-building center in America. The Delaware, sometimes 578 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY called the American Clyde, with yards at Philadelphia, Camden, Chester, and Wilmington, is the most important ship-building river in America. There is a shipyard at Baltimore, but the most. important yard upon the Chesapeake waters is at Newport News. The more southern yards have less interference by ice, storms, and cold weather, and are about the same distance as Philadelphia from the great source of steel supply at Pittsburg. The yards upon Chesapeake Bay have a slight disadvantage in comparison with those of the Delaware and Boston bays because they are not so near the machinery and engine-manufacturing centers of the Middle Atlantic states and southern New England. Nature has favored this industry in the United States. The Clyde is but a creek dug out at great cost, while the Delaware is a wide open estuary with room enough to build the shipping for all the world . Other American Yards. — Shipping upon the American Great Lakes renders great commercial service, and the vessels, being so large that they cannot leave lake waters, are built upon the lake shores. This industry accounted for approximately half of American ship building in 1910. The most important centers are at Cleveland, Chicago, Detroit, and Buffalo, although there is some ship building at Lake Erie ports other than Cleveland and Buffalo. Although the Pacific states produce practically no iron, the need of equipment for repair work and the building of battle- ships has caused the establishment of first-class, modern ship- yards at San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Seattle, but the output of new shipping is limited almost entirely to war vessels. In practically every river town, fishing port, and seaport, there are small yards for the building of row boats, launches, fishing vessels, canal barges, and other special vessels many of which are usually of wood. This material, of which nearly one-fourth of our vessels are built, still serves for vessels used in sea, lake, and river fisheries, and as pleasure craft. Navy Yards. — The enlarged navy of the United States requires Government Navy yards equipped for the repair of war vessels. As these repairs are often extensive, some yards are now able to build, and have built, large vessels and should therefore be ranked among the important ship-building enterprises of the United MACHINERY AND SHIP-BUILDING INDUSTRIES 579 States. They are located at Brooklyn, N. Y., Charlestown (Boston), Mass., Norfolk, Va., Mare Island (Vallejo), Cal., Bremerton (Puget Sound), Washington, League Island (Phila- delphia), Portsmouth, N. H. (Kittery, Maine), and Pensacola, Florida. 8. SMALL METAL MANUFACTURES Relation to Good Labor Supply. — An inspection of a hardware store reveals a collection of hundreds and even thousands of articles, such as saws, axes, cutlery, fire arms and ammunition, plumber's, tinner's and carpenter's tools, and that very long list of articles known as builders' hardware, nearly all of which are made of metal. A jewelry store reveals a collection of still more valuable metal products in which, as in the hardware, the metal plays a relatively small part, and the labor a large part in the cost of production. This high labor and small material value means that these articles are likely to be produced where population is abundant, as in New England, not where it is scarce, as in Virginia, West Virginia, or Kentucky. The Distribution of the Industry. — The manufacture of most of these small articles in the making of which machine tools and automatic machinery are very important, particularly in America, originated in England and in Germany. It soon started up in this country, in southern New England, and has gradually moved westward through New York and Pennsylvania into the North Central States. Thus, at Gary, Indiana, a suburb of Chicago, the United States Steel Corporation has re- cently built the most perfect steel plant in the world. In it ore is unloaded from steamer at one end of the enormous plant, spread out on the Lake Michigan sands, and from the other end are shipped many small articles that may be bought in a hardware store. In the meantime New England is holding a leading place by making more and more refined articles as regions farther west take up branches of the metal manufacture. She continues to be a great center for the manufacture of fire arms and ammuni- tion, important industries of Springfield, Massachusetts, where rifles and revolvers are turned out by the tens of thousands and cartridges by the tens of millions. Two towns in Vermont make a large part of the fine scales that weigh goods all over the 580. INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY United States and also in foreign countries. Philadelphia has one of the largest saw factories in the world. A large part of the jewelry made in the United States is produced within 30 miles of Providence. Rhode Island, being the most densely populated state, becomes a natural home for such an industry, in which labor is so dominant a factor when you consider that both the valuable raw material and the finished product can be transported so easily. Silverware has its center of manufacture in some of the towns of Connecticut, which state also leads in the manu- facture of clocks and watches, especially the very cheap clocks and watches. In this class of industries it is plain that America is at a dis- advantage with Europe in the combined factors of labor and raw materials. We have made advantages by invention, in which we have thus far led the world. Most of the articles of this type are patented, such as firearms, and typewriters, of which one factory in central New York exports millions of dollars' worth per year and sends its product to all lands. Sometimes the patent control lies not in the design of the article but in the method of making. When it comes to plain unpatented, simple things, European labor decides it, as in the case of toys, of which the world's supply comes so largely from Austria and south Germany. Standardization and Interchangeable Parts. — The New Eng- land clock business has been made possible by the American system of manufacture, in which standardization and inter- changeable parts have replaced the old hand methods by which every clock was different. Switzerland was long famed as the best watch-making country in the world, Geneva and vicinity being the center. These watches were made by hand, each wheel carefully fitted to the next wheel, so that if one broke the new one had to be shaped by hand to fit its mates. By the American method of interchangeable parts, fifty watches can be taken to pieces, each piece put into its own bin, and the watches may then be satisfactorily reconstructed by chance selection of the necessary parts. Thus, Connecticut can make alarm clocks and cheap watches at fabulously low prices, because of new methods of manufacture, perfected largely through American inventions. MACHINERY AND SHIP-BUILDING INDUSTRIES 581 These mechanical methods of manufacture, in combination with the patented devices owned by American firms, have enabled the manufacturers of New England, New York, Pennsylvania, and Ohio, to sell builders' hardware, rifles, bicycles, clocks, type- writers, and many other patented articles in many foreign coun- tries, despite the fact that England and Germany have cheaper material and cheaper labor. Apparently this trade can only be kept up by the continued improvement of the patterns and methods, for if an article, like a microscope for instance, falls into the class where it is a plain matter of labor and skill, it is made where skilled labor is cheapest. Thus America has never thought of establishing a wood-carving business. . It belongs in Europe as the yet more difficult ivory carving belongs in India with its yet cheaper labor, and as silk belongs in China and Japan with the cheapest of all labor. Indication of this adjustment of industry to population is shown by the complaints of German makers of cheap clocks that Japan is selling them in China at prices no European manufacture can meet (U. S. Con. Rep., July 18, 1911). European Jewelry Centers. — The centralization of jewelry making in the United States around Providence is matched in England by the leadership of Birmingham, and in Germany by the three towns of Pforzheim, Hanau, and Gmeund. Pforzheim became the residence of fleeing French Huguenot jewelers, and the industry was well established 130 years ago, by 1907 there were 1,078 factories, and 30,000 workers, a number nearly equal to all those of the United States. The town has special schools to train jewelry workers, many of whom work in their own homes. REFERENCES See General References CHAPTER XV CHEMICAL RAW MATERIALS AND MANUFACTURES Chemistry: The Laboratory and the Factory- — Chemistry, the science, and the chemical industries are of most universal importance in manufacturing. The printer depends upon them for his ink, the railroad builder for his dynamite, the blacksmith and the tinner for materials to make their metals weld, the glass maker and iron manufacturer for chemicals for fluxing and re- ducing ores. The chemist produces the painter's colors, the dyes of the weaver, the tans of the tanner, the fertilizer for the tiller, of the soil, the drugs and medicines for the apothecary and the physician, and raw materials and commodities without number. The processes of the chemical laboratory which supply these necessities are coming more and more to be performed in factories on a large scale, as the basis of a rapidly growing industry of an importance in manufacturing that is to be likened only to the use of power. Almost daily some new chemical is discovered — some new device is so perfected that another laboratory process may become an industrial process, with the result that the prices of many chemicals are rapidly declining and the output rapidly increasing. German Leadership In Chemistry. — Germany leads the world in chemical industries, because her people are, upon the average, the most thoroughly educated and especially because her univer- sities had developed the science of chemistry for decades before it was important in any other country. The trained chemist of the German university very early found employment in German chemical works, and thus gave Germany her easy leadership over all other countries. The German government has also encouraged this and other industries in many ways. Since 1880 many German chemists have sought employment in England and America, and many Americans, trained in Germany, have returned to this country, where the teaching of industrial chem- 582 CHEMICAL RAW MATERIALS AND MANUFACTURES 583 istry has become general and the chemical industries are rapidly on the increase. One of the most typical chemical manufactures in its scien- tific nature, its importance, and its relation to other industries, is that of dye stuffs. These are manufactured almost entirely from coal tar, one of the by-products of the by-product coke oven. This tar is one of the greatest chemical mines known. In 1906, on the fiftieth anniversary of the discovery of the coal tar dyes, 700 distinct color dye stuffs were in existence, and the total number of aniline dyes recognized by chemists was over 62,000. From this same source other chemicals are prepared, including carbolic acid and many drugs. Synthetic indigo made from coal tar has so nearly replaced natural indigo that the exports of that staple from India decreased from 21 million pounds in 1896 to 2 million pounds in 1910, and the average price had dropped from eighty-five to fifty-five cents per pound. The chemical industry arising from coal tar products has an out- put of $100,000,000 per year, but the share of it outside of Ger- many is relatively insignificant. There are a few plants in New Jersey and in New England, but about 95 per cent, of the industry is German. i. THE RAW MATERIALS The chemical industry resembles the textile industry in having a few raw materials of great importance, and a host of minor ones. Thus sulphuric acid, most important of the acids, soda ash, similarly important among the alkalies, nitrate of soda, the potash salts, ammonia, and coal tar are to chemicals what the major fibers are to textiles. In both chemicals and fibers the far ends of the earth have their contributions. Seeds and extracts from the plants and trees, rare minerals, and even the sea water itself are sources from which the chemist with his laboratory is ever fusing, distilling, and extracting new substances of use to mankind. Sulphuric Acid. — Sulphuric acid is the most important manufactured material used in the making of chemicals; and, for this reason, it is sometimes spoken of as the chemical barom- eter. Some persons even go so far as to say that one can gauge the civilization of a people by the amount of sulphuric 584 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY acid they use. It is used extensively in fertilizer factories and nearly all other chemical works. It is made by a comparatively- easy process from sulphur and water, and costs but a fraction of a cent per pound. 1 It gives the chief use for the sulphur con- sumption which now amounts to 18 pounds per person per year in the United States. Some of the sulphur we produce at home, but we get it chiefly as sulphur ore from the Rio Tinto and the Tharsis mines near Huelva, Spain, which together sent us nearly a million tons in 1911. Small quantities also come from Italy, • Portugal and from Pilly's Island, Newfoundland. Owing to the ease of manufacture, most of the sulphuric acid is made where used in the fertilizer and other chemical plants, the rapid increase in the amount produced in the north central states showing the development of the chemical industries in that part of the country. Soda Ash. — Almost equally important with sulphuric acid as a chemical raw material is soda ash, or sodium bicarbonate, used in manufacturing of soap, glass, and many chemicals. It is chiefly made by the Solvay process, a Belgian invention that has done much to cheapen alkalies. The sodium in the soda ash is furnished by common salt, in the form of brine secured either from salt springs or by the easy method of pumping water down through the earth to the salt beds through one pipe and pumping it out by another after it has done the work of the miner by dis- solving the salt hundreds of feet below. Coal, coke, and lime- stone are also used in the process of manufacture; and the plants are usually located where salt and limestone both exist. The chief works are at Syracuse, New York, Detroit, Michigan, and other points along the salt deposits of these two states. The increase of this chemical product of wide usefulness has caused a great decline in its import from Germany. We are not compelled to depend upon factories for soda. It is merely because of its cheapness. Certain lakes in the western Nevada deserts are highly charged with soda to be had by evaporating the water; a similar lake at Megadi, East Africa, has dried up, leaving a crystalline bed of soda. These lakes with their hundreds of millions of tons of soda have remained un- 1 As a by-product from the fumes of a copper smelter at Ducktown, Term., the cost of sulphuric acid is only $2,25 per ton. CHEMICAL RAW MATERIALS AND MANUFACTURES 585 utilized because it was cheaper to make it near the place of consumption. The Manufacture of Explosives. — Explosives have long been the most spectacular of the chemists' products. Long used for destruction only, they have at last entered industry, and are performing rapidly increasing services, since dynamite has be- come cheap. Without dynamite and gunpowder the prosecu- tion of the mining and quarrying industries, and the building of our railways, tunnels, subways, and canals would be impossible. Our per capita consumption of explosives amounts to over 5 pounds per year, and in 1910 we shipped over 10,000,000 pounds for use in the Panama Canal. This commerce in dynamite is so great that over 2,000 cars upon American railways are con- stantly engaged in carrying it. This, too, despite the fact that the plants are scattered over the country from end to end to minimize transportation of the dangerous product. This one factor of danger and consequent cost of transport is the dominat- ing factor which scatters the centers of manufacture, as high freights scatter cement plants. The assembling of the raw materials is much easier than the handling of the finished ex- plosives, but it is a distinct advantage to have the plants on tide water as the banks of the Delaware River, which has long been the greatest location for the manufacture of explosives, with the center at Wilmington, Delaware. The great danger of explo- sions causes the plants to be removed from city limits to isolated locations often in or on the edge of swamps. Among the raw materials for this industry nitrate of soda is important along with nitric and other acids, sulphur, and charcoal. The Products of the Electric Furnace. — Another group of chemical products meriting mention here are those produced by electricity or electro-chemistry. The great heat of the electric furnace is used in the manufacture of a number of crys- talline substances produced by the cooling of fluids made by the melting of refractory substances in the consuming heat of the electric spark. One of these is called carborundum, and is made by fusing coke, glass, sand, and sawdust, the resulting crystals being carbide of silicon and resembling black diamonds. Pieces of carborundum are useless as gems, but exceedingly valuable when cemented together or made otherwise usable as 586 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY abrasives for the cutting of metal, stone, glass, or wood. Another of these products is alundum or artificial e mery; and for making non-fusible retorts, the artificial graphite from Niagara Falls furnaces now far exceeds the output of the mines in the Adirondacks. Calcium carbide is another product of similar process of manu- facturing, namely the fusing of materials under the great heat produced by the electric current. This material in combination with water produces the brilliant acetylene gas now so well known. It is manufactured at Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan, and at Niagara Falls, where the great power plants, run by the water- falls, produce also all the carborundum made in America. These same products are produced in Norway and Sweden, where the moist Atlantic winds blowing against the high mountains give excellent water power for the production of cheap electric current, which seems to be the locating factor in this industry, which is assuming large proportions, and in which Scandinavia and Switzerland with their riches of water power plants have such a surprising lead in exports, as shown by the appended table. CALCIUM CARBIDE Countries Made Used Exported Sweden and Norway. United States France Switzerland Italy Austria and Hungary Canada Spain Germany England Other countries 52,000 50,000 32,000 30,000 28,000 22,500 12,000 18,000 7,000 2,000 5,200 4,000 37,000 31,500 4,000 23,000 17,000 8,000 16,000 36,230 16,000 63,800 48,000 13,000 500 26,000 5,000 5,500 4,000 2,000 Norway alone has 60,000 horse-power employed in making calcium carbide and 40,000 horse-power in other electro-chemical work. CHEMICAL RAW MATERIALS AND MANUFACTURES 587 2. SUGGESTIVE MINOR CHEMICAL INDUSTRIES "Essential oil" is the name applied to oils that are charac- teristic of particular plants. Thus the cinnamon flavor is in the essential oil which can be entirely extracted from the cin- namon bark. Essential oils enter largely into drugs, medicines, perfumes, and flavors. The extraction is sometimes by distilla- tion, sometimes by other processes. The production of these oils is a combination of agriculture and chemical manufacture — agriculture furnishing the raw material. Orange, lemon, and bergamot oil are citrous products made chiefly in Sicily and Calabria, where the fruits are cheap and labor abundant. Lime oil comes from Montserrat and other West Indian islands. India exports a number of seeds producing essential oils, and China ships, largely through Hong Kong, nearly a million pounds a year of aniseed and cassia oils. Another class of these oils appears in perfumery. The growers of Damascus roses in Bulgaria give to the western world its supply of the precious attar of roses. Its costliness results from the payment of from three to five cents per pound for the flowers, of which from 160 to 225 pounds are required to distill an ounce of the attar. The Riviera, the warm, sunny, rocky coast of the Mediter- ranean near the Franco-Italian boundary, has a dense population, a climate good for flowers, and the tiniest patches of arable land along the cliffs. Here a perfumery industry thrives, with syndicates of orange perfumers and jasmine growers. Oil of geranium and oil of violets are also distilled here. In south- eastern England lavender oil is made from the cultivated lavender plant, and a recent entrant into the perfumery trade is the oil of linaloe, made from a wood growing on the highlands south- west of the city of Mexico. Essential oils are merely one class of chemicals and drugs. There are also numerous vegetable extracts other than oils, such for example as nux vomica and strychnine, the products of a bean yielded by a tree growing wild in the forests of India. The few oils and extracts men- tioned here are suggestive of the rapidly widening use of a class of products in which discovery has but begun, and in which cultivation and manufacture follow on the heels of demand made effective by new laboratory processes. 588 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY Two great industries of a chemical nature, fertilizer and soap, demand particular discussion because of their intrinsic import- ance and also because of their importance in enabling us to understand other industries. Millions of Tons 6 5 4 3 2 1 °c c c / i ?u A & 1 ■s oj> -,Vn ;*> ^ i 1 1 fS s> SI V oS8 5 / / \ / / • S '' "&■* k S /■ A ^ f b ^ J.OOU 1885 1890 1895 1900 1905 1910 1911 Fig. 187. — The increasing output of fertilizers. 3. THE FERTILIZER INDUSTRY The heaviest of all chemical industries is that devoted to the production of chemical plant foods known as fertilizers. Of the several important chemicals necessary to the growth of plants, three — namely, phosphorus, potassium, and nitrogen — often exist in the soil in insufficient amounts or in unavailable forms, and CHEMICAL RAW MATERIALS AND MANUFACTURES 589 often must be supplied. These three substances in many differ- ent' forms and commodities are the main raw materials of the fertilizer manufacturer, and he ransacks the world to get them. Guano. — The first article extensively used as a commercial plant food was guano, the excrement and dead bodies of sea birds which have lived and nested in places where the rainfall is insufficient to dissolve and carry away the deposits. Of all the accumulations of valuables upon the surface of the earth, none have been more productive of easily gathered wealth than the guano beds of the rocky Chincha Islands off the desert coast of Peru, where for unknown ages myriads of sea birds had lived and nested. Upon the discovery of the value of guano, these islands became a mine rich with the newest fossil accumulations, and yielding between 1830 and 1880 about $600,000,000 worth of valuable plant food (nitrogen and phosphorus) which was chiefly taken around Cape Horn to Europe and America, and sold at from $30 to $60 per ton. As the taxation of this industry was most easy, it was for a long time the support of the Peruvian Government; but the exhaustion of the deposits has caused the industry to decline to an annual harvest of a few thousand tons per year, of which the larger part is used in Peru itself. Small amounts of guano are still exported from the west coast of South America and from some of the drier West Indian and other tropic islands, but its place as a fertilizer has, since 1880, been quite largely filled by chemicals from widely different sources. Phosphates. — The bulkiest, cheapest, and possibly the most important of these rival plant foods are phosphates, which fur- nish phosphorus to the plants. Much of the phosphorus of the world has been concentrated as phosphates in the bones of animals. Consequently, it is from animal sources, directly or in fossil form, that nearly all available phosphorus is obtained. Thus, ground bone is an important fertilizer, and for many years the bone hunters, with their wagons, roamed the western plains of the United States, getting these last remnants of the buffalo and cattle that had perished in blizzards, by the wolf pack, or by the hand of the hunter. Ship loads of bleached bones are picked up on the plains of the Argentine Republic and shipped to the fertilizer plants of the eastern United States 590 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY and Europe. The small butchers as well as the great slaughter houses of our large cities also furnish their contribution. But by far the greatest amount of phosphorus is now obtained by man from the fossil remains of animal life, known as phosphate rock, from which, by chemical process, fertilizers are made. Fossil Phosphates. — No other country approaches the United States in phosphate rock resources. The lime phosphate rock in this country is usually found so near the surface that it can be dug from pits. This industry started near Charleston, S. C. This state had a monopoly of this industry from 1867 to 1888, but its greatest development now is near Tampa, Florida, which state produced four-fifths of the entire output of 2,600,000 tons in 1910. New discoveries have been made in central Tennessee, and recently deposits of great exteDt have been found in the arid plains near the boundary of Wyoming and Idaho, not far from the Yellowstone National Park. The mining of these western deposits has scarcely begun, and the location lacks the advantages of water transport that are so helpful. In addition to supplying the American market, we export over a million tons a year, chiefly to England, France, and Germany. The port of Tampa alone sends about half of the product, St. Marks and Fernandina, Fla., each one-fifth, while smaller quantities are shipped from Pensacola, Fla., and Savannah and Brunswick, Ga. Some phosphate rock is produced near Liege, Belgium, and also at Estremadura, Spain, and Cambridgeshire, England. In Ontario and Norway there is some produced in the form of a mineral called apatite. The phosphorus only becomes available as plant food after it is dissolved, a service which sulphuric acid renders in the factory, making the so-called acid phosphate. Of late years the so-called basic process of purifying iron and steel has given us a new source of phosphorus. The limestone linings of the furnace draw the phosphorus from the molten iron and steel, and are later ground up and sold under the name of Thomas slag or basic slag, quite largely used as fertilizer in England and Germany. It is used less in the United States because of our fossil phosphates. The greatest seat of its manu- facture is Germany, whose exports amount to nearly half a million tons, of which we imported but 13,000 tons. CHEMICAL RAW MATERIALS AND MANUFACTURES 591 Potash. — The second great raw material in the fertilizer industry is potash, of which we are heavy importers (586,000 tons, 1911) from Germany, which country has, under present conditions, almost a world monopoly. Potash differs from phosphorus in that there are vast quantities of low-grade mate- rial as a possible future dependence. Mountains of feldspar in various parts of the world contain about 8 or 9 per cent, of potash; but it is unavailable under the existing state of chemical knowledge. So the whole world depends upon the mines of Stassfurt, near the Elbe River, in Germany, where, overlying a large deposit of common salt, is to be found the only important collection thus far known of available potash salts, of which there are several varieties. This collection of natural chemicals makes Stassfurt possess the greatest variety .of chemical works to be found in any city of the world. From it the materials of the soap-maker, the bleacher, the glass-maker, the dyer, the photographer, the potter, the gunpowder manufacturer, the fertilizer manufacturer and the druggist go forth in great variety. The adjacent town of Schoenbeck, upon the Elbe, has the largest salt works in Germany. The potash mines of Germany are controlled by a trust, which distributes the product at a rather high price throughout the commercial world. The exactions of the German Potash Trust, backed up by the German Government, have caused the United States Govern- ment to make formal search for this mineral, which, along with tin, has long been the most conspicuous shortage in our wide variety of natural resources. In 1911 great interest was aroused by the discovery in the old bed of a dry California lake of a deposit of potash variously estimated at from four to ten million tons. There is small prospect, however, that this deposit can even stop the increase in our imports from Germany. Much more promising is the potash from Kelp or sea weed, of which several hundred square miles exist off the Pacific coast of the United States. Conservative estimates place the output of 100 square miles of this kelp at 1 million tons of chloride of potash worth $35,000,000 per year, or nearly twice our present imports from Germany. This output provides for the perma- nence of the beds which feed upon the exhaustless chemicals of sea water. This accounts for the high yield, $50 per acre, year 592 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY after year upon thousands of acres, which puts agriculture to shame (Year-book, U. S. Department of Agriculture, 1911, p. 108). The manufacture of this potash has begun in Cali- fornia, Scotland, and Norway, but its technique is to be worked out. It is difficult to conceive of a trust monopolizing this sea- bottom product which belongs, like fish, to the catcher. Nitrogen. — The third; and most expensive, of the fertilizing materials is nitrogen, of which, despite the apparent scarcity, there are many and unlimited possibilities of output, because this rather inert element comprises three-fourths of the air, and we can draw upon it as we do upon water. Until recently we have had to draw upon the indirect sources of nitrogen. All animal matter is more or less nitrogenous, and fertilizer factories receive as raw materials the inedible animal products from the butcher shop and the slaughter house. Dried blood and tankage, the general refuse collection of otherwise unusable animal material in a slaughter house, are high-priced fertilizers. Dried fish and fish scraps and drjed crabs are also important nitrogen fertilizers, especially in Japan. In that country bean cake also has long been used. This cake remains after oil has been extracted from the bean, and is much like that which remains after oil has been made from flax seed and cotton seed, which has been used for fertilizer in this country. The use of these seed-cake products as fertilizer is declining, because of their greater value as animal food, and the high fertilizing value of the animal excrements. Fish and other animal remains also contain some phosphorus. Nitrate of Soda.— The greatest nitrogen-supplying raw material at present is nitrate of soda, which, like guano (and probably potash also) accumulates in commercial quantities only in deserts, where the rainfall is insufficient to dissolve and carry it away. Small quantities come from the deserts of northern India; some is produced in Death Valley, California, and the other deserts of California and Nevada, where it is found in small quantities as a white crust along with borax on or near the surface of the earth, and only needs to be hauled away and refined. The California 1 borax supplies the 40,000 tons a year necessary for 1 Recently discovered borax mines have so reduced the price of borax that it is no longer gathered from old lake beds. CHEMICAL RAW MATERIALS AND MANUFACTURES 593 the United States, but the supply of the nitrate in commercial quantities is practically a monopoly of Chile. The northern third of Chile is a desert, as absolute a desert, some of it, as the world possesses. Here, in the desert plateaus between the Andes and the ocean, near the Tropic of Capricorn, are vast amounts of nitrate of soda — soluble riches which a decade of rain would dissolve and carry to the sea. The method of mining this treasure of nature is simple. After the removal of a little sand and earth from the surface, it can be shovelled up like clay and gravel and taken away in carts or temporary railways to the nitrate works, where it is refined. This is done by dis- solving it in water, then boiling down the solution, from which the nitrate crystallizes, as sugar does from the cane juice. A by-product of the nitrate plant is iodine, and Chile having a practical world monopoly of both nitrates and iodine at the pres- ent time, limits production and prices almost at will. The possession of this valuable monopoly has profoundly influenced Chilean industry, government, finance, and trade. Nitrate Cities in the Desert. — The prosecution of this industry in the desert of northern Chile gives rise to an interesting com- mercial situation. When shipments of nitrate first began, the towns along this coast even brought their water from more favored ports from which water ships regularly sailed northward and southward, replenishing their tanks at each end of the journey. As the nitrate industry has grown and become firmly established, the nitrate towns have been enabled to secure a water supply by laying pipe lines to the Andes, sometimes more than 100 miles away. But the desert destroys all possibility of any local food crops. Everything for the use of man and beast must be imported, so that Iquique, the nitrate metropolis, a city of about 50,000 inhabitants, and many smaller towns and nitrate works, are depending upon the farms of central Chile, several hundred miles to the south of them, for every potato, cabbage, bale of hay, or loaf of bread, necessary to support the daily life of these thousands who are extracting from the desert the nitrate accumulations of the past. The same conditions of foreign support apply, to: the nitrate, manganese, and borax works in the same vicinity but across the boundary in southwestern Bolivia. These. desert colonies with the mineral products give 594 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY rise to a curious triangular trade by which the desert miners sell minerals in Europe, while Europe sends manufactures to central Chile to pay for the food and forage sent thence to the dwellers in the desert. Nitrate of soda alone comprises about three-fourths of the Chilean exports, and amounts to an annual total of nearly 2,000,000 tons, approximately a freight ship load every day in the year. Copper and iodine, from the same desert, comprise one-third of the remaining exports. The greater part of the nitrate goes to France, England, and especially to Germany, where it is one of the greatest chemical raw materials. The United States is also a heavy importer to the extent of 300,000 to 400,000 tons annually. Manufactured Nitrates. — The nitrate supply of Chile is vari- ously estimated at a quantity sufficient to last the world a few decades or possibly a century, but fortunately this monopoly is destined to pass not into a world famine, but into an era of plenty through new inventions. Sulphate of ammonia yields approx- imately as much nitrogen pound for pound as does nitrate of soda. It is one of the by-products of coal distillation, and the total out- put of about 1,200,000 tons in 1911 (United Kingdom, 384,000 tons, Germany 418,000, United States 115,000, France 60,000, Belgium and Holland 43,000), is about half that of the nitrate product and has doubled since 1903. The more economical utili- zation of our coal would enable the United States to make a half million or a million tons of this product. While the coal will be exhausted some day, the air and waterfalls will not. The air is our ultimate source. In 1910 (U. S. Con. Rep., May 16, 1911) Germany imported 11,000 tons of manufactured sodium nitrate and calcium nitrate from Norway, and plants then under con- struction would raise the product of Norway to 330,000 tons per year. This is a product of the illimitable atmospheric nitrogen, caught in the electric furnace by the electric spark from a hydro- electric current, produced by German capital in the defiles of the Norwegian mountains. Yet another nitrogen supply, much like nitrate of calcium in analysis and manufacture, is cyanamide, of which the manufacture has been started at Niagara Falls after its production had reached a considerable amount in Norway and France, where water power is cheaper than in America. CHEMICAL RAW MATERIALS AND MANUFACTURES 595 The Fertilizer Industry and Its Location. — It is plain why the fertilizer plant, drawing each of its staple raw materials from a different continent, finds the best location upon navigable arms of the sea, so that a ship load of potash from Germany, or bones from Buenos Ayres, or nitrate from Iquique, or fossil phosphate from Tampa, can be unloaded direct from ship to factory. We thus find fertilizer plants established in or near almost every Atlantic port from Maine to Florida. Here fertilizer plants are also near their greatest market. Since fertilizers are so largely used by the truck-crop growers throughout the Atlantic plain and on nearly all farms east of the Alleghanies, fertilizer manu- facture is essentially an eastern industry. Georgia is the leading state in the manufacture, chiefly because it is an important cot- ton state, and the exhaustive one-crop plantation system of growing cotton makes the use of chemical fertilizers imperative. In new countries the soils are usually fertile enough to make unprofitable the use of fertilizers, and in the United States their use began in the older east and is now steadily going west- ward into the Central States. The manufacture is rapidly on the increase in Ohio, Indiana, and as far west as St. Louis. Upon the more valuable and carefully cultivated lands of western Europe, particularly of England, France, Germany, Holland, and Belgium, the use of chemical fertilizers is very general, and their manufacture is relatively a more important industry than in this country. By the aid of chemical fertili- zers lands in Holland, Germany, and the United States Atlantic Plain previously worthless have been made productive. The Future of Fertilizer and Fertility. — We are just entering the era of artificial fertilization especially in the United States, because we have an increasing population, soils of decreasing fertility, and the new science of agriculture which is being dis- seminated with great rapidity. The comfort of our future depends upon commercial fertilizers more than upon coal or iron. Granted the ability to grow plants abundantly science can probably adjust and meet man's wants, but without plants, nothing. Without any one of the three constituents, potash, phosphorus, or nitrogen, a field rich in every other requisite of plant growth lies barren. Even the careful Chinese have to abandon other- wise good land where they can get no fertilizer. It is therefore 596 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY fortunate that we have, even without the aid of the nitrogen- gathering bacteria upon plant roots, unlocked indefinite stores of nitrogen and potash. With phosphorus it is otherwise. Speak- ing in terms of generations its supply is scanty and no ultimate reservoirs are yet in sight. Phosphorus is therefore probably the point of man's weakest hold upon the earth, and its waste in sewage, the loss of animal manures, and soil leaching, is a form of resource destruction with which the future must deal unless perchance we can open some avenue of phosphorous recapture from the great reservoirs of the sea. 4. SOAP-MAKING AND ITS MATERIALS Soap is produced by the action of soda or potash upon fats. This chemical reaction causes soap manufacture to be classed among the chemical industries. In the United States the product amounts to over $100,000,000 per year or something over a dollar per person, and in Europe it is nearly as important. There is a considerable international commerce in soap (United Kingdom exports $10,000,000 worth of it per year), but a much greater commerce in its raw materials. Oils and fats used in soap making, like many other raw materials, seem to be of especial im- portance in countries of comparatively undeveloped industry. Tallow, olive oil, cottonseed oil, oil of sesame from India, groundnut or peanut oil, and coconut oil, are all the basis of large commerce. Many other fatty substances of animal and vegetable origin are also used, even including the grease that is removed from sheep wool in preparing it for the loom. Tallow, Olive, Cottonseed, and Peanut Oils. — Tallow, the standard fat of northern countries, has for a century been the product of the most remote sheep and cattle pasturing districts, and it comes to-day from the sheep ranches of Falkland Islands, from those of New Zealand, and from central Asia, as well as from slaughter houses in our big cities. Since the coming of soap olive oil has been the standard soap fat of Mediter- ranean countries; and Marseilles, with a soap industry one- seventh as valuable as all of the United States, is probably the greatest center in the world for the handling of vegetable oils and fats. It is located near the French olive district. It is also the natural gateway to northern Europe for the olive oil CHEMICAL RAW MATERIALS AND MANUFACTURES 597 shipped in small vessels from the numerous parts of Spain, Italy, and north Africa. In recent decades new industrial movements have given other oils as rivals of, and substitutes for, the oil of olives. Marseilles, the oil center, has attracted this trade also, doubling the output of her vegetable oil mills between 1905 and 1910. One of the most important of these new mate- rials is cottonseed oil, produced chiefly in the cotton districts of the United States, and in its purer grades, largely used for food in south Europe as a substitute for olive oil, while the lower grades serve as a soap material in the Marseilles markets and factories. The opening of the Suez Canal enabled this French port easily to import new oils from the East, and the fat seeded leguminous groundnut or peanut (see Chapter V) is largely imported from Pondicherry, India ; from the French colony of Madagascar; from Mozambique, east Africa; from German East Africa ; from Senegal in west Africa ; and also from Brazil, Argentina, and Costa Rica. The great market for all these produc- ing districts is Marseilles where peanut oil, like cottonseed oil, is a rival of olive oil for both food and soap. IMPORTS OF OIL MATERIALS AT MARSEILLES Articles 1906, tons 1910, tons Sesame seed Groundnuts: Shelled In shell Linseed Rape and ravison Poppy seed Castor seed Pulghere seed Cottonseed Niger and kapok seed Copra Palm kernels Mowrah, illipe, etc . . , Total 61,416 90,979 111,158 199,774 78,677 148,242 19,634 10,128 3,191 5,483 3,925 1,794 13,554 13,487 1,887 18,391 11,655 2,375 1,788 109,914 171,423 4,170 1,629 6,431 7,410 432,836 665,679 598 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY The list of imported oil materials shows the extent and phe- nomenal growth of the industry at Marseilles which crushes 90 per cent, of the oil seed imports it gathers from many lands. It will be noted that the great increase is in the tropic products of peanuts and copra. Coconut Oil. — The coconut, one of the most promising of all oil producers, thrives upon the tropic sea shores almost everywhere, but the largest producer of the nuts upon a commer- cial scale is Ceylon, where the natives have numerous small Fig. 188. — Coeoanut palm is one of the great automatic food machines. There is a saying in the tropics that when a man gets his coeoanut grove started he hangs up his hammock. (U. S. Dept. Agr.) coconut plantations and Europeans have made large planta- tions. Ceylon, with the size of West Virginia and the popula- of California and Oregon, has nearly as large a proportion of her area in coconuts (1,035,000 acres) as the United States has in corn and wheat. Coconut meat (copra) is a very durable product when dried, or even when allowed to lie upon the ground, so that it is an admirable commercial product for the easy-going tropic native, who can pick up his crop and dry CHEMICAL RAW MATERIALS AND MANUFACTURES 599 it ready for the oil press when it suits him. This oil material is an important export from the Philippine Islands, from the Malay Archipelago, from Madras, Malabar, and Coro-Mandel in India, from the east coast of Africa and the Indian Ocean Islands of Maurtius and Seychells. The coconut is most im- portant, however, to the South Sea Islanders, to some of whom it directly supplies an amazing variety of wants and furnishes the only means of purchasing the products of the outside world, which come to them in small vessels, veritable floating depart- ment stores that skirt the populous archipelagoes trading for coconut meats and coconut oils, which finally find their way to the European soap factories — at Antwerp, Liverpool, Ham- burg, and Marseilles. One of the leading manufactures of Sydney, the metropolis of Australia, is the new branch of a British soap company. The plant crushes 1,500,000 coconuts per week. The annual harvest of 23,000 acres of palm groves is brought to it by steamers which scour the Pacific from Christ- mas Island on the east to Solomon Islands on the west, including Fifi, Samoa, and Tonga. Some of these islands are never visited by any other ships. This one plant at Sydney makes soap, supplies Australia with coconut oil, exports much to Europe, and also has as by-products glycerine, and oil cake for cattle food. From New Caledonia comes the complaint that the natives can make a living so easily gathering up a few tons of coconuts ($100 per ton for copra) that they do not care to work for white men or dig in the chrome mines. Coconuts are also shipped from Jamaica and Trinidad to the United States, and these places are so near the market that the nut arrives fresh and is used for food, leaving the soap factory supply to come from more distant localities. Palm Oil. — Marseilles, Liverpool, Antwerp, Hamburg, and other centers of African trade are now receiving large and ever- increasing quantities of a comparatively new soap and candle fat. It is the oil of the palm, the olive of tropic Africa — ex- ported from the west coast, between the upper part of the Gulf of Guinea and Fernando Po, from the east coast between Zanzi- bar and Pemba, near the Tropic of Capricorn, and also from the shores of the African lakes. The breech-clothed African climbs the 30-foot palm tree and cuts off its head of fruit, as big as a 600 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY basket. The many small fruits are boiled, thrown into a kettle of water, and tramped by bare feet to crush out the oil, which is skimmed from the surface of the water. This is refined by further boiling, and used throughout much of Africa as a choice morsel of food, a substitute for the olive oil of Europe and the butter of America. It is also the chief money crop of West African countries and is one of the important articles of freight for the many steamers that skirt the African coast. The kernel of the seed is also quite largely exported for the manufacture of oil in European ports. The Soap Industry. — The great slaughtering industry of the United States makes its inedible grease into soap materials. Of late the progress in the fuller utilization of by-products has given increasing importance to the manufacture of soap by firms that began as slaughterers of meat animals. The soda ash factories of New York and Michigan produce most of the other raw materials required, and soap manufactories are quite gener- ally distributed throughout the manufacturing parts of the United States from Chicago to Boston; Philadelphia, Cincinnati, and Chicago being especially important. Our riches of animal fats combined with our facility in invention and discovery have given us a large soap industry. Consequently, although we import a few hundred thousand dollars' worth of valuable toilet soaps from Europe, we have come to export thousands of tons of cheaper soap of much greater total value to Europe, and to almost every country in the world. REFERENCES See General References The Production of Sulphate of Ammonia, Annual. American Coal Product Co., New York. Utilization of Atmospheric Nitrogen. Report, Bureau of Commerce and Labor, Washington. Reference hist on Electric Fixation of Nitrogen. Bulletin, Bureau of Soils, U. S. Department of Agriculture. Baron, Harold. The Chemical Industry on the Continent. Meade, E S. Story of Gold. D. Appleton & Co., N. Y. CHAPTER XVI THE MINERAL INDUSTRIES The mines and quarries of the world were estimated to employ in 1909 about 6 million persons and give an output valued at $4,200,000,000 — a total less than half as great as the output of American farms. Nineteen forty-seconds of the total value was coal, and coal and iron together made more than half of the total. Millions of Dollars United States Farm Production, 1909 8760 United States Mineral Production, 1907 2069 World's Gold and Silver Production, 1906 551 Increase in the Value of U.S. Farm Products, 1909 869 Fig. 189. — Comparison of mineral and agricultural production. (The Phila- delphia Museum.) The mineral industry is and has long been characterized by a steady increasing importance of the baser materials. The value of trap rock annually crushed for road making in the United States is greater than all the gold output of the world in the rush years that followed the discovery of America. i. BUILDING MATERIALS The scarcity and a resulting increase in the price of wood that came with the twentieth century forced the people of America, like those of older countries, to find building materials in the earth's crust. After our nineteenth century saturnalia of tree slaughter and cheap wood, we are being driven more and more 601 602 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY to adopt the building materials used in Ancient Rome and used now in most parts of Europe, east Asia and north Africa. It is merely a sign of the declining ratio of land to man that neces- sarily accompanied the increase of population. Rome had these conditions and cement was more largely used there in the days of the Empire than at any time prior to the present. The re- sult of this turn to the earth materials is seen in a doubled output of quarry products in the United States between 1900 and 1910 (from $36,000,000 to $76,000,000) and the astounding increase in cement manufacture. Clay in the form of burned or unburned brick has commonly been the first resource of peoples with whom wood was scarce, especially in warm and arid countries. Houses of adobe or sun- burned bricks have been widely used from Pharaoh's time to the present, and adobe is still a common house material through western Asia, north Africa, parts of south Europe, Mexico, and some of the Andean section of South America. In these countries the mild winters (freezing tends to disintegrate brick and stone) and small rainfalls permit such a building material to suffice. In the middle temperate latitudes, brick must be hardened by burning to make them endure, and they become by this process more durable even than stone. The Effect of Bulk and Materials in Locating the Brick Indus- try. — The low value and great bulk of bricks make them relatively and absolutely expensive to transport. Then, too, the clay suitable for making them is very common, so that the industry is located near the cities that furnish the market for bricks. There are few more widely scattered industries in America. In its wide distribution, the making of common brick resembles dairy farming. Of the total output of nearly $60,000,000 in 1910, forty-three states made over $100,000 worth, thirty-seven over $300,000 worth, thirty-two over $500,000 worth, nineteen over $1,000,000 worth and but five over $2,000,000, and only two over $5,000,000. The regions of high output are the regions of large population — New York, Pennsylvania, and Illinois. Thus, New York, the state with the greatest city population has also the greatest amount of brick manufacture. The industry has its chief development in the Hudson Valley between New York and Cohoes where an eighth of the output of the United THE MINERAL INDUSTRIES 603 States is made in 135 plants (1910). This locality has abundant clay, and both railroad and river navigation to furnish easy access to the enormous market of the cities about the mouth of the Hudson River. It is only occasionally that long transportation of brick is warranted because of some special quality of the bricks. Such are the widely disseminated yellow bricks made in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Winslow Junction, New Jersey, and elsewhere and also the vitrified brick made so largely in the Ohio clay belt. The bricks of special quality above mentioned are for facing fine houses. Others called fire bricks are very resistant to the fusing effects of heat and are used to line blast furnaces and other heated receptacles used in metallurgy. Some of the best clay for this purpose is found beneath the Appalachian coal seams and the most important fire brick center is in the western Pennsylvania coal field. Occasionally conditions of ocean transportation are such that bricks of no special quality may be taken great distances chiefly as ballast for vessels. For this reason lumber and tobacco ships of the eighteenth century brought back many cargoes of English bricks, which the farmer's otherwise empty wagon hauled sur- prising distances where they may still be seen in the old colonial structures of the Tidewater region of the Atlantic States. In the same way Belgian and British bricks are yet carried to Argentina. But the brick yard, with its smoking kilns and clay mixing machines that shoot out the bricks by the mile and cut them off into lengths, is usually an industry with a very limited local market. Building Stone. — Although brick must be manufactured and stone merely taken from the earth, the building stone is often more expensive to use because of the large amount of labor involved in quarrying and shaping stone, or in fitting rough stones together in the wall. The great weight of its prod- uct and the widely scattered deposits of stone, make the quar- rying industry, like the production of brick, tend to be local, that is, near the consuming markets. Exceptions are found in several places in the United States where stones of pecu- liar merit or unusual accessibility give rise to large quarrying industries with a distant market. For this reason, Maine, 604 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY the Granite State, has important quarrying industries along the sea coast where the scraping glaciers have exposed bare hills of slate, limestone, and granite. These quarries have access to the best possible transportation facilities, namely, that afforded by the sea-going vessels that can practically come to the side of the quarry in many sheltered bays upon the indented coast. Mas- sachusetts, with conditions like those of Maine, is the third granite producer and Vermont is first. Quarrying is more im- portant to this state than any other. Its granite for buildings and monuments is shipped to great distances and its leadership in marble is most pronounced, the output being four times that of Georgia, its nearest rival. Marble. — In south Vermont near Rutland is one of the greatest marble industries in the world. A splendid marble deposit is almost as accessible to the quarrymen as are the granites of Maine. As in other extensive quarries, the rock is cut and lifted by mechanical methods and the product is sent surprising distances when one considers how many other good marble de- posits there are in the United States. There are unused deposits around the Great Lakes, especially Huron, and in many parts of Appalachia. Fine marble is produced in Georgia and Tennessee, and Colorado quarries are now being worked in the sides of whole mountains of white marble. The most famous of all marble districts in the world is that at Carrera not far from Leghorn in Italy. This district has furnished practically all the world's statuary marble for several centuries and, in addition, much beautiful building stone. The American imports of Carrera marble are nearly one-tenth as valuable as the output of America. Limestone. — -The beautiful marble is far less important than more vulgar stone. It is no greater in value than Trap rock, the hardest of all, which is crushed for surface roads. Common limestones, used for road making, railroad ballast, concrete, and building stone are five times as valuable as the marble output. The region of its production is from Pennsylvania (first in out- put) to Missouri, which is fifth in output. The limestone most in use as a building stone in the United States is the Indiana limestone (Bedford, oolitic), of which the output of nearly one million cubic feet from the two towns of Bedford and Blooming- ton made up half the limestone building stones of the United THE MINERAL INDUSTRIES 605 States in 1910. This stone is widely used in eastern states because of its durable character and the ease with which, when first quarried, it can be sawed and worked into blocks and other Fig. 190. — Marble quarry, Proctor, Vermont. (Vermont Marble Co.) desired building forms. Upon exposure to the air it hardens. This same quality gives a wide market to the product of some Ohio sandstone quarries. 606 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY Although they send their products to great distances, these important quarry centers produce but a small amount of the total building stone, which is commonly dug from the quarry most nearly available to the place of consumption. European Quarrying. — In Europe quarrying is more important relatively and much more important absolutely than in the United States, for reasons arising from the number and density of population and the scarcity of forests. The quarries of the United States are worked almost exclusively by men who learned their craft in Europe. In quarrying, Switzerland is the New England of Europe. There, as in New England, there is dearth of other resources and great abundance of stone. The solid Alps give abundant supplies of granite, in great demand in the home country and in the Rhine Valley. Rhine boats which bring to Switzerland coal, grain, cotton, and other raw materials for her dense population, take a return cargo of stone for the alluvial lands of Belgium, Holland, and Rhenish Germany, dis- tricts entirely devoid of stone. The Dutch dykes which keep out the sea are, in part at least, constructed of Swiss granite brought in the Rhine boats. The quarries of Belgium have given the name of Belgian Blocks to a paving stone of a certain shape. The Belgian quarries exported 140,000 tons of stone in 19Q7, but they have of late suffered from the competition of Norway and Sweden, which possess fine bare ledges on tide water. Cement. — Cement is a mixture of lime and clay burned to drive off the water. When wet, the cement absorbs water, hardens and becomes as durable as rock. Experience has proved it to be good for two thousand years. Cement has been known since the Roman times, the people of that Empire having been very proficient in its manufacture and use. From that time to the late nineteenth century, cement was little used and was a builder's luxury. Three new factors, the reinforcing of concrete, the rotary kiln and high priced wood and iron, have combined since 1890 to produce what is called the cement age in Amer- ica. Concrete, a mixture of cement, sand and broken stone, has been known for ages. It was little better than a good kind of stone and mortar wall. When reinforced by having a kind of skeleton of steel wires or steel rods within it, its strength is greatly increased and it becomes a substitute for stone, for iron, THE MINERAL INDUSTRIES 607 for steel, and even for lumber, and can be used to build an entire house. New uses for it are being found continually and in great numbers. The new uses brought increased consumption and the demand for cheaper processes of manufacture brought the in- vention of the rotary kiln which has cheapened production. Ce- ment has declined in price at the same time that its rivals, steel, iron, and lumber have increased in price. The resulting Price per Barrel Fig. 191. — Price, production and import of cement in United States. R. Malcolm Keir.) (After unprecedented increase in the industry has been one of the most sudden of all industrial changes. It will take us many years to appreciate the full importance of having buildings which will last for centuries rather than those which need renewing in a few decades. At the present time we are losing by fire nearly half as many buildings as we erect and the life of past equipment has at best been short. Concrete buildings are permanent equipment, enabling us to get progres- 608 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY sively richer as decades pass. In addition to this great dura- bility, cement has exceptional ease of construction. Building stones must be laboriously shaped, bricks must be slowly laid by hand, but cement is mixed by steam power and poured into moulds with an ease that makes it a natural product of machinery and unskilled labor. The increase in the use to which it is put is swift and will doubtless continue for decades. Among the most suggestive of the new uses may be mentioned cement girders, boats, fence posts, piles for driving into the ground and the re- placement of shingles on the Swiss Chalet. K)^-^ / I i J t\)4r< "-P^* \ \ / / ••V Ar^ -^^Z/ / *\\ ? \ 1 l^-J \ " ir^ Fig. 192. — The location of the cement plants in the United States shows that the industry tends to be a local one. (After U. S. Geol. Surv.) The Supply of Raw Materials and the Distribution of Cement Making. — Fortunately the raw materials, limestone and clay or limestone and shale, are to be found in every state and the fuel for burning is also widely scattered so that we have the possibility of having many cement districts if the demand arises. From 1895 to 1905 the leading cement section of the United States was the Lehigh Valley in eastern Pennsylvania. Here the limestone and shale are close together, at the surface, but a few miles removed from the anthracite coal fields and near an abundant supply of good labor (from the adjacent Pennsylvania THE MINERAL INDUSTRIES 609 German settlements). In addition to all these advantages of mere production, this field is less than 100 miles from Phila- delphia and New York, which are both great markets and also convenient places for shipment by water to Panama and to other places where cement is being used in large quantities. The price of a 380-pound barrel of cement in the Lehigh district (Sept., 1912) is $1.20. As a freight rate of $7 per Fig. 193. — Cement is of great service in the management of water. Trail Creek, Yakima Irrigation Project. (U. S. Reclamation Service.) ton will more than double the cost to the consumer, it is plain that a local plant has a great advantage over distant plants with the result that Lehigh Valley is making relatively less and less of the American supply because of competition of newer plants as in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, in Georgia, eastern Tennessee, Pittsburg, New York, Ohio, Michigan, Illinois, Kansas, and elsewhere. Like other building materials, cement tends to be a local industry and the map of plants shows it to be well distributed over the country, for the freight charge for a few hundred miles is as great as the cost of the cement at 610 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY Fig. 194. — Formal opening of irrigation canal and diversion dam on Truckee River, Nevada. Note cement construction. (XT. S. Reclamation Service.) Fia. 195. — Cement step down and diversion in irrigation ditch. Young ostriches at pasture. Cottonwood tree being killed by girdling. THE MINERAL INDUSTRIES 611 the mill. The founding of new cement districts, therefore, goes steadily on. It is now being made in half the states of the Union and will eventually come to be an industry in which it will be unusual to market the product at long distances from the point of manufacture. Cement from the Iron Furnace. — The making of cement from blast furnace slag, with or without addition of other substances, is a recent innovation, important alike to iron and cement makers. Since the disposition of this practically useless by- product of the blast furnaces has been a serious problem at many plants, the making of it into cement is a double advantage and is being extensively carried on at Pittsburg and Chicago, and will doubtless soon spread farther. Foreign Cement Industry. — Cement making in England, Belgium, and Germany was developed earlier than in the United States. The product is having the same extensive use there as in this country, but our dependence upon European supplies is rapidly falling off due to our large home production. England, Belgium, and Germany for a long time sent some cement to our Atlantic ports, and still ship it to the Pacific coast of the United States because of the very cheap freight rates which can be given by sailing vessels outbound in search of grain cargoes to take back to Europe. Thus the re-building of San Francisco after its destruction in 1906- gave rise to heavy importations of European cement. The foreign cement industry shows the same wide distribu- tion found in the United States. Agricultural . Bulgaria has two plants. Cement is manufactured in Peru and other parts of South America,. and even the Far East is practically capable of supplying its present needs from plants in Sumatra, Hong Kong, Canton, on the Yangtse-kiang, at Tientsin and the many Japanese plants in Manchuria and Japan. POTTERY, PORCELAIN, AND GLASS Utensils of earth materials were made in most ancient times and by primitive peoples. Pottery is common even among savages, was made by the Indians of America and was left by the Mound Builders. The ancient Egyptians and Phoenicians 612 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY were expert glass makers before the beginning of the Christian era and porcelain has been made in China for over a thousand years. Simplicity and Distribution of Pottery Industry. — Glass is made by melting pure sand which by the aid of flux melts under high heat and remains transparent after hardening. Pottery, including its finer form, porcelain, is made by burning clay mixtures, which harden without melting. Pottery in its simpler forms is a local industry which has survived the competition of the modern factory somewhat better than the textile industry has. The product is much more difficult to transport and clay suitable for some kind of pottery work is very common, although pure kaolin, the kind of clay used for the finest ware and which can be heated to 3,000 degrees without melting, is somewhat limited in its distribution. In addition to the abundance of the material, the simplicity of manufacturing makes the pottery industry easy to carry on; so that in its simpler forms it ante- dates the commercial epoch, and was widely scattered over Europe and America a hundred years ago. Large factories tend to concentrate the production of the better grades of prod- uct, but the cheapest grades tend to be made close to the market, as illustrated by the present manufacture in Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio of 80 per cent, of the drain tile produced in the United States. Drain tile, an article cheap, bulky, and difficult to transport because porous and weak, is mostly used as a sort of field sewerage system, to carry off surplus water from the flat lands of the North Central States, and make them fit for tillage soon after the rain. Pottery and Porcelain in Europe. — Special porcelain centers have been important since the origin of world .commerce. Early in the eighteenth century a German re-discovered the very old Chinese art of porcelain making. A royal factory was estab- lished at Meissen, Saxony, and there is now another at Berlin. From this start, Germany has become the leading porcelain- manufacturing country of the world. There are over 100 large factories devoted entirely to the manufacture of fine porcelain for export, this branch of the German foreign trade being three times as great as that of any other country. Austria, another German-speaking state, also has important porcelain manufactories, the products of which are exported in consider- THE MINERAL INDUSTRIES 613 able quantity. In Bohemia, the porcelain and glass works employed 52,500 workers in 1910 with an output valued at $23,000,000. For the last century and a half, France has been Germany's chief rival in the production of fine porcelain, the factory at Sevres having long been the rival of the German one at Meissen. The town of Limoges has given its name to a fine porcelain ware, much exported to the United States. In a treeless and stoneless country like Holland, earth products, like brick and tile, are very important. Most of the houses of that country are roofed with a beautiful red clay tile, and one of the favorite interior house decorations is a glazed tile called Delft ware from the little city that for centuries has been well known throughout the western world because of this ware. Since the fifteenth century, Italy has been known for its export of Majolica ware, the name being a corruption of Majorca, one of the Balearic Islands, where the industry originated through the influence of the Saracens. The pottery industry in England has had an interesting shift in its sources of raw materials. It first began in a large way in a district of Staffordshire, known as the "Potteries," where there was an abundance and variety of clays in close proximity to the coal necessary for burning them. Burslem, one of the pottery towns of England, was the birthplace of Wedgewood, the originator of the ware that he ars his name. Upon the intro- duction of porcelain making, which requires pure kaolin, mixed with flint and sand, it was found necessary to import a clay from southeastern Cornwall and Devonshire. This import of the fine raw material from a distant source did not cause the shifting of the industry, because Staffordshire had the necessary fuel and the coarse clay suitable for the manufacture of seggers, the heavy vessels, in which, as temporary casings, the porcelain is burned, and which often require actually more clay than is used for the fine porcelain itself. England exports large quantities of china- ware to Canada and Australia, but the trade with the United States has declined heavily because of the greatly increased home production in this country. Pottery and Porcelain in the United States. — The pottery and porcelain industries of the United States have increased very 614 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY rapidly since the Civil War, but the best grades are yet imported from Germany, Austria, and France. Owing to the bulky nature of the goods, they give rise to the employment of much shipping room and store space. Large New York importing houses, many stories in height, handle nothing else. The two cities of Trenton, N. J., and East Liverpool, Ohio, manufacture much the greater part of the good pottery produced in the United States. Trenton alone has more than forty potteries. The supply of raw materials for this city is diverse, like that for the English porcelain industry. The coal comes from the anthracite district of eastern Pennsyl- vania, and the local clay suffices for the coarser uses of the industry. Quartz and feldspar are brought from the Adiron- dacks and the southern highlands of New York. Some of the clay comes from distant southern states, the best from Florida. About half of the fine clay is imported from England, being brought back very cheaply by vessels which took out thousands of tons of American agricultural products and must otherwise come back well-nigh empty. From New York to Trenton by canal boat is a journey of only a day and freight cars can deliver the clay to the potteries in a few hours. From Philadelphia, delivery up the river is even easier. In actual practice, the New York canal is little used because of railroad domination. The freight rate from Cornwall to New York is a dollar a ton and from New York to Trenton by rail is another dollar. By wagon it costs a dollar to bring the local clay four miles from the pits. The fuel cost ($3.50 per ton for soft coal) is 50 per cent, greater than all other raw materials and the labor cost is about 85 per cent, of the total. As long as the wages are the same in Trenton and East Liverpool on the coal and gas fields of southeast Ohio, the fuel advantages of that city are not an im- portant factor. Trenton is one of the best places in the United States, if not the best, for a new pottery plant to secure adequate skilled labor and supplies — hence the concentration of the industry. Ohio is the leading pottery state in the Union. While New Jersey has, in addition to Trenton, only one other small center, that at Perth Amboy, Ohio has in addition to East Liverpool, which produces almost nothing but pottery, the pottery centers of Akron, Zanesville, and Cincinnati, which last city has the distinc- tion of manufacturing the only distinctive kind of American art THE MINERAL INDUSTRIES 615 pottery. The state of Ohio, with its great variety of glacial clays, its abundant underlying coal and its transportation by lake, river, and numerous trunk-line railroads, is in an excellent position to ship pottery in all directions. It makes one-third of the sewer pipe of the country, and is important in the manufacture of drain tile. There are extensive deposits of good kaolin in North Carolina, Georgia, and other southern states. Small amounts are dug in Delaware and Maryland, but there is no prospect of the industry moving to these southern supplies of raw material, which can be so cheaply and easily transported to centers of manufacture upon the edges of the coal fields. China and Japan. — China, rich in china clays, and so long famed for its porcelain, taught the trade to the Japanese centuries ago, and the pupils now rival their teachers in the excellence of their porcelain. This old Japanese industry has long depended on charcoal from the wooded hills and hammers driven by water wheels to grind the clay and stone. The practical destruction of forests in the pottery districts has recently caused the use of coal to be introduced; but fuel is economized by having the ovens placed one above the other upon the sides of steep hills, so that the heat passes from one oven to the next, and is thus made to perform its greatest service. The Japanese porcelain makers, like the other Japanese artisans, were, until a recent date, individual artists, but the quality of their product is declining, because of -wholesale manufacturing and the desire to make cheaper goods for the foreign markets. The Japanese porcelain industry is relatively unimportant in comparison with that of England, Germany, or the United States. It is nearly all made for export, which amounts to one-fifth of that of Germany and one-third that of the United Kingdom. Glass-Making. — The quartz sand and flint for glass-making are commonly melted at about 2,500° F. with an alkaline flux, usually soda, to hasten the melting. Various other fluxes are used; and, in different factories, numerous other materials are added to give particular qualities. The only substance always present is silica, which is usually in the form of pure sand, a product most widely distributed. It occurs in practically all countries. It is claimed that western Massachusetts has the best 616 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY in the world; and excellent glass sands are found in New Jersey, Maryland, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, Indiana, Illinois, Missouri, and Minnesota. The American Glass Industry. — The United States leads the world in the manufacture of glassware. Like iron, the industry began with a wood-burning epoch, which caused it to be centered in New England and the eastern states. In 1776 a glass company established itself at Glassboro on the sands of south central New Jersey, where a tract of 35,000 acres of woodland was secured to produce the fuel. The industry still survives at Glassboro, but coal, amounting to about 25 per cent, of the cost, is now used, while there as elsewhere the packing boxes and barrels are more expensive than the sand, which costs little more than the cost of steam-shovelling and a low freight rate. The $92,000,000 worth of glass made in this country in 1909 used 11/2 million tons of sand worth $1,500,000. There are three important glass manufacturing districts in the United States; the eastern is in southern New Jersey and south- eastern Pennsylvania. Millville, N. J., is one of the leading glass manufacturing towns in the United States, and it is followed in importance in the eastern field by Bridgeton, Glassboro, and Philadelphia. These eastern glass centers have abundant sand, but they are at some distance from their coal supply which they use in the form of producer gas. The gas-fed flames play around the pools of melted sand as it waits its final shaping at the hands of the glass blower or glass machine. Owing to the great fuel advantage possessed by the natural gas region of western Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Indiana, great gains have occurred in these states, and the east has gained little in recent years. Muncie, Indiana, is the rival of Millville, N. J., and Gas City, Indiana, has had a great rise in glass making. The exhaustion of the natural-gas supply has centered attention upon bituminous coal as a fuel. As a result the Pittsburg district with both coal and natural gas is now the greatest glass-manufacturing dis- trict of the United States, and Pennsylvania makes over a third of the product. The Ohio Valley dominates this industry as it does the iron industry and for the same reason — fuel. Processes of Glass Making. — For a long time practically the only means of shaping glass was to dip a long tube into the clear pool of THE MINERAL INDUSTRIES 617 liquid glass and blow through the tube, so that, by whirling and blowing, the expanding bubble of molten glass became, upon cooling, the desired vessel. For window glass it was blown into cylinders, which were cut open and allowed to fall upon a table to cool. Glass blowing is difficult work, requiring very great skill and commanding high pay. During the first few years of the twentieth century, glass-making machines were invented. Some of them do the work with great rapidity; for example, two men working twelve hours a day, or three men, working eight hours a day, attend to machines which will turn out 360 gross of bottles. The machines take the molten glass from the furnace and deliver the perfect bottle. This has so demoralized the glass blowers that they have accepted a 20 per cent, cut in their scale of wages and there has suddenly developed a scarcity of apprentices entering the trade. Plate-glass is the name given to a product of such special quality that it can be passed between rollers, which give it the beautiful, smooth surface. The greatest plate-glass center in the world has long been in the Belgian town of Charleroi, and a Pitts- burg glass company has established similar plants for producing the same plate-glass at a town named Charleroi near Pittsburg. Glass Industry in Foreign Countries. — It is probably true that the glass industry is relatively more important to the Belgians than to any other people. This small country, but little larger than Maryland and with a population one-twelfth that of the United States, has a glass industry one-third as great as this country. It is located along the edge of the coal-fields of Liege and Charleroi close to sand quarries and soda factories. This district, which has long been the leading window-glass center of Europe, furnishes Belgium one of her leading exports. Germany is second to the United States in glass production. As in the Pittsburg district, the chief centers are located close to the iron districts, being along the Rhine, and near the coal- fields of Saxony, and Silesia. This southeastern coal-field in Silesia borders the Austrian province of Bohemia, which has long been famous for its colored glass. In the south German States of Bavaria and Saxeweimar, special qualities of glass are made for use as lenses. In the little city of Jena, the Zeiss factory with its highly trained scientific workmen, produces the glass of excep- 618 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY tional fineness, which is to be found in the lenses of the micro- scope or telescope in almost every observatory and laboratory throughout the civilized world. The French glass industry is located near the northern coal- fields along the Belgian frontier where the town of Baccarat is the center of the manufacture of French crystal glass. The English glass industry is about one and one-half times as great as that of Belgium, but only about one-half as great as that of the United States. The best sands are found along the south coast of England near Hastings and on the Isle of Wight; but the chief centers of glass manufacture are upon the three coal-fields near Birmingham, Bristol, and Newcastle. There is also much manufacturing in London, where the factories have exceptional facilities for easy delivery of the brittle product to the vast market in the metropolis. Glass resembles pottery in the abundance of its uses and it presents even greater difficulties of transport, but the heat is too great to make it in the tropics, the high heat and suitable fuel are much more difficult to secure than for pottery, so it is not so widely distributed and is not, like pottery, an industry of very primitive peoples. Uruguay has recently opened a glass plant on the banks of the river Plate where the flowing current brings an unlimited supply of properly washed sand. Mexico makes a little glass; but most countries with undeveloped manufactures and practic- ally all the colonial territories are importing their glass from Germany, England, Austria, and, to a lesser extent, from the United States. Commerce in Glass. — The United States imports some Euro- pean glass, especially the finest grades for lenses and for fine work, but we also export to many countries certain of our machine- made products, in which we are exporting the products of our inventive ability. Our glass machines are being introduced in the German glass works — a process which will probably tend to cut off our exports. 3. COPPER, TIN, AND ALUMINUM Machines, power, explosives, chemical processes, and the large corporation have, within fifty years, transformed the win- THE MINERAL INDUSTRIES 619 ning of the less abundant metals to an extent comparable to the changes in the making of textiles. In some kinds of mining, operations are on a gigantic scale and the miner is no more of an industrial unit than the weaver. A recent mining enter- prise in Nevada expended $20,000,000 in the purchase and equipping of two mines including 141 miles of railroad, a smelter, three towns, and a concentration plant. This latter marvel uses 6,000 horse-power, crushes nearly 5,000 tons of ore per day (and can be enlarged to handle 15,000 tons) at a cost of fifty to sixty cents per ton for milling (crushing). The porphyry ore that this large plant works has only 2.34 per cent, copper, 0.019 ounces gold, 0.07 ounces silver per ton. Of this the concen- trating plant with the new concentration processes extracts 87 per cent, of the copper, 55 per cent, of the gold, and 56 per cent, of the silver, the precious metals being worth but twenty- three cents per ton of ore, but yielding over $1,000 per day to the company. 1 Copper, tin, and aluminum occupy a position intermediate in cost between the precious metals, gold and silver, and the cheap and common but more impbrtant iron. In their industrial use, they are rapidly increasing in importance because of the many new uses to which invention subjects them. It is a fact humiliating to modern scientists that the ancients were better artificers in copper than are the moderns who know nothing of the means by which the soft ductile metal was, by the ancients, tempered into a splendid cutting tool. The service of copper as coin is very ancient, and at the present time of very great im- portance, particularly in India and China, where large quantities of copper coins are hoarded by the natives as a safe and con- venient storage of wealth. Bronze, an alloy composed of copper and tin, is a most durable metal prized alike by pre-historic and by modern man. A mixture of copper with zinc makes brass. The universal demand for copper in electrical work caused enormous increase in the use of this metal in the last quarter century. This increased demand caused the production of cop- per approximately to double between 1888 and 1898, and again in the succeeding decade — the total world production now being nearly 1 million tons a year. Constant discoveries of copper ore 1 Industrial Progress, June, 1910. 620 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY and new methods of smelting assure sufficient supplies for the immediate future. This increase in copper production and in our ability to use low-grade ores has been brought about by the very rapid improvement in mechanical devices, which in a few years have increased the capacity of copper smelters from 30 tons to 3,000 tons. The improvements in extracting the metal and hence our increased supply are instanced by the recently acquired ability to use large deposits of porphyry ores that are known to exist in Nevada, Arizona, Utah, and Queensland, but which were of no value at all a few years ago. The Occurrence of Copper. — Copper usually occurs in com- bination with many other substances. A single copper mine in Utah, for example, contains silver, gold, and iron. Other mines, especially in Colorado, have the copper in combination with silver and lead. Sulphur is one of the commonest substances and it is commonly driven off by roasting the ore, which causes the sulphur to unite with oxygen of the air and pass off as sulphurous gases very injurious to the comfort of the people living in the vicinity, and which kill vegetation for miles, as at Butte, Montana. The sulphur of these furnaces can be made into sulphuric acid at a cost, in Tennessee, of $2.75 per ton, but this manufacture was only begun under compulsion as a measure to protect vegetation and there is no market for it at Butte. THE WORLD'S COPPER PRODUCTION The new world of copper mining that accompanies the new methods is very different from the world of 1850, as shown by the eighteenfold greater output fifty-nine years later. The United States, producing but 1 per cent, of the world supply in 1850, when we depended upon the relatively insig- nificant deposits of the East, now has more than half the world's output and produces more than six times the output of our nearest rival, Mexico, and eight times that of Spain, long the world's great copper producer. Arizona and Montana each exceed in copper output any two foreign nations combined, Michigan's product is 60 per cent, greater than Mexico's. THE MINERAL INDUSTRIES 621 Michigan Copper. — The upper portion of Michigan was for many years the leading copper producer of the United States and of the world. In the old rocks of this glaciated district, there exists a large copper deposit, unusual in that some of it is pure. This fact, which at first appeared to be an advantage, is often otherwise. The masses are often too large to be taken out whole, the metal too ductile to break with blasting, and the labor of cutting off pieces of pure copper made the cost of mining higher than it would have been had it occurred in the more complex form of ores. eao iaas iaw «9S 1900 1905 ^ 196 POUNDS 800.000.000 600,000.000 400.000.000 200,000,000 ' ie 80 1885 1890 1895 1900 1905 1910 1915 Fig. 196. — The production of copper in the United States from 1882 to 1'907 (in pounds). Easy transportation to this region by the Great Lakes caused early and profitable development of mining. Some of the mines are now a mile deep, their productivity is declining, the output of the district is stationary and shows small possibility of increase before further decline results from the gradual exhaustion of the deposits. Rocky Mountain and Western Copper Field. — About the end of the last century Montana surpassed Michigan in output. This was due to the one great deposit in the hill at Butte, respon- 622 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY sible for the flourishing cities of Butte and Anaconda. The smelter capacity of Butte — 250 million pounds of copper per year — is greater than the production of any two foreign countries. At Great Falls, a single smelter has a capacity of 4,500 tons of ore per day and sends its sulphurous fumes from smoke stacks 500 feet high in the effort to avoid contaminating the atmosphere; yet it kills all the trees in the vicinity. In 1910 Arizona exceeded all other American states and ter- ritories as a copper producer, due to recently discovered deposits which now jdeld one-third of the American output. The smelter capacity in millions of pounds per year of four Arizona towns, Bisbee (129), Morenci (77), Globe (36), Jerome (36) gives some idea of the enormous yield of this metal, which is much more valu- able per capita to the sparse population of Arizona than is wheat in North Dakota or iron in Pennsylvania. Nevada and Utah are apparently just beginning as important copper producers. Recently found Nevada deposits of the newly conquered porphyry ore can be mined by steam shovels as are some Lake Superior iron ores. New smelters are being erected, and the output of the two states has already increased from 50 to 189 million pounds between 1906 and 1910. Colorado copper pro- duction comes largely from the town bearing the name of Lead- ville, and chiefly noted for the production of gold. Much Colorado copper ore is smelted at Omaha, Nebraska. Arizona copper fields are continued in the adjacent Mexican State of Sonora, where mining progress has been rapid, making Mexico the second copper-producing country. A fifth of all Mexican copper comes from Boleo, in the southern part of the peninsula of Lower California, where for many years a French company has smelted its ore with coal and coke brought from Europe via Cape Horn. Mexico, by nearly doubling her copper production between 1901 and 1910, surpassed all other im- portant countries in rate of increase. The Import of Copper Ores. — In addition to being the greatest producer of copper, the United States also smelts a great deal of copper produced in foreign lands. This is due partly to our great wealth in the necessary coal and also to the fact that from many sections ships returning, practically empty, can carry the ore cheaply. For these reasons, New York, Baltimore, Norfolk, THE MINERAL INDUSTRIES 623 and other coast cities smelt hundreds of thousands of tons of copper ore brought from Labrador, Newfoundland, Spain, Germany, Italy, Peru, Cuba, and Canada. Although the metal is destined for export, our copper imports are greater than the combined production of any two foreign countries. Old World Copper Supplies. — The Old World is at the present time deficient in copper output. Europe produces less than a sixth and uses much more than half the world's copper supply. The exports of copper from the United States, about one-half of our total product, one-third of the world's supply, amounted in 1911 to 400,000 tons, worth over $100,000,000, making it one of the most important of our exports. Spain, now next to Mexico in copper production, resembles our southwest in its aridity, in its mountainous character and in its mineral wealth. Two-thirds of the Spanish copper output comes from the Rio Tinto mines, which also furnish in the form of iron sulphide or pyrite a large part of the sulphur imported into the United States. The richness of this great mine is such that the cost of operation is only one-fifth the value of the output. Among the Old World producers, Japan is after Spain the leader. Although the fourth country in the world, it is not half as productive as Michigan, the third state in the United States. Yet such is the poverty of Japan, that copper is one of the most important metal productions. Australasia, the third Old World producer, has copper fields in the Mt. Lyall district of western Tasmania and in Queensland, in New South Wales and west Australia. South America. — The Pacific coast of South America is appar- ently rich in copper. The desert region of north Chile has a number of copper mines, making that country one of the world's important copper producers. Although the mines have not produced a great amount, few of them are yet worked to any great depth. Peru is also an important copper producer chiefly through the output of the Cerro do Pasco district, upon the high Andean Plateau, which sends its product to the sea by means of the railroad that passes Lima and Collao. This section was until recently dependent upon pack trains. Prospective Copper Supply. — The present rapid railroad 624 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY development in remote regions promises to bring forth much mining development, copper included. A copper deposit in central Africa, known as the Star of Congo mine, affords an interesting example. Before the completion of the railroad to it, from Beiro (1911), mining work was already begun, so that 1,000 tons of copper per month could be extracted as soon as the railroad permitted the erection of the machinery and 5,000 tons of copper per month is expected in a short time. On the Magda- lena River in central Colombia, a deposit is reported greatly resembling that of Michigan. Alaska is known to be rich in copper, as is Yunnan, a southwestern province of China, which is reached from British India by rail. The Argentine govern- ment had recently expended $1,000,000 in building a twenty- mile cable way which will carry 40 tons of copper per hour out of the Andes Mountains in the province of Rioja. Persia is reported to be rich in copper ore and in the Transvaal, old work- ings of the unknown ancients are being reopened. As yet only a very small proportion of the earth's surface has been pros- pected at all carefully for copper and other metals, and the new processes of working low-grade ores have just been perfected. The Caucasus Copper Company is evidence of the probable effect of the new processes. This company, partly American owned, has bought property near Batum on the Black Sea, which was worked several centuries ago by the Genoese. After spend- ing $8,500,000 in experiment and development, the new owners have begun large scale work on a deposit of many million tons of low-grade ore (3 1/2 per cent, copper) resembling that of Utah (U. S. Con. Rep., January 6, 1912). Tin. — Fortunately, new applications of science to industry have not increased the uses of tin as they have of copper. Such new demand would have created an acute tin famine. Although its production is but one-tenth that of copper, it has increased but one-third in a decade despite a three-fold increase in price be- tween 1897 and 1907. This metal is valuable chiefly because it does not rust, and is, therefore, used as a protective covering for sheet iron and steel in making so-called tin cans, tin roofing and many other articles. It is the only metal of importance to industry, in which the United States is entirely lacking. Our product of a few tons a year from the Black Hills of South Dakota, THE MINERAL INDUSTRIES 625 from Texas and from South Carolina is and has been insignifi- cant. The tin mines of Cornwall, England, are among the most conspicuous mines in history, as they were worked long before the Christian era, and seem to have been the basis of important trade between England and the Mediterranean countries in the time of the Phoenicians. At the present time these mines are doubtless producing as much as they did in ancient times, but the amount has become inconsequent in the world's total of 100,000 tons, because of the great production by Chinese laborers in the region near Singapore. The southern part of the Malay Peninsula produces over 50 per cent, of the world's supply and the near-by Dutch Islands of Banka and Billiton 12 per cent, additional, also by Chinese labor. Bolivia contributes 19 per cent., Australia 5 per cent., and England but 5 per cent, of the world's supply. Conditions of Tin Production. — The centuries-old Cornwall mines are hundreds and even thousands of feet deep, but in the Malay Peninsula and adjacent islands, there are large areas bearing alluvial gravels in which the 200,000 coolies work as the individual miner works placer gold. This mining is done very carelessly. The regions promise a great output in the future if the same lands shall be reworked with such a dredging device as that which now reworks the old alluvial gold-fields of Aus- tralia. By this device, a centrifugal pump and six or eight men per shift can do as much work in twenty-four hours as do 500 Chinese under present hand methods. Alluvial deposits are usually trivial in comparison to the lodes from which they were washed. The first tin mine on the mother lode in the Malay Peninsula has been opened, and the era of deep mining such as is followed in Cornwall should be long. In Bolivia, second only to Malaysia, the tin is practically all derived from veins in many mines in the districts of Potosi, Oruro and Uyuni. This region is in the high, dry, and very cool plateau, the mines being between 14,000 and 18,000 feet above sea level, an altitude greater than any mountain peak in the United States or the Alps. Most of the mines are still far from the railroad, are operated by crude hand methods and ore is being carried to Oruro on the ADtofogosta line on llamas at forty cents per ton per mile. 626 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY The most important single tin district in Australia is the vicinity of Mt. Bichoff, Tasmania, where tin is won from ores, and also from stream beds by dredging. Supply of Tin. — Although rumors of discovery of tin deposits frequently are unfounded, the discoveries in the Transvaal are especially promising and Nigeria, west Africa, is also believed to be rich in it, as is the Lake Kabele district of Katanga. At the present time some Nigerian tin ore is carried on the backs of men as much as 190 miles to the navigable waters of the Benue, the eastern branch of the Niger, making a freight cost of $60 per ton to the coast. This is an alluvial product, like that of Ma- laysia. Inasmuch as the thorough processes recently applied to copper have not yet been applied to tin, and deep mining has been limited to Cornwall, there is every reason to think that the deposits now known should yield an increasing output for decades. Aluminum.— As one of the elements of the earth's crust, aluminum exists in enormous quantities in the ordinary clay. Hence, great hopes for the future are entertained, but the extrac- tion of the element in its metallic form is very difficult, and it thus becomes the newest of the important metals. It is especially attractive because of its lightness, toughness, and non-corrosive- ness, being strong in qualities in which iron is weak. It was first manufactured for commercial purposes in 1859, but for twenty- five years the price was $10 per pound and the world's production only 2 or 3 tons per year. In 1907 as a result of new processes of manufacture its price fell to thirty-three cents per pound, and the world's consumption rose. ALUMINUM World production tons Average price 1897 1902 1907 1910 3,000 7,000 32,000 20,000 35 cents 31 cents 42 cents 22 cents THE MINERAL INDUSTRIES 627 At the expiration of the patents in 1909, its manufacture was opened to competition and the price fell to fourteen cents per pound, causing the metal to enter upon an entirely new field of usefulness, and permitting only the best plants to keep running, for the manufacture is costly. An aluminum plant at East St. Louis requires one ton of bauxite (aluminum ore), one ton of coal and one ton of very pure limestone to make half a ton of alumina (an oxide of aluminum). This requires further treatment in the electric furnace, a process requiring a large amount of electricity, by present practice about one horse-power for a day for a pound of aluminum. The world's aluminum is, therefore, made easily where power is cheap, namely, the regions of great water-power. Five companies working in Europe are located in the mountainous districts of Savoy, France, of Germany, and of Italy. Some French companies get the water-power for $10 per horse-power per year twenty-four hours per day. One of the American companies has plants in Niagara Falls in New York, using 40,000 horse- power, others in Massena, New York (on the St. Lawrence), using 20,000 horse-power; and Shawinigan Falls, Canada, using 15,000 horse-power. The three American plants with their 75,000 horse-power equipment can manufacture 18,000 tons of metal per year. The world's manufacturing capacity of 50,000 tons is much larger than the present world's consumption, but the new processes, with reduced price, are increasing the demands. For example, aluminum is an excellent transmitter of electricity; more efficient than copper. Now that copper and aluminum are not unlike in price, the possibility of competition at once appears. One aluminum electric transmission line 180 miles in length has already been erected in California. Automobile construction has made great demand for it and aerial navigation is suddenly opening a new field for the lightest kind of strong construction, so that the combination of lower prices and new uses is likely to give us greatly enhanced dependence upon the new metal. It is now cheaper than tin or nickel and the aluminum cooking utensil is as cheap as enamel ware. New alloys are constantly discovered and more doubtless will be, and each new alloy, giving new qualities, widens the field of usefulness. 628 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY 4. GOLD AND SILVER On account of their remarkable malleability, durability, and beauty, these metals were highly prized for ornaments and coins even before the period of recorded history. After the discovery of America, the Spaniards' quest for gold led them to remote corners of the New World; this American gold is said by some historians to have been the chief source of the power of the Spanish Monarchy in the sixteenth century and of its later economical downfall. Fig. 197. — A quartz vein (the white band) in metamorphic rock. Muchals Caves, Kincardineshire, Scotland. (From W. S. Tower.) The uncertainties of mining are apparent. The appeal gold makes to the imagination tends to cause an overestimate of its value. The world's output is of approximately the same value as the corn crop of the three states of Illinois, Iowa, and Missouri in 1911; yet, because of its use as the basis of all our commercial transactions and price, gold production becomes one of the most potent economic influences. How (Gold is Obtained. — Gold, widely scattered in the earth's crust, is collected into veins of quartz in many kinds of rock. The destruction of exposed veins in the wearing down of moun- THE MINERAL INDUSTRIES 629 tains by streams has caused the transportation of gold along the courses of streams to great distances from the original veins. Sometimes the search for gold along these streams leads the pros- pector back to the vein or mother lode, from which the stream supply has been eroded. The miner's pan, not unlike a wash basin, suffices to extract the gold from the sand if there be water present in which to agitate the sand until the gold settles to the bottom so that the sand can be gradually separated from it. Large banks of sand and gravel, containing very small quantities of gold, are worked by the placer process, which consists of washing down the gravel banks by the force of a stream of water from a nozzle. The water carries the sand through long sluice boxes, with crevices in the bottom, in which the gold is caught, because, being the heaviest of the materials, it gradually settles to the bottom. This method has been used extensively in many parts of the world, especially in California, where streams have been so choked by debris as to fill up valuable channels in their lower courses and to cover rich agricultural lowlands with worthless beds of sand and gravel. To prevent this destruction of agricul- ture, California has wisely passed laws which control and often prohibit mining by the placer process. Vast stores of gold are thus made unavailable; but the farm lands which are saved are of greater value to the community since the metal-bearing bank yields once while the tilled valley will yield thousands of harvests. Dredging is another method' somewhat resembling placer mining. It is largely practised in California, parts of Alaska, New Zealand, Montana, and elsewhere. A dredge resembling that used in deepening river channels takes up the earth in front of it, runs it through sluice boxes, catches the gold and drops the earth behind the dredge. The most permanent kind of gold mining consists in the work- ing of the ores that are found in the veins themselves. The ore is usually ground fine by a stamp mill, and then washed by a process similar to that pursued in placer mining. This process does not, however, get out all the gold, and a newer method called the cyanide process dissolves the gold out of the pulverized ores and makes profitable the use of ores containing as little as $2.50 (less than one-eight of an ounce of gold) per ton and possibly 630 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY even less than that. This chemical process has greatly cheapened the extraction of gold from some ores. This and other improve- ments explain the increased yield which has practically doubled in each decade since 1886 (1886, $106,000,000; 1896, $211,000,000; 1906, $405,000,000; 1910, ($465,000,000). Dollars 475,000,000 450,000,000 425,000,000 400,000,000 375,000,000 350,000,000 325,000,000 300,000,000 275,000,000 250,000,000 225,000,000 200,000,000 175,000,000 150,000,000 125,000,000 ►" 1 Africa - • ' < / / v Austral a - fp 6ih li "toll ntrie — s >?"iL; HSU _ Xatvac a 75,000,000 50,000,000 25,000,000 % / -^ // ^ L nite d! St! te s si ' ! It n 5 c 1 ( 5 3 i O i 3 oo c 3 C 11 o c 1870 | 1! 1 1880 I 1885 1886 1 1887 | 1888 I 1889 1 1890 ■ us n 1 a - 1 c O 1 ?1 O r n - o & 35 o 2 II II Vi !i n 1S§ Fig. 198. — Gold production. The world and leading countries, 1800-1910. (U. S. Conservation Commission.) The Uncertainty of Gold and Sliver Production. — While there is every evidence that gold production will largely increase, few industries have, on the whole, less permanence in any given locality. It may be likened to a fever because of its sudden great activity, its decline and its intermittent revivals. The rumors of gold discovery start a "rush" of miners from all parts of the world. In the desire to stake out a good claim, it matters not if they must penetrate thick forest, hot desert or arctic waste. In 1849 men went from every land to California, in 1851 to Australia. In 1897, the news of gold on the Arctic Yukon in Alaska and the Klondyke caused the speedy departure, to that death-dealing land, of miners, professional men and even women, THE MINERAL INDUSTRIES 631 who struggled with their packs through the snowy passes of the south Alaska mountains into a region of which they knew nothing, to undertake a business of which many of them knew nothing. This district also shows the quick rise and decline of a gold-mining district. The gold output of the Canadian Klon- dyke was in Million dollars 1896 3 2 10 16 22 12 7 3 3.6 3.9 4.5 1897 1898 1899 1900 1903 1905 1907 1908 1909 1910 - This rise and decline was due to the fact that the deposits were in sand and gravel along the streams where the individual worker could easily get the gold. The increase since 1907 marks the beginning of the period of large scale production at the hands of a powerful corporation which built 62 miles of flume and' pipe line to operate placers, and a water-power plant with 36 miles of electric transmission line. With this equipment, the Klondyke will have a few more years of prosperity and then another decline which will be final unless the mother lode is found. The mother •lode which will probably be found may last several decades before mining reaches its ultimate depth, which is now about one mile and has been reached in the Victoria gold mines. This district was a scene of the great rush of 1851. Nevada also has illustrated the uncertainty of the community depending upon the precious metals. In 1860 the state had 60,000 people dependent almost entirely for livelihood upon the silver from the mines in the great Comstock lode near Virginia City. The exhaustion of the mine caused the population to 632 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY fall to 40,000 in 1890, since no other mines of importance were discovered and agriculture was virtually impossible in an arid region. Since 1890 Nevada has been the scene of tremendous excitement because of the discovery of many new gold fields in the central and eastern part of the state. Many new towns have sprung up (population of state, 1910, 81,800), and single mills costing nearly a million dollars have been built to work the Millions of Dollars 80 70 60 60 40 30 20 10 (I \ 1911 / Fig. 199. — Gold production in California, 1848-1911. Compare this with previous gold production. desert ores. One such mill takes 200 tons of gold-silver ore, concentrates it into one ton at a cost of $2.25 per ton and saves 97 to 99 per cent, of the metal. California, long the leading gold producer in the Union, shows the uncertainties of the industry by its frequent changes of base. The gold discovered there in 1848 was in stream beds. These were soon exhausted, and the miners next discovered many old abandoned river beds and even buried river beds which could be reached by tunneling under lava deposits. Then came placer THE MINERAL INDUSTRIES 633 deposits. Finally the mother lode was discovered and at present two-thirds of California gold is coming from deep mines in the hard ore and the state which had been surpassed by Colorado (vein mines) was again the leader in 1910. Relation of Gold to Other Metals. — Aside from the gravel and placer deposits, few mines in the United States are worked for gold alone, because gold is generally closely associated with silver, copper, or lead. Thus most of the mining cities of the western mountain regions have several mineral products. This is particularly the case in Colorado, which in 1909 surpassed Cali- fornia in gold output, was third in silver and also produced copper and lead and zinc. Colorado cities, depending entirely upon mining, have arisen in almost inaccessible places in the Rocky Mountains, such as Cripple Creek, which produces about half of Colorado's present gold output, and Leadville, more than two miles above the sea. Gold in Alaska. — Alaska, which in 1908 produced more gold than California, has three distinct fields. On the southeast coast (especially on Douglas Island) there are gold ores of low grade but of vast extent, which are being profitably worked in stamp mills. The profits have lately increased as a result of the operation of machinery by fuel oil from California. The total cost of working this ore was $1.60 per ton in 1910. The Yukon Valley, in which other centers of production will doubtless arise, has yielded gold first at the Klondyke iD Canadian territory and later at Fairbanks and minor centers in United States territory. Cape Nome (beyond the Arctic circle) on the west coast of Alaska, has a most unusual deposit. It consists of a sea beach so enriched by gold-bearing streams that a miner could pan $10 worth of gold per day from the sands. More recently old beaches at higher levels have been discovered increasing the total output to several million dollars per year, and the Arctic desolation of beach and tundra is temporarily enlivened by a thriving settle- ment, living upon the produce brought by steamers from the south and landed in lighters on an unprotected beach during the good weather of summer. Gold Mining in Africa. — The United States, with about $100,000,000 in gold per year, is second to the Transvaal, which in 1910 had an output of $155,000,000, while the adjacent colony 634 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY of Rhodesia yielded $1,000,000 a month. The producing dis- trict of the Transvaal known as the Rand is a long range of low hills, the leading gold district of the world with Johannesburg as its chief center. It is in a semi-arid country like New Mexico or Arizona, where other industries are few and communities of hundreds of thousands of people must live by mining alone. The deposits are of great depth, the companies I88S |390 1895 1900 1905 1910 1915 DOLLARS 100,000,000 80.000,000 6Q 000,000 40,000,000 20,000,000 le 511 IK ■* -fr" rrr ztt i h M flf^K ajZ • It [trt frtrnTiiii Mt'&'L i|inii 11 f' iHj iWiMEX TO tEGO ■- wmt flmiitiiiiiiunihimi YOMINGTAN H l|Oji lllllll J ! 111 1 Hi JILLJ il Is'laW gq pu JM C. \LIFOR JIA~~ 85 1990 1695 1900 1905 1910 1915 Fig. 200. — The production of gold" in the United States and in the principal states. (U. S. Conservation Commission Report.) can, therefore, plan to work for many years. The resultant great mining booms which occurred in 1895 and 1902 led to disappointment because of the scarcity of labor. This difficulty will be somewhat alleviated by the extension of railway lines into central Africa whence black workmen can be easily transported by rail. It is the practice to bring men from great distances to work in these mines on time contracts. In 1909, the total number of men employed on the Rand was about 220,000, and nearly 10,000 stamps were at work. THE MINERAL INDUSTRIES 635 Some gold is being found in Madagascar, in the forest lands of West Africa, and recent finds in French Guinea on the upper Niger are reported to be of great promise. Gold Mining in Australia. — Australia, with an output of $65,000,000 per year (1910), is third among the world's gold producers. The output of the newer west Australian fields, like that of the mines of Victoria, is declining, with the result that the total gold production for Australia fell off about $15, 000,000 between 1906 and 1910. It is expected, however, that the production of west Australia will continue at its present level, about half of the total, for a number of years, now that the surface deposits are collected and the working of the deep quartz has begun. Other Gold Fields. — It is of interest to note that there is almost no gold produced in western Europe, Germany and Hungary together producing less than $5,000,000 annually. The Russian Empire with an output of about $25,000,000 is not far ahead of Mexico; and Mexican mines, under aggressive American management, are, unless stopped by physical disorder, likely to outstrip Russia with its inefficient labor supply, although Russian "resources are enormous," and there are vast unpros- pected areas in Russian Asia. Gold and Silver in Spanish America. — The mountains of west- ern America from the United States to Chile are rich in gold and silver, which have been alike a curse and a blessing to those regions. They caused the conquest by the Spaniards and for many districts have been the chief basis of commerce since the discovery of America. The Spanish succeeded in getting gold by enslaving the people, one-half to work the mines, and the other half to produce food for the miners. In Peru and other parts of South America, the Spanish task masters mined .large quantities of gold by placer mining in deposits of such low grade that they could only be worked now by our best efficient devices. Throughout the mountain districts only the best vein deposits could be worked and by the crudest hand methods, so that in many parts of the Andean region and in much of Mexico numerous deposits, although worked for many decades, may now be considered as new fields, in view of modern improvements in methods of mining, which, however, demand the railway for 636 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY their proper installation. 1 Despite the great production of Potosi in Bolivia, and other South American mines — "this enormous area (South America) almost equal as it is to North America, still lies undeveloped and awaiting investigation" (from page 519, Fays' Mineral Industry, 1907). Thus far the modern operations in South America have been limited to the temperate zone and to mountains where temperate climate prevails, as in the interior province of Antioquia in Colombia (output $3,000,000 in 1910), the east slope of Peru and the Bolivian and Peruvian plateau. There has also been a small output from the plateau of Brazil. The only thoroughly modern gold production in South America is $4,000,000 a year from the placer deposits in the European territories, the Guianas. Yet the resources of South America are such that even with the surface-scratching methods of the past, Colombia has yielded about a billion dollars in gold. One of the best ways to appreciate the advantages and possibilities of the present machine epoch is to remember that mining stops at the level of ground water unless power pumps remove it. Gold in Central America and the West Indies. — Central America is reported to be rich in gold, but transportation and labor conditions are unsatisfactory and domestic capital is entirely lacking. Some American capital is now being invested there. The Island of Hayti has such disturbed political con- ditions that there is small chance of working the gold deposits, which are reported to be rich. Silver. — Mexico is the leader in the world's silver production, has long been so and will likely continue to lead, unless she returns to her old political chaos. The resources appear to be enormous. In the past she has been preeminently a silver producer, partly because of the great number of silver de- posits, and partly because these deposits can be mined in remote localities of a dry and rugged country where they are concentrated by the simple device of the arrastra — a stone floor on which ore is crushed by a stone wheel, rolled around upon the ore by beasts of burden. From the crushed ore the silver collects in the cracks of the floor and in this concentrated form is carried scores or even hundreds of miles on pack mules. The 1 In this connection the railway map of South America should be examined. THE MINERAL INDUSTRIES 637 building of American railways into Mexico has made possible the opening up of mines using most improved machinery and processes, and has caused rapid increase in the output of gold, bringing the production of silver (usually associated with gold) up to a point where the declining price serves as a check to its production — a situation unique among important commercial products in an era of rising prices. There is also a rapidly increasing copper output, and, with a total mineral product of $150,000,000 per year, Mexico probably depends more for prosperity on minerals than any other country, except Chile. In the United States, second to Mexico in output, silver mining depends for its prosperity upon the output of gold, copper, and lead. The mines operated for silver alone are 1880 I3SS 1890 1895 1900 1905 BIO 1915 IOO.0OO.OOO )k S'lmsi; ;:;;!!:;:":: ." : ::: ■Ei; 1 !, »" .:::.:::::::::::-::.:::::::--- frr° {fc-=S -£ tp nit; l_ TATIlS- - = a T 1880 1885 It ao 1895 1900 1905 I9IO 1915 Fig. 201. — Silver production is unusual in that it does not increase. relatively few. The total output of silver in the United States, $30,000,000 in 1910, is but a third of the value of the $94,000,000 corn crop of Indiana (fourth in corn, 1911). Canada, the third silver producer, gets nearly all of her $17,000,000 worth (1910) from the very rich new silver districts of Cobalt and Porcupine in the forests of upper Ontario. Aus- tralia is fourth and Germany, the chief producer of the western world in the middle ages, is fifth with $6,000,000. The other European producers are Belgium with an output of $4,000,000 won from the hills in the eastern part of that country and France with only $1,000,000 worth. The Future of Gold and Silver Production. — Few industries have had so great a reduction in the cost of operation as has taken place in the production of gold and silver, especially of gold. Therefore, few materials of use to man have greater 638 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY prospects of rapid increase in output. Much the greater part of the world has not been prospected adequately and deposits already known will provide for a largely increased output in the next few decades. This increase in production may take place too rapidly for the welfare of the world, owing to the disturbing influence that large production is supposed to have upon prices, probably the most interesting aspect of gold production. 5. DIAMONDS Source of Our Present Supply. — Brazil was for a long time the leading diamond-producing country in the world. They were found upon the interior plateaus of the state of Minas Geraes, near Diamantina, in a sparsely settled region where the diamonds had been left in the beds of streams by the same process which leaves gold in the stream, namely, the washing down of the mother lode. During the last quarter of the nineteenth century, South Africa vastly outdistanced Brazil, because of the discovery of several so-called diamond pipes in the vicinity of Kimberly, in the Transvaal. These deposits are believed to be the cores of old volcanoes with diamonds imbedded in the lava, now existing as a hard formation knowD as blue clay or diamond clay. The washing of the clay from these old volcanic necks produced diamonds so much more cheaply than the hunters of Brazil can find them that for many years South Africa has vir- tually supplied the world. Nearly all the product is furnished by two companies. One of these, the Premier Diamond Company, simply lifts the earth from the bottom of enormous open pits, crushes and washes it in a way not unlike that in which the gold- bearing ore is washed after crushing. Owing to the difficulty of preventing the native Kaffirs from stealing and carrying the diamonds out of the mines, men are kept on the premises almost like prisoners during the time of their labor contracts. The price of diamonds rose from 1900 to 1912, but it does not indicate any scarcity of the stones. It resulted from the control of the market by the diamond syndicate, which shut down the mines in 1908 when the demand fell off as a result of the financial depres- sion of 1907-08. The trade in diamonds seems to be peculiarly sensitive to the checking influence of financial depression. New Diamond Fields. — There is prospect that the long diamond THE MINERAL INDUSTRIES 639 monopoly of British South Africa will shortly disappear. Further explorations in Africa have revealed new finds of true diamond- bearing earth in Rhodesia, while in German Southwest Africa, diamonds are secured in the sand on or near the seashore for 300 miles north of Elizabeth Bay. Miners wash the sand for diamonds the same way the gold miners wash the Cape Nome sand for gold. Unfortunately for the easy prosecution of the industry, this region is a desert, less so than that of similar latitudes in northern Chile, but supplies must be brought hun- dreds of miles. Recent explorations seem to indicate the discovery of the volcanic neck from which these shore diamonds have been washed. Thus German Africa has had developments similar to the Transvaal, where there was for a time a large diamond industry on the shores of the Vaal River where the searching for water-borne stones finally led to the discovery of the mother lode in the blue clay. The German government itself is now actively engaged in diamond mining and the product of German South- west Africa amounted to $5,000,000 in 1910. The finding of river diamonds in Katanga, west of Lake Tanganyiha, 1,500 miles north of Kimberley, in German East Africa, opposite Madagascar, in Guiana, New South Wales, California, and elsewhere, is indicative of abundant supplies. American companies are trying to modernize the old workings of Brazil, while geologists have reported a true volcanic neck with diamonds embedded in it near Murphreesboro, Arkansas. The price of diamonds would long ago have been greatly reduced but for the price control of the Trust. The United States is the greatest diamond market in the world with purchases of $40,000,000 per year in 1911, but the cutting of the diamonds is chiefly done in Europe. Amsterdam has long been the great center of this skilled trade, but the recent increase in diamond output has gone largely to Antwerp and the German supply is now chiefly cut in Hanau. Altogether diamond cutting employs over 100,000 persons. REFERENCES See General References See References to Chapter X Whitbeck, R. H. Specialization in Industry by certain cities, with Particular Reference to Trenton, N. J. Journal of Geog., October, 1909 (Pottery). CHAPTER XVII THE EXPANSION OF INDUSTRY AND OF RESOURCES i. THE BALANCE BETWEEN RESOURCES AND HUMAN NEED Definition of Resources. — A resource' is something which may be turned into, or made to produce, a useful commodity, and thus give rise to an object of consumption or of commerce, and aid in the support of population. There is frequent expression of the idea that opportunities for the making of a living are getting fewer, that the world holds less •opportunities per man than it previously possessed. This belief is not founded in geographic or scientific fact. If it appears true, it is due to the shortcomings of our financial and industrial sys- tem, and from our hotch potch and purely irrational method of distributing wealth and holding property. There is good reason for the belief that the available resources of the world are increas- ing quite as rapidly as the population and that they will continue to do so for a long time to come. The complaint about the lack of opportunity is old. At vari- ous times in the world's history industry has apparently caught up with the available resources, so that there actually were few opportunities available. Such a period was the warlike and piratical seventeenth century. As commerce and the desirable and available world then existed, there seemed to be little room for enterprise for the daring, or investments for the capitalist. Foreign people were positively or potentially hostile and, there- fore, their lands were unsafe. The sea was unsafe for merchant- men, railroads were absent, highways were bad and while lands lay idle they could not be reached by industry. The people of Holland, then the greatest financial country and the chief money lender in the world, found themselves in a land of small oppor- tunity, as a result of the great scarcity of resources to develop. There were few new enterprises in which they could invest their 640 THE EXPANSION OF INDUSTRY AND OF RESOURCES 641 surpluses, hence interest rates sank to a very low point. At the preseDt time, on the other hand, the railroad and steamship and the security of peace have made almost the whole world available to commerce, to investment, and to settlement by civilized people. The rapid progress of science, showing us how to better utilize resources, has brought the world into a period of really rapidly increasing resources (opportunities for industry). These resources need developing and offer employment to the capital and labor of all nations. The Dutch investor in this period owns railroads in the United States, plantations in Java, nitrate works in Chile, and the rate of income is several times as great as it was in the seventeenth century. The Degree of Utilization of Resources. — The question natur- ally arises, when are resources fully utilized, and when is a country fully occupied. It is difficult to say when a country is full because of the present practice of living by manufacturing and consuming the products of other localities. The question of the standard of living is a second factor making it difficult to deter- mine when resources are fully utilized. If the population is content to live in small houses rather than large, to eat grains, vegetables, and beans rather than meat and other things requiring more land to produce, then the population can be large. Under the system of household industry many localities of Europe and Asia have become populated up to the food limit, the non-flesh food limit, and the record of famines in India shows that country to be far beyond the food limit in years of crop failure. Millions there have starved beside the railway, which could have brought them food if they had had goods or money with which to buy it. Belgium, the most densely peopled of Western lands, has passed the point where she can under present standards feed her people; but she has passed into the stage of buying raw material and sell- ing manufactures and importing food with the proceeds. This nation, like other nations, and other localities in Europe and America, has become like a city in its economic life and is steadily increasing in population, and, with the steady increase of com- mercial facilities, shows evidence of continuing growth in manufacture, population, and dependence upon the foreign markets and upon foreign raw materials. To a large number of 642 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY people in Belgium, their land is a home space, in part at least, their sustenance space being in other lands. 1 The best example of a country approaching the full develop- \_._/-' 3fc* Antwerp 7 17, **7 T 2 V \ ' 1 L. 90„ ._3>'+ >- 2 50/93 66 /21 __j .^Ghent ■*>j^ *2% u ^ V a?^ ^32 W}jr I 29 140 (-27 / 2^^^12 / '49/ 18 •" Brussela^o ^ 2, 6^6 / 1E 94 ! 'S^S 2 Z /t37' *■> «00 V'**" 14f 214. /IN. Ml 6 ^ifioBaw 224*v AST /l 79 5_ S] / 4t /29 /MB «1 1 36\ 4B a£>JBB 76] A B8\ 180 a?Srf*'60 14^-*^ 60, .7 Xk •— . I s V I Co 39 N \ ?^ 2B> ^*8 ^l^jj^Verviers j \^ J2*^^h 4\ 2 ° a 7 v. / k yo. 14>-2 f34 5T*\ 42 >/ .-•» 1l2 8\ •^ Anderlues A** /B7 /80 |67 J \J > ">- \ A /1 — \j^ S^ IS \5 X ^ '25 J§ \& -^21 2 /\ •> \ X / / 1 3 / ^— — * - ^™ "**2 Rochefort ) / \ s7 \ ^Over /SOOO Wkfzsoo-f&ooo H/roo -J/ooo J/oo - tsoo □ Under $ ZOO... Fig. 206. — Farm products in Michigan. (After A. E. Parkins.) A good illus- tration of the way glaciers have laid out the occupation of men — rough land having prohibited plow agriculture. trunks in between the rocks, send their roots far down into the moist glacial subsoil which is richer than the subsoil of Indiana, rear their heads into the abundant sunshine, and -produce. What care they for rocks? If there is earth among them, the tree roots will find it. If the rocks encumber the surface they merely serve as a mulch to keep in the moisture. What New England and all hill countries need more than any other thing in the whole list of relations between man and nature is an application of science to give them an agriculture that is adjusted to their unplowable soils. The present agriculture of THE EXPANSION OP INDUSTRY AND OF RESOURCES 659 New England is an imported misfit from the lands suited to the plow. Everywhere east of the Mississippi trees will grow where there is earth standing above the water level. With the properly improved varieties of tree crops there is no reason why Massa- chusetts might not, square mile for square mile, produce as many fat pigs or fat sheep or fat turkeys as Kansas does now — possibly more. The proper succession of fruiting mulberries, persimmons, chestnuts, walnuts, pecans, hickories, shagbarks, filberts, and many other tree crops that might be introduced from this and other lands would give us an abundance of good food or one continuous succession of workless harvests to which the pigs, sheep, and turkeys could walk and eat if man himself did not want them. Thus may the eastern country double its possible production. The one-third that is now too hilly for good cultivation will, with tree crops, double and more than double its present meager output. The roughest third, now hopeless of tillage, can with tree crops match in productivity the best third which should remain for the agriculture of the plow, to which it is by nature adjusted. The benefits that tree crops can render the arid and semi-arid land are equal to if not greater than those that may be conferred upon the hilly lands. The grasses, grains, and ordinary forage plants are ill equipped to fight for life against the rigors and uncer- tainty of aridity. Corn, for example, must have water within a certain two weeks or it is blasted, but trees can prepare for a siege. In the first place, their roots can go down indefinitely deep. These roots can store up energy, and when the time comes they can make fruit. Further than this, many of the trees of the arid lands are legumes, with the legume's power of gathering nitrogen from the air, leaving a part of it upon their roots to enrich the soil, and using the rest to make seeds that are rich in nitrogen and, therefore, meat substitutes and tissue builders. A claimant for superiority in the possible desert harvest is the wide-pod thorny honey locust, a leguminous tree with a big pod easily picked up and full of rich beans, often analyzing over 50 per cent, of sugars and starches and also high in protein. This tree also will grow on many of our plains now almost worthless, 660 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY and its seed is one of the richest of all stock foods. It nearly duplicates in quality the carob bean, the "locusts" of John the Baptist's desert sojourn. This leguminous tree is now a crop grown in all Mediterranean countries, and the beans are largely exported from Cyprus to England for stock food. In Spain it is the oats of the cavalry horse. A little of it also comes to the United States for manufacture into a milk substitute for calves. This honey locust is but one of nature's many desert possi- bilities. One of the botanists of the Department of Agriculture has found six species of woolly fruited wild almonds growing on the desolate shores of Pyramid Lake in the so-called Nevada Desert. The desert may yet bloom with almonds, for these six varieties bear nutritious though small and bitter fruit, and Mr. Frank Meyer, Plant Explorer of the Department of Agriculture, brings back from central Asia the seeds of wild almonds producing good fruit and good edible oil in a climate with an estimated rain- fall of 8 inches per year. Foreign lands certainly have great numbers of promising trees to offer us when once we set out in earnest to breed up tree crops. If we will, it seems that we may easily breed the crop-yielding trees and convert hundreds of thousands of square miles of almost vacant western range into fruitful orchards for the fat- tening of beasts or the feeding of men. This belongs more in the class of probabilities than among mere possibilities, as witnessed by the experience of Hawaii with the Algaroba, a species of the mesquite which will grow in considerable areas of the United States. Hawaii has, after many difficulties of a mechanical nature, learned to grind up the beans and pods of the Algaroba bean, and thereby added an industry of great promise. The meal resulting from this grinding is worth $25.00 a ton as a stock food, and is the "mainstay" of the dairy industry of the Islands. The Hawaii experiment Station states that an algaroba forest yields four tons of the beans to the acre per year, and one ton of wood. The labor of production consists of picking up the big beans which grow upon a leguminous tree introduced about the middle of the last century from Peru. This yield should be discounted by dwellers in other lands, be- cause of the phenomenal fertility of the volcanic soils of Hawaii, and the tropic growing season. THE EXPANSION OF INDUSTRY AND OF RESOURCES 661 The tree-crop possibilities of the fecund tropics are beyond description or even reference here, but it should be remembered that in comparison to it the temperate zone is a land of poverty of plant species. Fig. 207. — Scene in the Piedmont section of North Carolina. Hill ruined by erosion while in corn — a land-destroying crop. Girdled trees, wasteful rail fences. (U. S. Dept. Agr.) Man has thought of himself as depending upon a field in which to grow his food, but there seems abundant reason to believe that science can, through tree crops, now give him food from any land that grows a forest, and from much land which now grows almost 662 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY nothing. Further than this the tree crop will have a valuable by-product of wood, a material of which there is now a painfully increasing scarcity. Owing to the long time involved and the consequent impossibility of financial return to the individual, the breeding of these tree crops must depend largely upon govern- ments, and governments will act in this direction only in response to the pressure of intelligence. The time for far-seeing construc- tive scientific work has come. Fig. 208. — Erosion of California pasture land after too close pasturing, Marin County. (Photo G. K. Gilbert.) After Man the Desert. — The proper development of tree crops as indicated here will effect the greatest saving in the world conservation movement — the conservation of the soil, our great- est and irreplaceable resource. The saying, "After man the desert" is much too true, as the frightful desolation of most THE EXPANSION OF INDUSTRY AND OF RESOURCES 663 ancient empires attests. It has nearly all come through erosion, and tree crops with their earth-gripping roots will practically stop it all, for the tree is nature's method of holding earth on the rocky framework which erosion reveals so near the surface of our hills and mountains. Fig 209— A forest remnant and soil destruction on tree-stript mountains. Shansi province, China. (F. N. Meyer, explorer, U. S. Dept. Agr.) The Ultimate Uses of Land. — The final uses of land to get maximum return with conservation of the soil seem to be about as follows: (a) Where heat, moisture, and fertility abound 1. level or gently rolling lands will be tilled as at present but planted to more productive varieties of plants; and 2. hilly, steep, and rocky lands will be put to tree crops. (fi) Lands that we now call arid or semi-arid can in many cases also be in tree crops. 664 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY (c) Cold lands where the cost of keeping warm is great will be left to produce our timber-yielding forests. (d) Beyond the tree crop and forest zones will come cactus deserts and moss-covered tundra to be used as pasture ranges by animals, suited to the conditions. (e) The bare desert, the bare rock, and the snow field will then as now remain without harvest other than 1. possible minerals where the earth is visible, and 2. possible utilization of deserts for sun-power. generator^, 5. THE ECONOMIC POSSIBILITIES OF THE TROPICS t ') The temperate zones are dwarfed into insignificance when com- pared to the possible expansions of industry and human support in the tropics. These regions are quite the equal of the winter lands, as a field for the creations of new resources by science. While the tropics have great possibilities in the new era of scien- tific industry, they have for ages lain practically unused. Con- siderable areas of the temperate zone, as in parts of Europe, China, and Japan, have approached the food limit, and most unfortunately a great part of the remainder of the temperate zones lies under the withering limitations of aridity and of low temperatures. In contrast to this, the torrid zone, which includes about half of the land surface of the globe, has far more than half of the area of abundant rainfall. Add to this its greater heat with absence of winter, and we behold possibilities, of the growth of food plants and, therefore, possibilities of the support of population several times as great as that of the temperate zone. Despite this richness these possibilities have lain idle for unknown thousands of years, and to-day 90 per cent, of the tropic forest stands virtually as undisturbed as in the day of our arboreal ancestors. 1 With the exception of certain island 1 An excerpt from U. S. Con. Rep., Dec. 9, 1911, gives an interesting example of tropic emptiness. "British North Borneo (area 31,000 square miles) is owned and governed by an incorporated company under a charter from the British government. The population of the colony is estimated at 180,000, made up mainly of aborigines, about 15,000 Chinese, and not over 400 Europeans. The natives clear small patches of the valleys and hillsides, where they plant rice and vegetables for food. For other foodstuffs they depend upon hunting and fishing. The manner of farming is decidedly primitive. The hoe is the main instrument, and there is no demand for agricultural imple- THE EXPANSION OF INDUSTRY AND OF RESOURCES 665 colonies which have become peopled under white man's influence and a few minor exceptions chiefly in southeast Asia, the tropic Fig. 210. — Panama farmer's family, home, and all the tools of agriculture — a machete to cut the bushes and weeds and a sharp stick to make holes for seeds. These people are from another world, the tropic world. They have not developed from savagery through the pastoral or animal-tending stage. That is the Aryan method. These tropic people seem never to have used animals to any important extent but developed at once a hand agriculture depending largely on starchy roots, sweet potato, yam, manioc, taro, caladium and others which have been tilled so long that they have lost the power of producing seed. The banana, corn and sugar cane are important additions to this untitled soil- preserving agriculture. (Photo H. H. Bennett, U. S. Bureau of Soils.) forest in its full force has baffled man, and he has developed only the less productive corners, where nature goaded him with ments or any kind of hardware except the hoe and a long knife used in war and in cutting the underbrush. In all Borneo, there is not a cultivated tract of ground worthy of being called a farm. The greater part of the land is yet covered with large trees." British North Borneo is about one-seventh of the whole island, which is as large as France and naturally several times as productive because the unending heat and moisture of the equatorial belt permit the continuous growth of crops. 666 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY difficulties, stung him into action, made him work or starve and then often starved him despite his pathetic efforts. 1 Man seems inclined to take his ease where he can and it seems to require intermittency in supplies to make him work. Thus he has, except under Caucasian influence, advanced in the tropics only on its arid edges and in southeastern Asia where the Monsoon rains of summer make a season of growth alternating with the dry season of the winter monsoon. Under this stimulus and this limitation, India and south China alone in the tropics have be- come populous and the occasional failure of the summer rains produces crop failures and famines — catastrophies inconceivable to us of the well-fed West. It is a curious commentary on man's relations with tropic nature that he should have become numer- ous where the famine comes to slay him, and that the equatorial belt with its abundant and regular rains should have remained idle until the Dutch showed us by their wonderful object lesson in Java that this is the world's natural belt of heavy population. Since 1798, the Dutch government, leaving the forms of native government alone, has kept peace in Java and to a considerable extent directed and compelled the industry of the people to provide food for home use and export. As a result the popula- tion has increased more than five-fold in a little over a century. In Java and Madura (the population is mostly in Java) there are 50,000 square miles with 30 million people, over 600 to the square mile and it is far from being fully populated. Only 40 per cent, of the land is under cultivation. There are many wild forest districts, in which the elephant and rhinoceros roam at large; and a recent European scientist has (for good reasons we believe) estimated that Java may easily support three times as many people as it now possesses. This would bring its density up to about 2,000 per square mile. By applying this figure to the whole Dutch East Indies, of which Java and Madura are a 1 Famine Deaths. India (from William Digby, "Prosperous British India," pp. 130-131). 1800-25 5 famines deaths = 1,000,000 1826-50 2 famines deaths = 500,000 1851-75 6 famines deaths = 5,000,000 1876-1900 18 famines deaths = 26,000,000 Total since 1800 = 32,500,000 THE EXPANSION OF INDUSTRY AND OF RESOURCES 667 sample, comprising less than one-fourteenth, we would have a population three times as large as that of Europe, and ten times as great as that of North America. Population of this density- over the suitable parts of the tropics would permit that zone alone to contain six or eight times as many people as the entire world now contains, and they would be far less liable to famine than they are in India to-day. Evidence of the correctness of the high possible estimate for Java and for other tropic localities is found in the fact that Barbadoes, in the Lesser Antilles, has 1,170 people per square mile; that Porto Rico has over 300 people per square mile sup- porting themselves by a primitive agriculture in hilly country that is far from fully populated; that Cuba, the size of Virginia, with but 3 per cent, of the land under cultivation maintains a population of 2 1/4 million people with 47 to the square mile, there are over two persons to the cultivated acre and the character of culture is very unscientific. There is nothing exceptional about either Barbadoes or Porto Rico or Cuba, except that by the accidents of history they are used more than the rest of tropic America. If Brazil were as populous as Porto Rico, its popula- tion would exceed that of the four continents touching the Atlantic, and there is every reason to think that Brazil could easily support that many people if they chose to dispossess the monkeys, the parrots, the serpents and the other wild life now in undisturbed possession of hundreds of thousands of square miles of forest in the earth's most productive belt. The whole of Brazil and the rest of tropical South America have a popula- tion less than that of the little island of Java. This part of South America possesses, as do similar latitudes in Africa, large areas of absolutely unexplored territory. It is, therefore, perfectly natural that, except Java, the few commercial products of the equatorial belt should still be the wild products of the forest, namely, rubber and gums, palm oil and ivory, with a little cocoa, which grows in orchards little better than a modified jungle. The jungle is an almost untouched resource teeming with possibilities of crops and food. The Inhabitants of the Tropics. — If the tropic jungle becomes a field who will labor in it? If three centuries of colonization have shown us anything they have shown that it will not be the 668 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY white man. The white man has settled all these tropic shores — the Spanish main, the Indies East and West, Africa, South America, and Asia. He settled them before the United States was settled and he has settled them since. He has repeatedly settled them and the settlements have always melted away. The white man is a product of the temperate zone. We do not like heat. We fly from it as it shows itself in the summer of Washington, New York, Boston, and London, and the unending heat of the tropic lowland is one of the persistent forces of nature that, as a people, the Caucasians have been unable to withstand. In three centuries of trial on every tropic shore, there has been no single case of a group of Europeans who have physically thriven, increased from generation to generation, and main- tained the culture of the founders. 1 Several races, as the Malays, the Negroes, the Hindoos and the south Chinese, have by many generations become adjusted to this climate of which they are a product. They can live and work and increase on the tropic lowland — witness Java. The white man can only come in as the ruler, the capitalist, the plantation manager, the engineer, the sanitarian, the expert, and the professional man. The distribution of population in tropic America affords excellent illustration of the influence of climate on the white man and the location of his home. These countries are all under the dominance of the Spanish and Portuguese, races which are supposed to be more resistant to tropic conditions than other white races. Yet in all tropic America, with the single exception of Rio Janeiro, these races have placed their capital inland on the plateau to get away from the tropic low plain. This was done, too, with great effort, as shown by the labors incident to carrying on trade in the pre-railroad epoch between the port and the capital, hundreds or thousands of feet above and many miles inland. Thus the capital cities of Ecuador 1 The population of Jamaica shows an interesting analysis at the end of three centuries of repeated colonization by strange races from Europe, Africa, and Asia — from the temperate and from the tropic lands. That island has had the incomparable advantages of 250 years of British rule and a large amount of plateau with its cooler climate. Adjustment of these forces shows a population of nearly 200 per square mile and 2 . 3 per cent, white, 76 per cent, black, 19 per cent, "colored," 1.8 per cent. East Indian. Within twenty years the increase of the colored races has been over 200,000 and the white population is now about 15,000. THE EXPANSION OF INDUSTRY AND OF RESOURCES 669 and Colombia under the equator are over 300 miles from the sea and nearly two miles in elevation, with all the hardships of travel and agriculture that that elevation involves — but with a cool climate. Even Costa Rica has its capital at an elevation of nearly a mile. The only exception to the plateau location of Latin-American Capitals is Rio Janeiro, a city upon the edge of the tropics, with a plateau immediately in the rear, and on the plateau a suburb containing the residences of the dominant Fig. 211. — Native house and unplowed corn patch in Panama on land that has been cleared, put in crop and abandoned for a time and then recleared, for four centuries and probably many more. The land has never been plowed. (Photo H. H. Bennett, U. S. Bureau of Soils.) whites and the foreign colony. The significance of these city locations becomes greater when one notes that the location of every capital in north Europe is either a seaport or so low in elevation as to be reached by efficient water transportation. Despite this retreat of the white race to the cool interior, they have always remained a small, very small minority, and the native Indian makes up the bulk of the population and the half breeds the second element in numerical importance. But the handful of white people rules — a fact not without significance. 670 INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY If these vacant tropic plains which we claim, but may not inhabit, are to become peopled, it apparently must be by the various black, brown, or yellow races that have become adjusted to the tropic climate. 1 Left to their own desires, they have produced tribes of savages with Sultans, wars, murders, piracies, slavery, and pestilences that effectively kept down population. They have never yet developed even a second rate power or civilization and have fallen an easy prey to colony-annexing European powers. Given order and protection and guidance as in Java, they clear up the jungle, populate the earth, and have crops to sell. Thus, by the aid of the acclimatized peoples and apparently thus only will these untouched continents yield unlimited amounts of rice and rubber, sugar, cocoa, oil and nuts, cotton, hemp and other fibers, and a whole host of tropical products which we can buy with our northern goods, especially the products of factories located in comfortable climates. Relation of Tropic Peoples to Northern Prosperity. — The development of the dense populations of the Barbadoes, Porto Rico, Java, and Bengal shows that these lands are almost certain to remain essentially agricultural, or at best, in a low stage of manufacturing. The tropic lack of ambition means that they will probably stay indefinitely as colonies or in a low stage of political power. The white races of America and Europe would have nothing to fear from three or five to ten billions of black, brown, or yellow people in the torrid zone. They would be non- militant agriculturalists, carrying out, as now, the instructions of white men, and our trade with them, largely the exchange of manufactures for raw materials, would be a great source of temperate zone riches, and would easily enable northern lands to double their population. The sooner we recognize and act upon the fact that we have a brown man's world and a white man's world, the more comfortable we will all be. REFERENCES Rownthee, B. S. Land and Labor in Belgium. The Macmillan Co. See list of publications by the Division of Foreign Seed and Plant Introduction, U. S. Dept. Agr. King, F. H. Farmers of Forty Centuries. Madison, Wis., 1912. An excellent account of oriental agriculture by an expert. 1 Control of the Tropics, by Benjamin Kidd. THE EXPANSION OF INDUSTRY AND OF RESOURCES 671 Smith, J. Russell. "The Agriculture of the Future." Harper's Magazine, January, 1913. Kidd, Benjamin. The Control of the Tropics. Macmillan, New York, 1898. Smith, J. Russell. Economic Importance of the Plateaus in Tropic America. Bulletin American Geog. Society; January, 1911. GENERAL REFERENCES FOR PART II In the main, the second part of the book has been worked out from such fragmentary sources that satisfactory references for class use are not available. Teachers who are having their students make reports may find this part of the book a fruitful field. Standard reference works — atlases, consular reports, U. S. Government reports on foreign commerce of United States, advertising matter of transportation companies, the annual volumes of encyclopedias, the statesman's yearbook — these and many others give fruit- ful material for the working out in greater detail of many points in Chapters III to XI, inclusive. Smith, J. Russell. — The Ocean Carrier. Putnams goes quite fully into the ground covered by Chapters II and XII, and touches to some extent on the subject matter of the intervening chapters. Those caring to go more fully into the theory of the Balance of Trade will find it covered in treatises on Political Economy. Chapter XIII is partly covered by most of the Histories of Commerce. "Dun's International "Review," monthly, New York, has for a number of years covered very closely the field covered by Part II of this book. "Fairplay," London, and the "Marine Review," Cleveland, are two journals dealing with ocean transportation. The Shipping World Yearbook, published by the "Shipping World," London, gives a valuable collection of data about the physical equipment and trade of all ports of importance in ocean trades. The Panama Canal is exhaustively discussed in E. R. Johnson's report to President Taft on Panama Canal Traffic and Tolls, 1912. PART II COMMERCIAL GEOGRAPHY CHAPTER I THE LAW OF TRADE Commerce exists because individuals and peoples, having different goods, exchange their surplus to mutual advantage. This difference in the production of peoples arises from three main reasons — first, the difference in the peoples themselves; second, the differences in the stages of industrial development; and, third, the difference in the resources of their respective lands. Racial Differences. — The first reason for a difference in pro- duction arises from a difference in the peoples themselves. The Japanese and Chinese export to other countries their porcelains, lacquer ware, metal work, fancy paper goods, and other products, which have their distinctive character and value because they reflect a skill peculiar to these oriental peoples, whose culture is so different from our own. From India come many carvings and curios, which are prized as examples of Indian art. The chief commerce of some American Indians is in basketry, blankets, birch bark work, and other products of his own tribal life, and na- tive arts and crafts. Among the peoples of Western civilization, the French are conspicuous in commerce through the export of products which are valuable because of the French skill and taste which give them a superior artistic character, and make them precious to the lovers of the luxurious and beautiful everywhere. German commerce has reached an important position partly through the influence of the scientific attainment and thrift of the German people. This is particularly true of their leadership in the chemical industries and the industries that have through their chemical basis a close dependence upon the laboratories of the nation which has led the world in chemistry. It may at first thought seem that the difference in the skill, genius, or culture of races is the greatest cause of trade; but this is not the case. Racial difference is the least important of the three main causes. 675 676 COMMERCIAL GEOGRAPHY Racial differences and their commercial results are conspicuous for their tendency to be evened up and to disappear. The relative advantage of German scientific leadership is passing be- cause the Germans themselves are teaching other peoples their own sciences and arts. America, Japan, and England are copying German sciences and scientific instruction with all their might, while the Japanese art products are declining because of the in- fluence of European and American machine manufacture under the factory system. The arts of the Indian and the tribesman everywhere tend to vanish before the machine-made product of world commerce. This is usually a great blow to tribal life. Difference in the Stage of Industrial Development. — The second cause, a difference in the stage of industrial development, is much more important in explaining the world's present commerce. The difference in stage or intensity of industrial development is largely a matter of the density of population. Two people to the square mile will inevitably support themselves by means which differ greatly from those that will be adopted by 200 people per square mile in the same kind of territory. The sparse popu- lation seizes upon the raw products of nature, or produces raw materials requiring the least labor. A dense population, having few raw materials per capita, must fabricate them to a high degree to make value. In the new forest lands, one person to two or three square miles, will make a satisfactory living by the trapping of fur-bearing animals and the gathering of gums, herbs, and roots. A population slightly more dense will cut down the forest and sell logs as lumber. If this sparse population is upon the open plain it will employ itself in tending herds of sheep and cattle, and will export wool, hides, and animals. If the population increases and the climate is suitable, the level plain will be care- lessly plowed up and sown to grain, which will be exported to the densely peopled region. This, in brief, is the explanation of the great commerce of the second half of the nineteenth century. The European peoples settling the comparatively empty lands of America, have been producing wheat and sending it back to the better yielding wheat lands of Europe; they have been sending cattle, butter, and cheese to the European countries, where the pastures are fatter and cattle more numerous per square mile; they have been exporting THE LAW OF TRADE 677 lumber to the countries where the forests are better kept, because the European population is dense and the American population has been and still is relatively scanty. This is the chief explana- tion of the commerce between the German- American or Scandina- vian-American in Dakota with the people of the Fatherland, or the grandsons of the Englishmen in Nebraska with the people in the old country. We even send to and get from Europe articles of the same material but of different degrees of manu- facture. Thus we export raw cotton and buy fine fabrics and lace; we export logs and planks and import wood carvings from Switzerland and the Black Forest region of Germany; we export sole leather and import the fancy tans of France and Germany; we sell steel rails and pig copper and buy cutlery and scientific instruments; we send coal tar to Germany and bring back the drugs and dyes that her chemists make from it. Owing to the westward movement of the main line of migration and settlement we see, within the old world itself, a duplicate of the trade that passes between America and Europe. The densely populated manufacturing parts of Europe, west of Vienna and Berlin, carry on a most active commerce with the territories of the Baltic and Black Seas, deriving from them products identical with those that come from across the Atlantic. These manufac- turing regions have been sending to us and to eastern Europe woolen goods, cottons, silks, leather goods, machinery of all kinds, metal manufactures, cutlery, gloves, lace, and the thousand products which reflect the much labor and the relatively small raw material of densely populated regions. The new outposts of Western civilization in Australia and the Argentine Republic are to manufacturing Europe but two other Missouri valleys, with grain fields and sheep and cattle ranges, inhabited by people who buy their manufactured goods and pay for them with grain and animal products. This trade will appear wherever these differences of population are found and land permits. Thus in Roman times, France and west Europe sent to Rome furs, cattle, timber, food and slaves in return for the more valu- able goods of Rome. Today these conditions, with the excep- tion of British coal, are reversed in the trade between Britain and Italy. This basis of trade, like that depending on racial differences, from which it cannot completely be distinguished, 678 COMMERCIAL GEOGRAPHY has a strong tendency to disappear through the equalizing of industrial conditions throughout the world. The United States and Germany, which for a time were Eng- land's great market for her manufactured goods, are now rapidly developing the same industries, and are becoming the great rivals of England. Within the United States itself the whole development is shown. New England duplicates old England in more than name. It is little more than a group of towns and cities whose people live by fabricating raw materials, most of them imported, and sending the product chiefly to the West and South in return for the food and raw materials of those newer and less populous sections of the country. Ohio, which, fifty years ago, was to New England both market and source of supply for food and raw materials, is now becoming her rival and turns for her supplies to the yet newer West. The cotton industry of America, once centered in New England, is rapidly being built up in the South; and all kinds of manufacturing is going on in greater and greater quantities beyond the Alleghanies, so that the North Central States are coming to resemble New England as New England has come to resemble old England. Every state and every country desires manufacturing industries, and they are increasing in every state in the Union, and in almost every foreign country. Lastly, but by no means the least important, comes the emigrant to even up the population physically and complete industrial similarity, so far as it pertains to the labor supply. The cheapness of the Atlantic passage and the distribution of knowledge of American industrial conditions throughout Europe permit greater and greater movements of people to America, to take advantage of her industrial opportunities. Already more than a million have come in a single year, and there is no reason why, in a few generations, this country shall not become as fully peopled as is Europe. This growing likeness in industries and population is accom- panied step by step by the cessation of trade in those articles for which the necessity ceases as America comes to produce a product previously secured in Europe. A few decades ago most of our iron and steel was brought from England. Now we export it occasionally to England. The import of textiles, chemicals, and other manufactures is falling off in consequence of American THE LAW OF TRADE 679 production. The large trade in sub-tropic fruits and dried fruits from Mediterranean countries has almost entirely ceased through the development of identical industries in California. Difference in Resources. — The third basis of trade, that arising from difference in resources, is one of increasing importance and is one which man affects but little, a fact which will become of greater and greater influence the more fully we adapt our use of each section to its resources. The chief of these differ- ences are those of topography, soil, moisture, nearness to sea, anji temperature. i ] Differences in topography give rise to a trade which will endurq. The products of the well-used mountain and of the well-used plain must forever be different. The roUgh, rocky and steep lands cannot be tilled; but they are the natural home of the for- ests, of wood and tree products, and of the mining and quarrying industries. The full utilizing of mountain countries means there- fore minerals, wood, nuis, fruit, water-power, paper,! and the possibility of printing and publishing and the manufacture c-f varied light imported raw materials through water-power. But the mountain needs the agricultural products of the ojien plain, grain for bread, animals for meat, wool and cottto for; clothing, and the many other products of agriculture, which can be paid for with mountain products. Such is the trade that does now and may for centuries pass between the prairies of west Canada and the glacial regions north of the St. Lawrence, between hilly New England and Appalachia and the level West. Soil differences also make trade. Along the banks of the Mississippi, in southeastern Iowa, are glacial sand plains in the midst of the fertile black prairies of the corn belt. The sand plain, too poor to grow corn, just suits melons and sweet potatoes, which the farmers grow in large fields, and peddle in wagon loads across adjoining counties, or ship by train loads to adjacent states to be bought up by people who can grow corn, but who can- not, on their richer, heavier, more valuable lands, grow good melons or potatoes. This example is typical of the vast trade that is now developing between the sandy districts in the Atlantic plain and elsewhere, and the rest of the United States. Though the most conspicuous, this soil difference is but one example of many others. 680 COMMERCIAL GEOGRAPHY The differences in moisture give us the humid and the arid lands between which there is a great and growing trade. Beyond the bounds of cultivation in all countries are the sheep and cattle ranges, where sparse population has two or three products to sell, and must buy most of its food from more favored farm lands, and must secure from the manufacturing towns all the other Percentage 500 350 350 200 150 100. ■1011 / ope pical ,1011 ; s / f s / / / / / \ .-''" • S -**" s s -\ / / So & GO CO OO s Fig. 212. — Comparison of increase of imports into the United States from Europe with increase of imports of tropic products. Tropical products accord- ing to United States Bureau Statistics classification are cocoa, coffee, fibers, rubber, indigo, ivory, licorice, olive oil, rice, silk, sugar, tea, tobacco, vegetable oils (using values in 1870 as base or 100 per cent.). products that are to be purchased in the store. In the irrigated oases of the arid lands, dried fruit is produced most easily; and it is already being sent from these favored spots in Australia, in Argentina, in Chile, in Europe and in the United States to the more humid districts, which can with ease produce other prod- ucts for exchange. This exchange of dried fruits and animal THE LAW OF TRADE 681 products for grain and manufactures is world wide and seems to be as enduring as the distribution of people and variation in rainfall. The shore lands and the inland region have an enduring trade in the fish, of which the rocky and even untillably cold coast has at present a great wealth, enabling it to command the products of all other climates. Temperature as a basis of trade is the most fundamental, the most widespread, and, for the future, the most promising of great and yet greater performance. No exchange of culture, no equality in education or skill, no emigration of peoples evening up density of population can change the temperature and make tropic fruit grow in the land of arctic fur, or cotton grow in the land of spring wheat. If America becomes a second Europe, Manitoba will have a lively trade with Texas, because Texas can produce cotton and other sub-tropic products, which the short summer forever bars from Manitoba. Florida and other southern lands will send their oranges and vegetables to the northern lands of frost when the latter 's agriculture is frost bound; and the North will send in return its wheat, the red apples from its hills and the myriad products from its mills. Examples in miniature often permit us to see the tendencies of the time more clearly than larger and more complicated examples. Thus the Canary Islands, snugly fixed on steamer routes in the frost-free waters of the warm Atlantic, have, within thirty years developed an export of over 200,000 tons per year of bananas, tomatoes, and potatoes, mostly to the English market. The Future Course of Trade. — This north-south trade is the trade of the future. It is complementary to our production and is needed to round out the economic life of northern and southern lands alike. The most important class of commodities is tropic and sub-tropic foods. We want their cane sugar, their cacao, their coffee, their rice, their spices, their bananas and other fruits; their coconuts, their Brazil nuts, their palm nuts, their tapioca and many minor products. We want, for our mills, their raw materials, rubber, Manila hemp, jute, henequen and other fibers; their cabinet and dye woods; their rattan, gums, palm oil and other forest products. In exchange for these the 682 COMMERCIAL GEOGRAPHY northern lands are sending machinery, clothing and all kinds of manufactures and some foods. This is a natural trade. At the present time the great bulk of our commerce depends upon differences in the stage of industrial development — east and west trade — but the future is indicated by changes now in progress. The greatest rates of increase are taking place not along east-west lines, but in the trade of temperate with tropic regions; and, if the present rates of increase in this traffic continue' throughout this century, it will far surpass that on the east and west lines. The east and west trade will probably not decline in absolute quantity, but will become relatively and gradually less important as the world's commerce multiplies itself many fold, as it inevitably will if its present tendencies continue. Size of Country and Volume of Foreign Trade. — Foreign trade, depending thus upon natural laws, modified by man's aid and interferences, is of varying importance in different countries, with the general tendency to be least important in large countries and most important in small countries. China peacefully and successfully ignored the foreign world for many centuries, because she is a world within herself, reaching on the south to a latitude of Havana, on the north to the latitude of Newfoundland, producing cotton, rice and wheat, and reaching westward across semi-arid and arid pastures to the deserts of central Asia. The world could give her nothing that she did not produce. She therefore scorned the world. Petroleum, cheap cotton cloth, modern machine manufactures and new machinery have tempted the Chinese to buy; but their foreign trade of less than one dollar per person is insignificant to-day. The foreign trade, however, of a country like Uruguay, a little fertile cattle and sheep ranch, is over $60 per person, among the highest in the world, because Uruguayans produce essentially one class of articles, with which they must buy everything else which a civilized people consumes. Small countries like Switzerland, Belgium and Holland, with almost no variety in climate, and accompanying small variety of resources, have a relatively enormous foreign trade. So does England. So would New England, if we had the figures of commerce that cross her south- ern and western boundaries. But most of New England trade is with other states of the Union, and disappears without statistical THE LAW OF TRADE 683 record in our vast domestic commerce, which is said to be more than twenty times as great as our foreign commerce. If all Europe were but two nations, corresponding to the United States and Canada, most of her astonishingly vast foreign commerce would disappear, because the commerce of England or Germany with west Europe and Russia would be like that of our north- eastern with our southern and western states. Our great area and variety of resources gives us a smaller per capita foreign commerce than that which is shown by the countries of Europe, especially such small countries as Denmark or other western European countries. To see commerce in its extreme development we should look at the Falkland Islands, a wind-swept sheep-range with an area of 6,500 square miles, and a population of 2,300 people, whose foreign trade is about $600 per person per year. This only slightly surpasses the little French colonies of Miequelon and St. Pierre — a few thousand fishermen and ship outfitters on two barren rocks in the cold Gulf of St. Lawrence, who import and export each year the enormous total of about $500 for every person in the colony. In contrast to this the per capita foreign trade of the United States is less than $40, and of Great Britain is about $100 per year. CHAPTER II THE WORLD HIGHWAY— THE OCEAN AND ITS CARRIES S To understand world commerce we must first know the part played by the ocean. The nation that does not touch the ocean is like a house that is not upon the street, and some of the bitter- est strifes of history have been for the possession of bits of coast. Once a nation has reached the sea it has possessed itself of a part of the world highway that reaches everywhere and belongs to each and all who own even a tiny strip. The Freedom of the Highway. — It is an adage that ocean transportation is cheaper than land, but it is difficult for the landsman to realize how much ocean carriage differs from land carriage in cheapness and in the freedom of competition. This freedom is chiefly due to the same cause which produces the greater cheapness of transportation, namely, the fact that the ocean carrier must furnish only the vehicle, while nature furnishes the roadway, and, in some cases, even the motive power — wind. Upon the railway the cost of the vehicle is an insignificant part of the total cost of service. The important thing is the way itself. The names of the two means of transportation show this. Upon the sea, we speak of ships, which are vehicles; upon the land, we speak of the railroad, which is the way. The Freedom of the Terminals. — If the steamship company does not find terminal facilities, it can go to some other port where they are provided, the freedom of the sea permitting it to go with perfect ease. The ambition of cities makes them provide the needed facilities for ships if they would have trade. This is true because any city, no matter how insignificant or poorly located, has ambitions for world trade, and since no steamship company can give this no city will give away the monopoly of its ocean terminals. Accordingly, the place for the ship to unload is usually found with comparatively small expense to the ship, so that 684 THE WORLD HIGHWAY 685 ocean transportation remains competitive and cheap both on the international high sea and within the shadow of the land. The Two Types of Ocean Service.— This freedom of the high- way and of terminals results in a great variety of traffic methods, but the whole of ocean commerce may be divided into two large classes. 1. The line traffic, with which everyone is more or less familiar, carries the passengers and mails and certain kinds Fig. 213. -A tramp steamer in dry dock shows how nearly cubical she is — about 81 per cent. of freight. It corresponds to the express and fast freight business of the land. The line service is in the public eye and achieves a degree of attention which is much beyond its relative merits. 2. Charter traffic; single vessels operating as units, as is any wagon that is for hire on the street corner, handle the larger part of the ocean's freight. It is an individual matter entirely be- tween the shipper and the ship owner. The business is not 686 COMMERCIAL GEOGRAPHY heralded by expensive advertising, fine engraving and handsome cuts distributed throughout the five continents. All this public- ity is costly. The individual ship, which is known as a charter ship, or more commonly as a "tramp," is on the list of some ship- broker or brokers who secure a freight for her on commission, and she goes about her work unnoticed by the traveling public or by the headlines of the newspapers. She is reported only in the mari- time columns of the business journals, and is watched only by those whose business it is to know about her travels. But she carries a large proportion of the world's freight. The tramp vessel that is free to go when work offers, and to lie in port when it does not offer, has a distinct advantage over the line vessel, which must go on a certain date, full or empty, must maintain a schedule and make sailings to ports of call, which in themselves are often unprofitable, but which are necessary, since a line vessel must maintain a reputation to establish relations with shippers and form a clientele. The ambition of the liner is regularity and reliability; the ambition of the tramp is cheapness. The Charter or Tramp Vessels. — The freedom of the sea makes competition easy, but it is especially easy among the tramp vessels. When a great line is established, full competition can only take the form of another great line, which involves much capital and careful organization. Competition in the tramp serv- ice requires merely another ship. It does not even require that the owner shall be a successful manager. He may rent his vessel out to another, who has the necessary acquaintance with the trade, or he may secure a manager who will receive a salary or commission. Any person who has the necessary two or three hundred thousand dollars can go to any one of the scores of ship- builders and have a tramp steamer built in a few months. He can have a ship built on part borrowed money, the builder taking a lien on the ship; and when she goes to sea she will go mortgaged. Or, if the newcomer should desire to engage in the ship business and does not care to wait for the ship to be built, there are numer- ous ship-brokers who will sell him one within an hour. The owner of this single ship is then in a position to compete in the world's freight market, and can take service on any sea, in any country and from hundreds of ports. The ocean is a world THE WORLD HIGHWAY 687 ocean; the ship market is a world market; the charter traffic is a world traffic; and the ocean rate a world rate. If there is grain in volume in the Black Sea the ships go there, and the same is true of India, Australia or South America. Wherever freight offers, there the ships may go and do go; so that, although indus- try and railway transportation are local matters within a partic- ular country, ocean carriage is absolutely international, and reflects world conditions which are often directly opposite to those prevailing in any particular country. For example, during the bounding prosperity which prevailed in this country between 1901 and 1905, there was worst shipping depression ever known. The Tramp Traffic. — This tramp steamer, which may be built and owned by anybody, and which may sail in all seas, and carry the products of any or all countries is a remarkably free agent. It is to be had, however, only by those persons who can afford to load a whole ship; and that is about the only limitation upon the character of produce that is carried by the tramp vessels. First in the class comes grain; then we have sugar, cotton, ores, coal, nitrate of soda, lumber, china clay, petroleum and many other bulky raw commodities. Only occasionally some manu- facturer ships enough heavy goods, such as steel rails, locomotives and agricultural machinery, to fill a vessel, in which case he almost invariably charters a tramp. The regions producing the tramp freight and the regions consuming the same are widely scattered and embrace every important country in the world. For exam- ple, grain is shipped from our Pacific coast, our Gulf and Atlantic ports, from the Argentine Republic, from Australia, from India, from the Black Sea ports, from Egypt and from Baltic Russia. A further analysis of the origin and destinations of prevailing charter commodities would show that we have indeed a world problem. There are hundreds of ports with freight for tramp vessels and there are thousands of ships scattered about the world to do this work. Management of Tramp Vessels. — The proper bringing together of the ships and the freight is a world puzzle, compared to which the game of chess is simplicity. The ships must move around the world in such a way that the freight is all carried and that the ships that do the work have as few empty voyages as possible, and keep constantly employed. 688 COMMERCIAL GEOGRAPHY The successful adjustment of this complicated situation is one of the results of the development of the ocean cable. Lloyd's agency in Great Britain, with its branches throughout the world, reports every observed movement of more than 10,000 vessels; maritime associations in commercial ports do the same work; so that the shipowner can easily know where his vessel is and where the vessels of his rivals are. It is necessary, however, that in this work watch must be kept not only upon vessels but upon freight. Most of the products are products that depend upon harvest and commercial conditions. If there is to be a good or bad grain harvest upon the Pacific coast or in the Argentine Republic, tramp shipowners must know it and place their ships accordingly. The differing times of ripening of the various crops in the different producing regions and other particular seasonal demands make each port or district have its busy season and its off season. Accordingly, the manager of the tramp vessel has a number of problems to consider as he guides his ship through the maze of world commerce. The cable which enables Lloyd's to report the movements of all vessels, also reports the condition of crops in foreign countries, and enables the managers of the ships to maintain almost as good control and knowledge of their ships as does the chess player of the men on the board before him. The headland that projects into a traveled sea is nearly always occupied by a signal station, where, by means of the international flag signal code, a ship captain can receive orders from his owner. Thus, the trans-Atlantic steamer coming to New York is reported from Nantucket lightship or Fire Island lighthouse, usually both. On the other side she is reported from one of numerous stations upon the English or Irish coast. From these same sta- tions the captains of tramp steamers are receiving orders to pro- ceed to this port or that. The grain that is sent to "Cork for orders" may be unloaded anywhere between Belfast and Copen- hagen. The coasts of Africa, Asia, South America and the islands of the sea are supplied with these signal stations, so that the vessel owner in London, Liverpool or New York moves his steamer onward from station to station, as the chess player moves the men from block to block on the board before him or the train dispatcher manages the trains from his watch-tower in the center of the great urban railway station. THE WORLD HIGHWAY 689 The manager of the tramp steamer must consider more than one voyage when he makes an engagement to perform a certain voyage, for it is necessary that his ship be discharged in a place where freight is to be secured for another voyage, and if such is not the case he may have a long voyage in ballast, making cost without income. The result is that the probable second voyage affects the rates for the first. The manager seeks an engagement which will release his vessel near good prospective freights and he avoids engagements that take him into barren seas. Accordingly this master of applied commercial geography scans the world's horizon for prospective wheat crops or other freight supplies toward which he can work his ships with a chance of securing freight. The Tramp Freight Bates. — It is a fact that if a vessel cannot make good earnings it usually pays better to take low earnings rather than nothing. The consequence is that when freight is scarce the rates may go down not only to a point where there is no profit but below this, because each manager reasons to himself: "If I cannot make profit, it is better to operate at least at cost; if cost cannot be made, it is better to operate at a moderate loss rather than to undergo a greater loss by tying up to a pier and allowing the ship to do absolutely nothing." The result is that ocean freights may go to great depths; and, conversely, they may rise to great heights, for when the freight is plentiful and the ships are scarce the only limit to which the freight may rise is set by the limit that the shippers can afford to pay to get a particular deal consummated. No auction room or horse fair could be more competitive than the ship market. If there are two bidders the price rises; if there is one, he has his own way. In response to these primary forces, the bargainers representing the ship and the freight take advantage of every factor in sight, and freights range through hundreds of per cents. The method of making rates and securing cargoes for ships, and ships for cargoes, is best described by the relation of some common incidents of every-day occurrence. A Liverpool ship- owner had a steamer in the Mediterranean loaded with jute, which she was carrying from Calcutta to Dundee. The owner desired another cargo for the steamer at the end of the voyage. Knowing that there was nothing in Dundee he wrote to his 690 COMMERCIAL GEOGRAPHY agent in Newcastle, and himself made inquiries among the shippers of Liverpool. The Newcastle man suggested a cargo of coal to Hamburg, but it was declined; and the owner sought the aid of his correspondent in Dumbarton, but the iron trade of Dumbarton was not promising. Meanwhile the days were passing, the vessel had reached Dundee and there was nothing provided for her. The Liverpool man was himself the corre- spondent of a London firm of ship-brokers, who telegraphed him at this juncture that they had offers of a shipment of German coke to go from Rotterdam to Santa Rosalia, Lower California, and of another of Cardiff coal for Buenos Ayres. The first the shipowner declined, as being only suitable for a sailing vessel, and because of news from across the Atlantic he allowed the second to go to a steamer then lying at Antwerp. Three days before this he had cabled to his New York correspondent a description of the steamer, and offering her services to carry grain to the United Kingdom at a certain rate and saying that she could load after a certain date or between certain dates. As New York freight was dull, the firm in that city telegraphed their Boston and Philadelphia agencies. At the same time a Chicago grain exporter decided to export 150,000 bushels of corn, and telegraphed to his agents in New York and Philadelphia to secure offers of transportation. The representatives of the Chicago exporter and the Liverpool shipowner bargained face to face in the New York Produce Exchange. Offers were, however, made at the same rate by the New York representative of the owner of a ship then off Rio Janeiro with a cargo of Chilean nitrate bound for New York, and also by a Philadelphia broker who sought future employment for a vessel then in. the Red Sea with a cargo of Java sugar for Philadelphia. The Liverpool owner was informed of this competition, and still having nothing for his steamer he cabled that he would charter his ship for three- pence (six cents) less per ton, or, for the same rate, he would take freight to continental ports as far as Copenhagen. He added to his cablegram the word "range," which means in cable code that he would send the ship to the Delaware Bay with the understanding that she might be ordered to New York, Phila- delphia, Baltimore, or Norfolk to load. This offer secured the freight, for the representatives of the sugar ship and the nitrate THE WORLD HIGHWAY 691 ship having more time at their disposal preferred to take chances rather than cut rates. The steamer, which, pending negotiations, had proceeded to Newcastle to coal, departed thence in ballast for the Delaware. Meanwhile the Chicago exporter found that railroad conditions made Norfolk the most convenient port to deliver his corn at the appointed time. When the steamer reached the Delaware Breakwater (just inside Cape Henlopen), the captain received telegraphic instructions to go to Norfolk. There he loaded a full cargo of corn, and, as the final destination of the corn was still undecided, he sailed to the Channel port of Falmouth for orders. There he was instructed by signal to proceed to Copenhagen, where the corn was discharged. The vessel was now ready for another contract which the agents had been trying to arrange since the day they learned of the final destination of the corn cargo. Wireless telegraph is per- fecting the control of the absent shipping. The Cooperation of Tramp Traffic and Liner Traffic in World Commerce. — This tramp traffic bears a very fundamental rela- tion to world commerce because it carries the heavy commodities — the raw materials and food — without which the manufacturing city and the manufacturing state as at present constituted could not exist. The era of world commerce in its present sense may properly be said to have begun about the middle of the nineteenth century, when Great Britain began the heavy importation of food and the wide export of manufactures. At this time came the steamship, and lines were established between Europe and America, and between Europe and all other countries, and between New York and the West Indies and Colon, and from Panama to San Francisco and Chile. These two types of ocean service work together like freight trains and express trains. The tramps handle the trade of vast quantity; the liners handle the trade of high value and the shipments of small size and great number. The lines, therefore, serve the greater number of shippers. They serve the multitude who cannot fill a ship with one consignment, and among manufacturers there must be thousands of small shipments of finished goods to one that requires a tramp to handle it. The manufacturing state may depend upon the thousand ships that bring food and materials, but there is an equal dependence upon the 300 big liners that 692 COMMERCIAL GEOGRAPHY carry to market with greater speed the myriad small consign- ments of manufactured exports. Conversely the raw material producing country like Argentina depends largely upon tramps to take its exports and upon liners to bring its imports of valu- able manufactured goods. 'yyy/yZwy^Y/y// O'mrts of Trade m'nds in northern Summer mmmmm I. **>&• X X X X X X X ' Fig. 214. — Principal World Trading Routes, Steam and Sail, From The Ocean Carrier by J. Russell Smith (Courtesy of G. P. Putnam's Sons.) CHAPTER III THE TRADE ROUTES OF NORTH AMERICA ; The surface and contour of the North American continent offer easier paths for commercial routes than those of any o^ier continent except Europe. Most of the habitable areas are com- paratively near to, or easily reached from healthful coasts and suitable harbors. The tropic section is the only exception to this, and the tropic is of far less importance than the temperate section. The center of gravity in North American industry, population and commerce is, and will long continue to be, in the south- eastern temperate region, the region comprising the Atlantic slope, the basin of the Great Lakes and the Mississippi Valley east of 100° W. This section is especially favored for transporta- tion within itself and for access to the sea. The slowly sinking coast line affords numerous good harbors, with value increased by a moderate tide. Inland waterways are afforded by the Great Lakes, the Mississippi, the St. Lawrence, and the rivers and bays of the Atlantic Coast. There are few mountain obstructions, and the interior offers a most remarkable combination of condi- tions favorable to easy transportation. The Mississippi Valley is almost level, opens broadly to the Gulf and further has the phenomenal advantage of almost imperceptible passages to the Lake Basin, to the Atlantic slope and to the areas draining into the Hudson Bay and the Arctic Ocean. The problem of getting out to the Pacific is easier than crossing the Alps or the chief mountains of Asia or South America. In Mexico and Central America the mountains are more difficult and the plains less hospitable. Unexcelled climate and natural resources in the temperate sections complete the conditions necessary there for the development of trade routes unrivalled in the size and distance of their commercial movement. We have strangely failed to utilize all our advantages, especially 693 694 COMMERCIAL GEOGRAPHY THE TRADE ROUTES OF NORTH AMERICA 695 our waterways, of which President Roosevelt in a message to congress said: " Our river systems are better adapted to the needs of the people than those of any other country. In extent, dis- tribution, navigability, and ease of use they stand first. Yet the rivers of no other civilized country are so poorly developed, so little used, or play so small a part in the industrial life of the nation as those of the United States. In view of the use made of rivers elsewhere, the failure to use our own is astonishing, and no thoughtful man can believe that it will last." These resources consist in 25,000 miles of river now used to some extent; 25,000 miles that might be improved; 2,500 miles of canals and 2,500 miles of bays and sounds that need connecting by canals. The waterways have languished and the railroads have thriven because we have been an individualistic rather than a social people. The individual or corporation could make a fortune from a railroad, while the river, free to all, merely interfered with the monopoly of the railroad interests and favored the shipper rather than the carrier. The most conspicuous exception to this is the Great Lakes, a utilized waterway upon which, however, the railway companies run many boats which merely become extensions of the railroads. Before the coming of railroads, this country, like many others, was dependent upon rivers to an extent now little known. Thus the Ohio and Mississippi rivers were the first great avenues of trade, travel and settlement in the country west of the Alleghanies, which they dominated till 1850. But these streams were not improved and the Great Lakes were, and they have dominated the commerce of the last half of the nineteenth century as the Mississippi had dominated the first half. Influence of the Great Lakes in Making Routes. — The primary routes of the continent are those connecting the continental interior, the upper Mississippi Valley and the Great Lake Basin, with the Atlantic. Curiously enough, the main thoroughfare to this region is not by way of the St. Lawrence with its great estuary, nor by the navigable Mississippi, but through the low plain connecting the Hudson Valley and Lake Ontario. The Falls of Niagara, together with the rapids and ice of the St. Lawrence, hindered the early development of that route. A further drawback was the political division of the St. Lawrence Valley between two countries; another was the occupation of the 696 COMMERCIAL GEOGRAPHY lower part by the less numerous population and the one having the smaller interest in the West. The Gulf of Mexico appears to be the natural outlet for much of this region, but settlement began in the north and went west building routes as it went; so over these lines of travel went the trade to the Atlantic cities and Europe. The white population of the Lake Basin and adjacent territory moved in by many routes, but the best way to get goods back was by the route along the Hudson and Mohawk rivers, which flow out through the only complete break to be found in the Appalachians between Maine and Alabama. The completion of wagon roads across the state of New York about the beginning of the century was followed by the building of the Erie Canal in 1825, the first extensive canal in the United States. The tapping of the lakes by this canal was revolutionary for the commerce of the West. The fact that the St. Lawrence drained the waters of the lakes was now of no avail. The Erie Canal drained their commerce into the Hudson and it made commerce. A barrel of flour, which before this had consumed its profit in paying wagon freight for a hundred miles, could now be taken from the lakes to the sea for a tiny fraction of the former prohibitive freight. A large territory in the heart of the continent was given commercial possibilities, because the new route made possible a commerce with Europe by way of New York. New Orleans had a handicap of a distance 50 per cent, greater, and the growth of population and trade in the canal period was naturally most rapid in the territory affected by the Erie Canal. The early dominance of the navigable Mississippi in the economic life of the nation is shown by any population map of the period. In 1846 the commerce of the Lakes was $64,000,000, but that of the western rivers was $183,000,000. But this leadership of the rivers went down before the advance of railroads which have cooperated with the Lake carriers but not with the river carriers. The building of railroads to the West was most easily accomplished along the open route followed by the Erie Canal. This, too, was a profitable place for the building of a railroad, because here were already in existence the traffic- breeding centers of population that had grown up in the territory enriched by the canal that had made cities in the wilderness. The Great Lakes thus have dominated the development of THE TRADE ROUTES OF NORTH AMERICA 697 trade routes in the railway era. Along these shores are the great- est interior populations and trade. The lake freight rates, which have been but a fraction of land rates, were a freight attraction that gave any lake port access to a vast inland territory. The lake shores have, therefore, always been magnets to the railway builders. Whenever possible these men have brought their lines to the lakes at some point or points so that they might forward P£aatA>H££ T L L„ 1 1 T I.r iTHRUMIIS^WHaTBYWER^ML « -_i\_- ._ __ _| INC»rr5FElKJ5HH. A' si/ \ I |85T - M |SY \ CHICAGO TO NEWYORK J J \t t TT | i-inl T \ i A I i\ J \a£A ml t 1' W T &^ 5 i <7* t **u. \ 'T YT* Iffi ^ 11 \ffi' .1 jX 1 m " * u> « n» te w ■& »» f'°* '*•* Fig. 216.- -Water transportation is a controller of railway freight rates. J. Paul Goode.) (After to the eastward by boat and get a share of the water-borne lake traffic, going west. Consequently the Great Lakes have been the deciding factor in locating one terminus of most of the railroads of the central West. The trade routes of this region may now be likened to a section of a thick cable woven of many strands which are untwisted and spread out fan-like at both ends. The lakes, with their steamship lines and the competing and auxiliary railways that follow their shores, make the central or compact 698 COMMERCIAL GEOGRAPHY section of the cable. The loose ends are represented by the many- lines of railway that converge at the western lake ports, and by the other lines that diverge from the eastern lake ports to the Atlantic coast. Western Assemblers of Lake Traffic. — The ports of northern Lake Superior may at any time receive the freights from three trans-continental railways — The Canadian Pacific, the Great Northern, and the Northern Pacific. The Grand Trunk Pacific is also practically in this class, for while not yet completed to the Pacific, it is a mighty carrier in the country beyond the Lakes. Milwaukee, on the west side of Lake Michigan, has lines running westward and northwestward, connecting with these trans- continental lines. Chicago, the greatest railroad center in the world, at the southwestern corner of the Great Lake system, is con- nected with all trans-continental lines, even those that touch the Canadian and the Mexican boundaries. Toledo, at the western end of Lake Erie, is a Chicago on a smaller scale, a center for many shorter railway lines. Cleveland, on the southern shore of the lake, is a more important center, having eight different railways. Fig. 217. — Iron-ore dock, steamer, railroad terminal and ore storage at a Lake Erie port. Once the railways have brought their grain, lumber, and ore to the lake ports, water transportation renders a great service. From Duluth, Port Arthur, and Fort William on Lake Superior, and from Milwaukee, Chicago, and Toledo a vast fleet of steamers and barges busily and cheaply carry freight to and from Cleve- land, Buffalo, and even Montreal on the east. But the railroads are also busy with the east and west traffic. North of the lakes, THE TRADE ROUTES OP NORTH AMERICA 699 between the lakes and with many lines south of the lakes they keep up a constant competition with the lake vessels, and, in the winter months when the lakes are frozen, they must carry all the freight. The railroads also get at all seasons the vast amount of high-class freight for which there is need of haste. Thus, meat, one of the greatest, if not the greatest single product in value in the whole Lake basin goes eastward chiefly by rail from the great packing centers of Chicago, Kansas City, Omaha, and Sioux City. The grain from these same markets gravitates toward the Lake steamer. Fig. 218. — Dumping carload of coal into steamer on Great Lakes. The Traffic of the Lake Region. — In numbers of tons per year the traffic through the American and Canadian canals around the rapids at the eastern end of Lake Superior, far out-ranks that passing through the Suez Canal. The tonnage of freight passing Detroit is as great as the combined foreign trade of New York, London, and Liverpool, although it is of far less value per ton. 1 The enormous shipments of iron ore are the largest single item. Lumber, coal, and grain also assume great proportions. Millions of tons of coal are carried from the southern shores of 1 The Welland Canal at the other end of the Lake shows with its small tonnage of 3 million tons per year the limiting influence of shallow draught. 700 COMMERCIAL GEOGRAPHY Lake Erie to the upper lakes at a freight rate of thirty cents per ton. The ore rate is commonly sixty-five cents from Duluth to "Millions of Net Tons 62 60 58 56 54 52 50 48 46 44 42 40 38 36 34 32 30 88 26 24 22 20 18 16 14 12 10 8 6 4 2 / / \\ \ \ J 1 1 1 ' J I 1 . \ j \ 4 > _ - - ■" 1° <$ =-.\ I w^ : Fig. 229. — Globe shows narrowness of North Atlantic and cause of location of North Atlantic Trunk. (Photo E. Stirling.) upon the western shores of Hudson Bay — a fact interesting to speculate upon. The north Atlantic route has the great advantage of being entirely devoid of islands with the exception of Sable Island — the so-called graveyard of the Atlantic — east of the Maine Coast and a few small rocks on the Grand Banks. So universally are these skirmish posts of the continent dreaded that the route for the trans- Atlantic steamers aims to interpose 60 miles of clear THE NORTH ATLANTIC ROUTE 735 water between the ship and these destroying landspecks. This is the more necessary because of the mingling together of the Arctic current and the warm Gulf Stream which produces well- nigh continuous fog on the Grand Banks. The handicap result- ing from these difficulties is well-illustrated in the St. Lawrence River, one of the feeders of the Atlantic route, where the narrow and rocky channel has been frequently the scene of great dis- asters and where at the present time ships must often tie up during the night. The result of these dangers produces an insurance rate often several times as high as that for open sea voyages. The icebergs, almost continually afloat in the region of the Grand Banks, are a greater menace than a group of islands. Another dangerous part of the route is Cape Hatteras, which really projects into the Atlantic and, with its long strings of sand bar reaching out to sea, must be rounded by hundreds of vessels from the south, and, in the temptation to save distance, many a good ship has ventured too near these bars and met her end. Winds and Fuel Supply. — The north Atlantic, a region famous for its storms and strong winds, was, in the sailing vessel epoch, a route where some wind could always be had. The ship was never be-calmed, and the record of the zone of calms shows this to be a matter of importance, although it was often necessary in the winter time to make a great detour to the south to avoid the steady winds from the west. This was particularly the case in the colonial times when ships were small and rigging was ill equipped for headwinds. In those days it was common for the ship to return by way of the Canaries and West Indies and beat up the Atlantic coast. Even at the present time our pilot charts recommend a winter returning route that actually dips below the tropics to enable the skipper to take advantage of the trade winds which will speed him westward. While we boast of the age of steam, the best of steamers have done little more than double the best record of trans-Atlantic sailing vessels going east; but, practically, they have much more than doubled their efficiency because the average sailing vessel is so much more below her own best record than is the average steamer. In the present epoch of steam no route equals the north Atlantic in the abundance of the supply of fuel. Eastern 736 COMMERCIAL GEOGRAPHY America and north Europe are producing 95 per cent, of the world's coal and this supply is on both continents admirably distributed for the supply of steamers. On the American end there are four distinct fields: east Canada is supplied by Nova Scotia; the Middle Atlantic States from Pennsylvania; Chesa- peake ports from Maryland and the Virginias; at New Orleans and the other Gulf ports there is Pennsylvania coal, carried down the Mississippi river in barges at minimum cost; and Mobile has Alabama coal under equally favorable circumstances. The European end has a distribution of coal that is not less complete. Southern and western England with the ports of Bristol and Liverpool are supplied from the rich fields of Wales and Lancashire; Glasgow almost overlies the coal-fields of western Scotland. On the east lies Newcastle, synonym for coal; Antwerp and Rotterdam, the great ports of the Rhine, are in reach of Rhine-borne coal from Westphalia and Belgium; Hamburg and Bremen receive their coal very cheaply as return cargo in ships which carry sugar to England, and German coal can also come down the Elbe on barges from the east German coal-fields. Another fuel supply that should be mentioned is the oil of Texas, Kansas, and Oklahoma in the lower Mississippi Valley. This is now used to a limited extent and may at any time become of greater importance. Traffic. — The north Atlantic route began as one over which emigrants left Europe to start new homes in America; and, strange to say, this traffic, which was the first over this route, is also the last and one of the greatest. In the first ten years of the twentieth century, more emigrants by far landed from trans-Atlantic steamers than had succeeded in reaching America in the two and one-half centuries preceding the year 1850. In addition to this prodigious immigrant traffic it is also the greatest travel route of the world and the greatest freight route, and consequently the route possessing the largest, fastest, and most complete ships that ever floated. It is upon this route that have occurred the fiercest fights for international supremacy. Here in the middle of the nineteenth century occurred the great Anglo-American duel between the rival American and British. lines, the Collins and the Cunard. In this struggle the American line was the faster, but ultimately THE NORTH ATLANTIC ROUTE 737 victory was not to the swifter. The Cunard has now outlived the Collins line by almost half a century and the British marine has replaced the American. The last twenty years have seen an equally keen competition among the English, the German, the French and American lines, which are here rendering the best ocean service for both freight and passengers that the world has ever seen. The north Atlantic traffic has always been of a dual nature. The emigrating European has been finding a home, and the manu- facturing European has been finding raw materials. This has given to the passenger and freight traffic a continual condi- tion of unstable equilibrium. There are more passengers moving west than east; there is more freight moving east than west. Thus, there are, with the exception of certain short seasons of the year, unused passenger accommodations on the steamers setting out from America, and there is never even a temporary respite in the movement of empty freight vessels from Europe for American cargo. America has been sending raw materials in great bulk — cotton, wheat, corn, meat, lumber, copper, and cattle foods — and receiving manufactures of much smaller bulk. This was true in the first days of the Virginia colonists' settle- ment when they were saved from starving by the fortunate discovery that the people in the home country would pay them for shiploads of savory and bulky sassafras bark, with which the early colonists at Jamestown were able to purchase bread, clothing, and necessary manufactures which they could not themselves make. The medicinal virtues of sassafras bark were found to be largely imaginary, and the trade fell away to be followed by an unending succession of tobacco ships, grain ships, and lumber ships; and, in the last decades, American manufactures have added a new class of traffic, chiefly bulky products of wood and steel. Now, as always, the return freight is of much smaller quantity and of higher value, so that many of the ships go out fully laden, and most of them come back with partial cargo, and many with no cargo whatever except worthless ballast. This traffic in ballast, which makes a load valuable for its weight only has brought us hundreds of thousands of tons of sand and stone of less than no value; but the necessity of carrying 738 COMMERCIAL GEOGRAPHY something has caused the Atlantic ships to bring at times coal, iron ore, iron, chalk, china clay, and such bulky freight from Europe at minimum cost as ballast substitutes. This ballast traffic is not now so imperative because the newer ships have water tanks which they fill and empty with their own engines at practically no cost; but a voyage without cargo must never- theless always be a loss. The traffic future promises that our freight movement will not increase so rapidly as it has in the past. America, with her tremendously increasing population and her great mills, is using more and more of the raw material, has less and less for export to Europe. The fact that we are establishing manufac- turing industries means also that we have a lessening demand for European goods, so both upon the side of production and on the side of consumption there is a prospect of lessened depend- ence of America upon Europe, and lessened demand for com- merce upon the north Atlantic trunk route. Although it is also scarcely conceivable that there can be any large extension of the emigrant traffic to America, there is every indication of the steady growth of travel between the two continents. Ports. — One of the accompaniments of the nineteenth century revolution in world commerce has been the changing of seaports. Seaports have changed in two ways. The first of these changes has been the physical renovation and rebuilding of the ports and deepening of harbors and channels to accommodate the enlarged steamship and the consequently enlarged trade. The second and yet more important change has been the shifting of the centers of distribution through the relative decline in the importance of the old, and the rise of the many new centers. These changes have been of greater influence in the north Atlantic than in any other of the world's great routes. The great increase in trade during the last quarter century has produced a multiplication of the lines of vessels, and conse- quently a great breaking down in the centralization that arose in the distribution and collection of the traffic to and from a few great ports which had been monopolizing it. There was a time when London and Liverpool almost monopolized the line traffic between Europe and America, but other cities rose to the position of claiming their share from America direct rather THE NORTH ATLANTIC ROUTE 739 than through the intermediate ports. Liverpool saw Bristol rise to the south of her, Glasgow to the north of her, and Belfast across the Irish Sea. London has lost trade through the rise of Antwerp, Hamburg, and Havre, which ports in turn have established coasting lines and have snatched from London a part of the distributing trade of Scandinavia and Russia. But this was not the end. The establishing of coasting lines was scarcely complete at Hamburg and Antwerp, when the same process went further, and yet another set of rivals arose. There sprung up a direct trans-Atlantic connection that gave to Hull, Copenhagen, Stockholm, St. Petersburg, and Bordeaux the abil- ity to get some of their goods without dependence upon either the new intermediaries, Hamburg or Antwerp, or the old intermediaries at London or Liverpool. A similar development has occurred on the western end, where New York, while growing steadily in the annual amount of her traffic, is proportionally losing trade to her rival ports like Montreal and Boston, Baltimore, New Orleans, Galveston, and Pensacola. But with all the multiplying of lines and of services there is no multiplying of routes, only another straw is added to the mighty sheaf of tracks bound together in the mid-Atlantic but spreading at the ends to include Finland and France, Newfound- land and Yucatan. The rising of new services from new ports has apparently had no influence on the growth of trade in the old. The ports of Europe are steadily increasing in traffic and are chronically and almost universally out-growing themselves and making new facilities. After fifteen years of discussion the port of London is about to have $70,000,000 worth of improvements. The city of Antwerp is in process of spending a like sum. The harbor authorities have gone into the fields beyond the city and made a great new harbor. When completed the port will have 30 miles of solid stone quays, and 800 acres of freight sheds. Manchester, tiring of what were considered high freights to and from Liverpool, built a ship canal 26 miles long and a harbor. It gave the desired low rates by direct ship and then by the railroads that competed with the ships. The year the canal was opened 740 COMMERCIAL GEOGRAPHY its traffic was 686,000 tons and in thirteen years it inpreased to nearly sevenfold. Its effects upon the location of industry are seen in the rise of a flour-milling industry and a grain import that rose from 15,000 tons in 1894 to 493,000 tons in 1911. THE NORTH ATLANTIC ROUTE 741 CHAPTER VI THE TRADE AND TRADE ROUTES OF ASIA Geographic Handicap to Asiatic Transportation. — Asia is old. Asia is in an infancy in which the old peoples, gripping the tools and mechanisms devised in the west, are starting forward to the rebuilding of their old continent, and to the rediscovery of world power. She is the seat of ancient civilizations and of the oldest extended commerce; yet that commerce has always been handicapped by geographical hindrances which will tend to impede her new trade as well. The continent of Asia is five times as large as the United States. Its mere size divides its different parts by enormous distances. The comformation of the land has presented other barriers. more prohibitive than distance. There are no rivers flowing from the great central region, and trade must depend upon land transportation. Des- erts and mountains add difficulties that have been well nigh insurmountable and have limited the commerce of this section to small proportions. The heavy commerce of Asia, like her dense population, has been dependent upon the great rivers and river plains of the south and east; and here only has there been trade in the food supplies and the heavier articles that are typical of present-day commerce. The rest of Asia may yet be said to lie undeveloped, awaiting means of transportation except where the Russian railroads have made a beginning. The Importance of Asiatic Rivers. — The Yangtse-kiang is the greatest of the river thoroughfares by which the commerce of Asia has been supported. Running from west to east through the heart of China it has nearly a thousand miles of waterway for ocean steamers and much more for native boats. The Yangtse is the great commercial artery of China for two reasons. First, because of the navigable branches flowing into it from north and south, and the far-reaching system of canals that open up great tracts of territory. Second, because of the 742 THE TRADE AND TRADE ROUTES OF ASIA 743 tremendous populations that are dependent upon these water- ways. The rapids at the Yangtse gorges are still a great hind- rance to up traffic; but the river gives the western province of Szchuan, with its score of millions of people, a better outlet a a i j h a'% in Sao than the state of Ohio had in 1810, when all agricultural pro- duce had to be sent to New Orleans by flat boats which could not return. The Chinese are able, by ardous human labor, to tow their boats up the rapids. About a million tons cleared 744 COMMERCIAL GEOGRAPHY upward from Ichang in 1910. It is plain why Shanghai, the gateway to this great valley, is one of the great ports of Asia and of the world, and is destined to greater growth. It is both the New York and the New Orleans of China. It exports tea, silk, iron ore, and Chinese wares and imports kerosene, cotton, grain, flour, lumber, railroad materials, and manufactures in great variety. In south China the Si-Kiang or West River and its canals perform the same function as the Yangtse-kiang, but for a smaller area, having its metropolis at the great port of Hong Kong. In north China the great river Hoang Ho is useful for navigation only for short stretches because of the vast quanti- ties of loess mud that it carries. The metropolis of its valley is Tientsin, the Port of Pekin, with which it was connected by one of the first railroads in China. The only other river of importance is the Liao, which is useful to shipping from New Chwang to some distance north of Mukden. In Indo-China and Farther India the proportion of occupied territory is smaller than in China and India and the settlements of trading people are all on or near the navigable rivers Mekong, Menan, Salween, and Irrawadi, which constitute practically the only outlets and are served by both native craft and European steamers. Thus Rangoon, at the mouth of the Irrawadi, Bang- kok at the mouth of the Menan, and Saigon at the mouth of the Mekong become the great rice-exporting ports of the world. They also export much teak timber that has been floated down stream. In India the seats of ancient empire and trade were the rich valleys along the navigable courses of the Ganges and Brahma- putra, and in lesser degree along the Indus. Here are the historic names. The British Administration in India has im- proved these rivers and built railroads through their valleys so that Calcutta and Karachi, the ports near their mouths, are growing in population and commerce. Calcutta is the world's great jute exporter, and Karachi is a grain port. In Madras and Bombay we have cities that depend chiefly upon the railroads that center there. In this respect Bombay is a nineteenth-century city, a railroad city, and its location near the districts of wheat, cotton, and oil seed production has made it THE TRADE AND TRADE ROUTES OF ASIA 745 for a time the first port of Asia. Commercially, it is a city of the West dependent upon the railways built by the British, but in the large shipments of essential oils it shows its dependence upon the cheap labor of a densely peopled land. There seems no reason to think that Bombay can long hold the port leader- ship of Asia in competition with the superior resources and population of the Shanghai hinterland. Caravan Routes. — With the slight exception of the navigation of the Tigris, the commerce of the remaining and by far the larger part of Asia, was, until the recent railroad building in Asiatic Russia, dependent upon the land caravan. The entire north is shut off by the Arctic ice; and, in the other three direc- tions cyclopean difficulties present themselves to the caravan drivers. On the south a vast wall of mountain and plateau under various names reaches from Asia Minor to Thibet. On the west are the wide and often arid steppes leading into the remote east of Europe. In the center the deserts of Turkestan Mon- golia, beset with mountain ranges, connect Thibet with the arctic wastes of east Siberia. For thousands of years the caravan has contended against these obstacles, using horses, mules, donkeys, yaks, and men as pack animals in the mountains, camels in the desert, and wagons and sledges on the flat plains. These traders have traversed astonishing distances. The men of Pekin and Turkestan have for centuries been familiar figures at the Russian fairs of Nihzni Novgorod. The caravans from China to the west and northwest have been chiefly the caravans of the desert, following the routes of the desert, which comes down to within less than a hundred miles of Pekin, reaches northward nearly to Lake Baikal, south- westward to Thibet and westward to the Caspian Sea. This region is much like the arid region of the United States, having oases and irrigation settlements here and there, but the desert stretches of Asia are much greater in area and often more com- plete in aridity than those of the United States. Across this waste China has for ages had a caravan trade, and the camel has been a familiar sight in the streets of Pekin since before the birth of any European nation. 1 The most important branch 1 The recent building of the railroad from the sea to Singan on the Wei, a branch of the Hoang-ho, has changed the base for most of this camel trade. 746. COMMERCIAL GEOGRAPHY of this overland trade was that with and through Siberia, the routes from Pekin and Hankow combining and reaching Lake Baikal by way of the desert station of Urga. The Chinese caravan route next in importance passes up the Hoang-ho Valley, across Chinese Turkestan into Russian Turk- estan. At Hami in longitude 94° east the route branches, the southern arm crossing the high ranges via Kashgar and the northern going to Tashkend via Kuldscha. A third route of lesser importance connects Chingtu, the capital of the rich province Szchuen on the upper Yangtse, with Lhasa and Thibet, while a fourth connects Yunnan, a mining city in southwest China, with Bhamo in upper Burmah. The routes that center in Turkestan are, or were, before the coming of the Russian railroads, continued to Europe by a direct route from Tashkend to Orenburg at the end of the Urals, and by a more southern route via the Caspian and Black Seas to Constantinople and south Russia. The commerce that must traverse these enormous distances on pack animals over mountain, desert, swamp, and sand plain has pressing limitations of high freight rates which exclude anything but goods of the highest value — luxury goods, metal work, silks, cloth, skins, leather, rugs, tea, and spices. The most important of these routes, the one that passed through Siberia, had tea as the chief article of its commerce. The over- land tea cargoes traveled by a variety of means. At Lake Baikal that route reached a well-watered country and the camel returned to his desert. The mud of Siberian spring-time stuck fast the wagon wheels of commerce, which in that region was therefore carried on almost exclusively by means of sledges over the dependable snows of the Arctic winter. Therefore, the tea rested where the spring thaw caught it and proceeded westward when the next snowfall again permitted the movement of goods. Such were and to this day yet remain the only means of commerce and travel in vast areas of central Asia. Naturally the consumption of the goods from the outside world is light where such conditions prevail, and the inland settlements have always been essentially independent. The day of the trans-continental caravan is on the wane. At best it is a poor, weak rival of the poorest railway; and, wher- THE TRADE AND TRADE ROUTES OF ASIA 747 ever they compete, the caravan station becomes the embodi- ment of hard times and decay. The first great falling off in the overland trade came with the establishment of steamship service connecting the newly opened ports of China with Odessa, and the new railways reaching thence into the interior of Russia. The region west of the Ural Mountains could be supplied with Chinese tea and silk more cheaply by the Yangtse junks and the new water route than by the old routes, which had then no territory left but the domains of Asia. This territory was soon invaded by further improvements, and the Trans-Siberian and the Trans-Caspian railways are becoming the trunk lines for the trade of interior Asia and the caravan is reduced to being their distributor and feeder. The Trans-Siberian Railway. — Russian Asia now has industrial conditions similar to those that prevailed in 1870 in the region between the Missouri River, and the Pacific coast of the United States — a wide region, partly arid, partly fertile, not thoroughly explored and possessing a sparse population destined to rapid increase through the increased immigration fostered by pioneer railways, along which every station is the starting-point for wagons or pack trains en route for settlements scores or hundreds of miles away. The nomadic herdsmen of the black earth Siberian steppes are now being replaced by the peasant immi- grant who has come to raise grain. The wandering trapper of the great forest zone to the north must, when he exterminates the fur-bearing animals, as he is rapidly doing, become a lumber- man and help supply the wants of the prairie dwellers to the south. The commercial and industrial life of the new Siberia depends and will depend upon the Trans-Siberian Railway and its probably numerous branches. At present the Siberian river systems furnish the most efficient lateral lines of communication with the railroad which crosses them. The flat plains make easy navigation. As early as 1900 there were 119 steamers and 358 barges upon the wide- reaching branches of the Ob. The Russian government built the road with light and temporary first construction, which must be pretty thoroughly rebuilt before the line can handle much heavy traffic, or develop branches. Thus far the traffic has not reached the stage where branches are necessary: The 748 COMMERCIAL GEOGRAPHY main line is a stretch of prodigious length through the black earth plains west of Lake Baikal between the forest on the north and the arid land on the south. The long winter season and the ease of sledging enables the grain-growing peasant to haul his crop in for great distances. Sometimes the settler converts his crops into meat, kills his animals and sledges their frozen car- casses 100 miles or more to the railroad. The unremitting frigidity of the Siberian winter gives several months for this work. It is easy to overestimate the importance of this road as a carrier of through freight that goes from ocean to ocean. In this field it must play a comparatively small part and that part will be limited to passengers, mail, and what, in the United States, is called express matter and very urgent or very valuable freight. In this class will be the silk of China and Japan and possibly tea, but with this latter commodity the sea route can make a powerful competition in the seaport regions of Russia. Other freight, the common agricultural and industrial articles, comprising over 95 per cent, of the total commerce arising within a thousand miles of any sea, can be more advantageously handled by the ships that go through the Suez Canal. It should be noted in this connection that many of the agricultural prod- ucts and all of the grain of the Pacific coast of the United States were until 1899 carried to the Atlantic around Cape Horn in preference to paying the railroad freight across the United States. The railway from St. Petersburg to Port Arthur is twice as long as that from San Francisco to the Atlantic seaboard and this fact will of necessity make the Trans-Siberian line chiefly valuable as a local rather than an inter-oceanic freight carrier. 1 The functions of the completed Trans-Siberian railway as a purely commercial carrier of freight, particularly heavy freight, would be more clearly seen if the line were considered to be in two separate sections, with the division line not far from Lake Baikal. This lake marks the end of the great Eurasian low 1 Questions of military operations and requirements are not here consid- ered because they must so often be conducted with reference to con- ditions other than those purely economic or geographic. Politically, the railroad will have tremendous influence as a through carrier of emigrants, passengers, and mail and as a distributor of the Russian language and thought. THE TRADE AND TRADE ROUTES OF ASIA 749 plain. To the eastward the railroad plunges into a mountainous country and crosses the continental divide after passing many mountain ranges requiring expensive construction and high cost of operation, which tend to produce a natural freight divide. Con- sider the western section as attached to the European railway sys- tem and the eastern as a feeder of the Pacific commerce, and we would see the parts in their true significance as outlets running from the closed center to the free circumference of the Eurasian land mass. Western Siberia will look toward Europe, whence the western part of the Trans-Siberian line will bring the im- ports and take the exports of these provinces. Practically independent of this will be the developments on the other end of the railway system. This territory will find cheapest trans- portation on the Pacific ocean, and the Pacific termini of the Trans-Siberian line will be the gateways of import and export for the mining and agricultural regions along the eastern sec- tions of the railway. Such in fact is the case already. The road starting from the Pacific ports as a base was largely built with American machinery and supplies, equipped with American rolling stock, the towns are described as being practically Amer- ican towns, and the farmers on the Ussuri are using American reapers and plows. It is Manchuria, not Siberia, that is sending flour into the mountains of the upper Amur country. The Trans-Caspian Railways. — One can see the Trans-Siberian railway in the economic role of two different commercial out- lets by comparing it with the Trans-Caspian railway in the cen- tral Asian provinces. There one-half of a Trans-Asian railway has been made by the extension of the European transportation system to the backbone of Asia — to the mountain wall separating Russian and Chinese Turkestan. The first link in this chain was the railway connecting Batum on the Black Sea with Baku on the Caspian Sea. Steamers from this point and also the Volga connect with Krasnovodsk on the eastern shore of the Caspian whence the newly completed line passes Merv, Bokhara, Samakand, and reaches Andijan in far- thest Fergana, with branches to Tashkent on the north; on the south to Kushk on the Afghan border. A more direct connec- tion with Russia is the new line from Orenburg, at the end of the Urals, to Tashkent, the northern terminus of the first line. 750 COMMERCIAL GEOGRAPHY This is one of the old caravan routes that gave an outlet to cen- tral Asia before the Trans-Caspian railway caused it to be almost deserted. Trans-Caspia, Bokhara, Turkestan, Fergana and Kiwa, the territories served by these new lines, compose an 800-mile stretch of arid and, in part, desert country, irrigated in places by the streams that flow from the high and snow-clad mountains xo the east and south. The habitable sections are comparatively small, but fertile. The climate is good, the agricultural products rich and varied. Cotton, cattle, sheep, grains, forage crops, fruits and vegetables of the temperate zone have enabled these oases to support a population as dense as that of agricultural western Europe, and with the coming of the railway, the slug- gish caravan trade was quickly succeeded by a lively commerce. The ability to reach the European markets led to an increase of cotton production which now supplies one-fifth of the entire Russian demand. Tashkent and the other cities of the general government of Turkestan are now receiving a part at least of their tea by way of the Suez Canal and the Black Sea. India tea may supplant the Chinese, and a direct route to India may supplant the Black Sea route for this and other commodities. The Trans-Caspian railway has a branch from Merv to Kushk on the Afghan boundary, close to Herat, and separated from it by the easiest pass in the entire mountain system connecting Armenia and Mongolia. On the southern side the railway system of British India has been pushed upward past Quetta on to the Afghan boundary near Kandahar. There are no serious engineering difficulties in the way of connecting the two railroad systems and commerce would be much increased by another radial outlet to the vast landlocked mass of central Asia. Political jealousy is the only reason that the connection between these two national roads now so near together has not been made. They are both military roads, and were not built for economic reasons. Therefore, the caravan still connects India with Russia, and no one can predict how long international jealousy will block the railroad demanded by jostling trade. Central Asia affords the economic basis for another great railroad — to traverse the Hoang Ho Valley and penetrate the deserts to Hami and Kashgar in eastern or Chinese Turkestan. THE TRADE AND TRADE ROUTES OF ASIA 751 This road, which has already reached Sian fu or Singan, would be the eastern counterpart to the Trans-Caucasian and Trans- Caspian lines of Russia; the resources along the route are promis- ing, but the connection with the Russian systems would be improbable, as there are few commercial reasons to make it profitable to surmount a mountain range whose lowest passes are higher than the highest peaks of the Alps. This route from Pekin to Kashgar, followed by camels for thousands of years, passes the coal-fields of the provinces of Shensi and Kansu and the entire route is a promising though unprospected mineral region. In the upper Hoang Ho province of Kansu is the westernmost extension of Chinese agriculture and an important wool-producing region. The habitable part of East Turkestan is a succession of small oases along the foot of the central moun- tain range, and, like the oases of western Turkestan, depending upon the melting snows for life. Eastern Turkestan 1 is less valuable than west Turkestan, but the second railway has already been built to west Turkestan. The Routes of Persia. — The improvements in transportation to and beyond the Caspian Sea have profoundly affected the trade routes of Persia. The centers of Persian population, industrial life and trade lie in the north and northwest, where the fertile soil may be irrigated by the snow waters of the lofty Elburz mountains. These districts are reached from India by the Quetta-Meshed caravan route; from the south by the route from Bender Abbas, on the Straits of Ormus; from Bushire and Mohamere, on the Persian Gulf; and from Bagdad, where river steamers deliver cottons, cutlery, fire-arms, tea, and miscellaneous manufactures in exchange for dates, wool, skins, and rugs. 2 Prom the north, Persia is reached by the Trebizond-Erzerum- Tabriz route, by the routes from the Caspian ports and the 1 F. Younghusband in his book, Among the Celestials, reports that East Turkestan has settlements of from 6,000 to 60,000 people with unused agri- cultural land and a great abundance of agriculture products, among them wheat, which was cheaper than in India. The total population of Eastern or Chinese Turkestan is probably two or three times that of New Mexico. 2 The Oriental ring is a nice adjustment to geographical conditions. It is highly valuable and can stand the high cost of long caravan journeys from inland points in west Asia. The wool is furnished by the flocks living on the scanty pasturage of the semiarid lands. _ The weavers live in densely peopled oases where they divide their time between household manufacture and tilling their irrigated lands. 752 COMMERCIAL GEOGRAPHY stations on the Russian railway, which skirts the Persian bound- ary. A wagon road extends from the Caspian to Teheran, but all others are caravan routes. Those from the south are long, and cross country that is almost desert and has many ranges of mountains. The northern routes are so much shorter and more accessible to rail and water transportation that two-thirds of the Persian trade passes the Russian boundary, and the proportion would be larger if the high Russian transit dues did not compel the English merchants to bring in their goods through the Persian Gulf ports, whence the British government has spent money opening up routes to foster its trade. About 6 per cent, of the trade passes the Turkish boundary, but the general insecurity causes decline of this trade. The strong political influence of Russia in Persia promises to increase rather than diminish the importance of the northern routes in Persian commerce, unless the hand of Russia is palsied by the effect of Japanese reverses and the internal dissensions. A railroad to the Persian Gulf would be the natural outlet for only a part of the Persian terri- tory. It must be remembered that the best of Persia is the nor- thern margin, more easily reached from Batum, by the Trans- Caucasian Railway, from which a branch may soon be built into Persia. Perhaps Teheran lies near enough the trade divide to be served with European and American goods from both a northern and southern railway, as it now is by northern and southern caravan routes. There is, however, no immediate prospect of the building of a railway to the Persian Gulf. The Anatolian or Bagdad Railway. — The last Asiatic project of importance for international trade is the railway connection between the Persian Gulf and the Mediterranean through a region of wool, dates and minerals. This route was one of the most important international routes in the days of the mediaeval caravan trade between Europe and the East, before the discovery of the sea route to India. (See Chapter XII, Part II.) It is now being revived as a railway project, the Bagdad Railway, which, through the enthusiasm of Germany and the subsidies of Turkey, has been already built nearly the whole length of Asia Minor. Already this railroad extends much more than half the way from Constantinople to the navigable part of the Euphrates, which flows through a fertile flood plain, once the seat of mighty THE TRADE AND TRADE ROUTES OF ASIA ,753 empires, now almost deserted 1 but capable of supporting scores of millions of Asiatics. Since the Turkish Revolution of 1909 extensive irrigation plans have been sanctioned for Mesopotamia and greatly increased trade may, therefore, be expected. The pious desire of the Mohammedans to visit Mecca has made it for centuries the objection of a vast travel and has resulted in a great railway which, starting at Beirut, passes Damascus and follows parallel to the coast south and southeastward to the Holy City. The Importance of Southeastern Asia. — The emphasis that has been placed in this discussion upon the long and spectacular caravan routes or the half built and equally imposing railway projects of Siberia, central Asia, Persia, Asia Minor, and Meso- potamia, should not be permitted to cause any one to overlook the fact that the commercial center of gravity of Asia lies in China, Japan, and India and the countries of Indo China lying between them. Vast Siberia and Asia west of the Indus are empty lands, with scarce 50 millions of people. Most of this part of Asia is too dry or too cold for great communities, the exceptions being a strip across Central Siberia and occasional small and scattered areas elsewhere. It is a land in the main much like our arid west, where half the area of the United States has less people than some eastern states. Southeast Asia is soaked in summer by the monsoon rains and there are the crops and the people. In India and southeast of a line running from Calcutta to Harbin in Manchuria live half the people of the entire world. Theirs are the trade routes of a commerce that is to be stupendous. New Chwang, Tientsin, Shanghai, Canton, Hong Kong, Calcutta, and Bombay are the termini of great and growing routes. Fortunately, most of the people tributary to these ports live comparatively near the sea and their trans- 1 The large and prosperous community, depending upon one irrigation canal for its very life, was a, particularly easy victim for the Turk in the exercise of his genius for misrule. The farmer depending upon rainfall had at certain times certain crops that could be taken, but it is reasonably easy to keep enough to save life. The herdsman may get out of sight with his flocks, as the age-long strife of Bedouin and Turk attests, but the band of Turks at the head of the irrigation canal held over the heads of the irriga- tionists the power of life, death, and all exactions. Hence the desolation and unused possibilities of Mesopotamia. 754 COMMERCIAL GEOGRAPHY portation problem ' is physically simple. The Indian railway net is already well laid, and that of China is begun. The most important of all Chinese railway lines probably will be the great north and south trunk, which is to connect Pekin and Canton and is already built as far as Hankow, and northward to connect with the Manchurian roads. Railroads and the New Commerce in China. — In the main the Chinese roads will merely multiply the present trade and indus- try, not throw them into any revolutionary locations. The revolutions will be in method. The present rapid building of railroads in China promises to bring great industrial and com- mercial changes, and bring them more rapidly than did the introduction of the factory system in England. No corner of Asia is without its spectacular routes. Yunnan Fu, the capital of the rich mining province of southwestern China, was reached in April, 1910, by a 450-mile French railway from Haiphong on the Gulf of Tonquin. "The northwestern boundary of Yunnan touches Thibet, thence it goes south and fringes Assam, Burmah, Siam, and Tongking. Across Yunnan are the shortest land routes between the British and French Indies and China. The route from Canton to Calcutta, via Yunnan, is 1,600 miles, compared with 4,000 miles by sea through the Straits of Malacca. To take a longer view, the Yunnan lines will form an important section on the great trunk railway now assuming shape across southern Asia, which will link Canton with the European system at Constantinople, and with that of Africa at Cairo. Of this great trunk railway, fully 5,000 miles in length, about 3,500 miles are either already in operation or under construction; and the greater part of the remainder of the distance has been surveyed and projected. "The main line of this route, as at present existing, runs from Karachi, on the Arabian Sea, across northern India to Assam. From that point it forks into two branches, both of which impinge upon Yunnan. The more northerly branch reaches Sadiya, on the border where Thibet, China, and Burmah meet, at the point where the Brahmaputra, descending from the heights of Thibet, turns sharply in its course to roll onward through the plains of Bengal. This Sadiya branch is meantime of importance because of the coal fields to which it gives access, THE TRADE AND TRADE ROUTES OF ASIA 755 and its continuance into Yunnan would create a connection between the Brahmaputra and the upper navigable waters of China's great river, the Yangtse-kiang — from which Sadiya is less than 400 miles distant — but the other branch referred to is more likely to form the main route through Yunnan to the east. It leaves the existing line about 150 miles north of Manda- lay and runs to Bhamo on the Chinese frontier. From Bhamo, or from Kun-lon, on the same frontier, to which a third branch runs from Mandalay, the British government has the right to extend the lines through Yunnan and to the Yangtse." 1 In 1909 Britain increased her sphere of influence in upper Siam by 17,000 square miles at one sweep, and in consideration thereof arranged for a loan whereby Siam can finance (and the British build) a railway from Bangkok to Singapore. "Bangkok will be on a fair way to be a great railway center. With trains arriving daily from Singapore and Penang on the southern line, from upper Siam on her northern line, and from Saigon on her eastern line, she will have opportunities for becoming one of the great ports of the East." Chinese railroad building promises to transform. Chinese industry so suddenly that it may almost be called a cataclysm. Three or four hundred million people, still mostly in the home- spun stage of domestic industry, 2 will in a short time be sub- jected to the forces that have been gradually applied to the West during a period of one and one-half centuries, at the be- ginning of which time our populations were scanty. The West has in the main had an industrial evolution. China seems des- tined to have what we may in all propriety call an industrial revolution. Following excerpts from Transportation in Interior China, by Eliot Blackwelder, in Journal of Geography, Nov., 1911, describe the conditions. "If we look back to the seventeenth century we find our ancestors making use of methods of transportation, manufacture and agriculture which differ only in a minor way from those now used in China The horde of junks, large and small, which ply the waters of the canals upon the eastern plains, carry millions of tons, both of native and foreign goods, each year Along the river banks at nearly 1 From the National Review, a Chinese-British publication. 2 The completeness with which China supplies herself is shown by her imports, which are less than a dollar per person. 756 COMMERCIAL GEOGRAPHY all of the large cities of eastern China there is a mass of junks and smaller boats so densely packed that the traveler is moved to wonder how each owner ever finds his own boat. The bare masts make a veritable forest around such great cities as Hankou and Canton. As is well known, these junks are used as permanent habitations by thousands of families who spend most or all of their lives in these movable homes. The internal traffic carried on by means of the junks is enormous in volume but has never been reduced to figures. When the wind blows in the right direction, the skipper of the junk hoists the familiar sail strengthened with bamboo slats. But at other times — and these probably seem to the poor coolie all too numerous — the boat must be dragged or 'tracked' by the crew wearily tugging at the long hawser made of thin twisted strips of bamboo "On land two vehicles are most in use for both freight and passenger traffic — the cart and the wheelbarrow. The carts are small cumber- some affairs, very heavy in proportion to the loads they carry. This heavy construction has probably been adopted because the roads are so bad that a lighter cart would be shaken to pieces. In western countries local or general governments build and maintain the principal roads, but in China this is not the practice Among the mountains, pack-animals and men afford almost the only means of transportation. Carts are available locally in the broader valleys, but they cannot cross the rugged passes from one valley to another. .... The idea of doing anything for the common good seems utterly foreign to Chinese thinking. Thus it happens that instead of improving roads so that large vehicles may be used and drawn at a fair speed, both the vehicles and the speed are adjusted to the inexorable demands of roads, which are usually as bad as they could possibly be. "The great popularity of the wheelbarrow in China is probably due to the fact that a vehicle with one wheel can more easily take advantage of the best parts of the road than one with two; furthermore, it requires no draft animals. The freight-barrow used by the Chinese has a capacity of 600 to 800 pounds, and, like the cart, is a very stout, heavy machine. It is made of wood throughout. There is no more characteristic noise in China than the incessant squeak which arises from the ungreased axles of the wheelbarrows in town and country. The barrow is not always a one-man vehicle; often a donkey or a mule is hitched to the front of it, after the manner of a plow; and when the wind is favorable the thrifty coolie not infrequently rigs a sail to aid him in his weary struggle with a load which always seems much too big for him "There are coal mines in Shan-tung (one of the eastern provinces) whose entire output goes by wheelbarrow to cities and towns 50 to 100 THE TRADE AND TRADE ROUTES OF ASIA 757 miles away. In the case of coal, the rapid increase of the freight charges limits the sale to a small district. More valuable commodities are often carried much farther .... low grade commodities such as coal, building stone and grain, cannot now be carried any great distance from their sources, on account of the excessive expense of coolie and cart traffic In 1900 a severe drought destroyed the crops in Shen-si province and soon reduced 3 million people to starvation. More than a third of these actually perished for want of food. And yet, at the same time, bountiful harvests were gathered in the eastern and southern provinces The coal from Shan-si, carried on donkeys or coolies, is doubled in price every 15 or 20 miles, and so can have only a local market. For this reason one sees the peasants of the great Yellow river plain burning corn-stalks for fuel in their cooking stoves and making no pretense of heating their houses during winter. Coal is beyond their reach now, but with railroads they might have an ample supply at $2 or S3 per ton The railroad will not drive out entirely the cart and the barrow, the donkey and the coolie-porter. It will merely supersede them in long-distance hauling." Some observers predict that the next twenty-five years will see more railroad building in China than in all the rest of the world put together. 1 This will give rate wars and the freight advantages of competitive points. This is the force that has done more than all else to pile up western populations in unwieldy cities, separate them from their food supplies, and increase the cost of living. The Chinaman who can live by the household system on his patch of ground, will, like the New England farmer, often find that he cannot do so if he goes over to commercial agriculture with its freight charges and the limitations of crops to those that can be shipped. Yet China is getting railroads apace, the railroads make freight differentials, the freight differentials make cities, and the cities increase the cost of living by inflicting wastes which the richer West is with difficulty able to endure. The suddenness of these changes will make them harder to endure, especially as they will begin on a people with such a low standard of wages and such an undeveloped sense of united action for the common good. The Shanghai flour industry, 1 At the end of 1911 there were in China proper 5500 miles of railway in operation and 2800 miles of trunk line under construction. Dr. Sun Yat Sen hopes to be instrumental in building 60,000 miles of railway in the next 10 years. 758 COMMERCIAL GEOGRAPHY that rises as the railroad epoch opens, is a good example of the speed of the changes. In 1899 this city shipped 130 barrels of domestic flour up the coast. In 1909 the shipments reached a million barrels. "Its price was from 10 to 33 per cent, cheaper than that from the United States, and the American flour import to China and Hong Kong fell from 2,800,000 barrels in 1907 to 1,300,000 barrels in 1911. The German railroad in Shantung is bringing increasing shipments of wheat out of that province and the northern railways are advancing toward Shansi where (in the region where millions know not the taste of rice) large areas were in wheat worth locally twenty-five to thirty cents (American) per bushel. It is easy to see how the railroad will raise the price of that wheat to world level, stimulate its pro- duction and increase the price of commodities and the cost of living. The recent revolution in China is a result of the determination of the many progressive Chinese to adopt western industrial methods. The most potent sign of this change is the railroad. The Great North and South trunk route from Pekin to Canton has already passed Hankow on the Yangtse, which river is now accessible from Europe by rail. From Ichang, at the foot of the rapids of the Yangtse, a line is under construction toward populous, fertile and coal-rich Szechwan. In the spring of 1911 30,000 men were working on this line (U. S. Con. Rep., May 20, 1911). Of more immediate promise even than the new railroads is the general adoption of native-built motor boats for the canal and river traffic on the available waters of all parts of China. When the hundreds of millions of Chinese, by the aid of western teachers and by the use of western devices, are enabled to get at their wonderful resources, utilize and transport them, very surprising trade readjustments will follow, and China will enter an era of industrial and social problems more pressing than any nation has yet experienced. With the factory comes unemployment, a new thing of which the Chinese are already beginning to complain. Transportation in Japan.— Japan has had an unusual oppor- tunity to develop transportation — a string of narrow islands with rugged interiors, that force the people to live near the coast, and the coast well supplied with harbors suitable for the much-used THE TRADE AND TRADE ROUTES OF ASIA 759 coasting vessels. This ease of communication aids in the quick spread of western knowledge, and the transformation of Japan therefore preceded that of China. Most of the important places are connected by railroads which connect with the old transport facilities of the densely peopled orient, which consisted in 1908 of 166,000 Jinrickshas (number declining), 35,000 ox carts (number increasing), 126,000 horse carts (number increas- ing), 1,488,000 coolie carts (number increasing). CHAPTER VII THE MEDITERRANEAN-ASIATIC ROUTE The Lands and People Served by This Route. — : This great trade route connecting America and Europe with Asia by way of the Mediterranean and Red Seas is the route through the heart of the world. It passes through the heart of the world in several senses : First, in point of land mass served by it. The world is often shown divided into two hemispheres, one of which is called the land hemisphere, with its center in western Europe and including practically all of the eastern hemisphere except Australia and nearly all of the western hemisphere. The major parts of this land hemisphere are connected through their midst by this great route and its main ramifications. An examination of the globe shows how great a part of the world it reaches. Asia itself comprises more than a third of the land surface of the earth. With Europe and Africa, which are a part of the same land mass, it comprises much more than half of the earth's land; and by one of the fortunate circumstances of geography, this route pierces the middle of this land hemisphere and practically circumnavigates the vast irregular continent sometimes called Eurasia — much the greatest block of land in the world — and receives branches from all of the numerous indentations that cut its southern shore. The vast size and mountainous interior of these lands reduce land transportation to insignificant proportions and turn all traffic toward the sea. In a second respect this route may be said to pierce the heart of the world, because it reaches lands containing most of the world's population. For Asia the total is nearly 800 million; for Europe it is 370 million; for Atlantic North America it is over 70 million, and Africa contributes enough to raise the total of the people served by this route to over 1,200,000,000 — an astounding figure. The total population of the world is about 1,600,000,000, so that the Mediterranean- Asiatic route serves more than three- 760 THE MEDITERRANEAN-ASIATIC ROUTE 761 3 o * fl 762 COMMERCIAL GEOGRAPHY fourths of the world's inhabitants. The only large masses of pop- ulation that are not reached are the savages of Africa and the forty odd millions of South Americans, so that the Mediterranean- Asiatic route not only reaches the major part of the world's people, but a still greater proportion of the world's civilized people. It connects the two great types of Western civilization, as repre- sented by Europe and America, and the Orient, with its older civilizations of India, China, and Japan. Along the route is found every stage of industry from the most complicated and mechanical in America and Europe or the most elaborate hand manufactures of India and the Orient, to the crudest producers of crude raw materials such as the salt gatherers on desert coasts. History of This Route and Its Trade. — The route, in that it includes an artificial ship passage from the Mediterranean to the East, is a creation of the most modern civilization; but the trade is older than the Pharaohs, for the trade is that between the West and the East, regions which have, since before the dawn of history, differed as they do now in the general conditions of life and production. The silks, perfumes, spices, and other costly products of the tropics and of Asiatic skilled hand labor have for fifty centuries come out of the Far East and sought Europe. This destination has been reached over a multitude of routes from the Trans-Siberian sledge route in the frozen north to the galleons which rounded the Cape of Good Hope. Between these two extremes the route of this traffic has shifted, and with every shift it has made a new epoch in history. There were times when it came to the north of the Caspian Sea, through south Russia and Poland into east Germany; again it sought the same route to the Caspian and passed into western Europe through the Danube Valley. For a time it went to the south of the Black Sea across the Bosporus and made Constantinople the commercial mistress of Europe. A yet more southern route is that connecting the Persian Gulf and the northeastern end of the Mediterranean where the city of Antioch grew into promi- nence. In the sixth century it made great the desert cities of Baalbeck and Palmyra. The region around Suez has had its share of the traffic in ancient times. Caravans have sometimes crossed the short Isthmus of Suez; at other periods they have even reached the Nile Valley below Cairo. From 1500 to 1840 THE MEDITERRANEAN-ASIATIC ROUTE 763 nearly all of this traffic passed around Africa in sailing vessels. About the middle of the nineteenth century the Peninsular & Oriental Steamship Line had its origin in steam services which gave a mail route from England to India through the aid of separate lines of steamers running from Great Britain to Egypt and from India up the Red Sea to Port Said. The portage where the Suez Canal gives a through passage was then a busy place. At times 3,000 camels were employed to carry a $2,000,000 cargo of a single steamer across the isthmus. The opening of the canal in 1869 made a great revolution in trade; not only in the route it could follow, but in the type of vessels to be used. Because of the uncertain and weak winds of the Mediterranean and the yet more uncertain winds of the narrow, rocky, and dangerous Red Sea, these waters have ever been closed to the sailing vessel that would pass from the Indian to the Atlantic Ocean. In 1870 the opening of the canal, there- fore, meant a new route and a new type of vessel, for before that time the long route around Africa was closed to the steamer, and the new vessels had to be built for the Suez Canal which was closed to the sailer. This caused the traffic to rise slowly at first, but it has, however, risen steadily, and has now reached enormous proportions, so that the canal company which was at first ridiculed as a hopeless investment has become one of the best dividend payers in the world. Tbe Supply and Distribution of Fuel along the Route. — The Mediterranean-Asiatic Route is admirably supplied with coaling stations for the vessels that follow it and is fairly well supplied with coal. The route may properly be described as being double at both ends. In the West it has its main feeders in Europe, but an important part also on the Atlantic coasts of America. In the East, after rounding the continent of Asia, the greater division turns to the northwest toward China and Japan, while another and smaller branch goes to the southeast to serve Australia. There are coal fields at each of the four termini — eastern United States, Great Britain, Japan, and Australia, but the middle part with its thousands of miles of length is peculiarly barren of coal. Australia sends coal at times to every shore of the Pacific (including California), and Singapore at the southern end of the Malay peninsula is supplied with both 764 COMMERCIAL GEOGRAPHY Australian and Japanese coal. A little is also sent thither from the meager production of Bengal, and occasional cargoes of Welsh coal reach that distant point. All coal ports from Colombo, Ceylon; westward are regularly supplied from the fields of Wales. The price of coal at these ports bears little relation to the distance that the ports may happen to be from the source of the coal. This arises from the fact that as the tramp steamers carry the coal from Wales to the coal port, the rate is decided not by a consideration of mere distance but by the prospect of obtaining a profitable cargo when the coal is discharged. Consequently, coal is cheap near good sources of freight and it is high when freight promises to be scarce. It thus happens that although the distance from the coal fields is twice as great, coal at the eastern end of the Mediterranean is little, if any, higher than at the western end because the western end of the Mediterranean produces little freight of the kind that is shipped as full cargoes in the tramp steamers, while the eastern end, with Egypt and particularly the Black Sea with its millions of tons of export grain, produces such freight in great abundance, so that the coal vessel discharging at Port Said is nearer another cargo giving profitable employment than is a vessel discharging at Gibraltar or Algiers. Consequently Port Said is a coaling station of greater importance for commercial ships than any other one port in the Mediterranean, although Gibraltar and Algiers are important stations and Malta is sometimes used. Aden, which lies exactly on the route at a very convenient place for the taking on of coal, has the misfortune to lie between two deserts producing little but salt, so that the coal at this point is high, and as a coaling station it is only used by those vessels which are compelled to do so. The next coal station, and one also of admirable location, is Colombo on the southwest shores of Ceylon on the road toward the Malay Peninsula, the point of Asia which all ships to the Orient must round. Exactly on this point is Singapore, a port of admirable location for a coaling station and also with cheap coal supply, due to the fact that comparatively near it lie the rice ports of Burmah and the sugar ports of Java and the Philippines, so that vessels coming with coal from Australia, from Japan, from India, and even from Wales have excellent opportunities to secure return cargo. THE MEDITERRANEAN-ASIATIC ROUTE 765 It is interesting to note that this port of Singapore is purely a creation of the present Mediterranean-Asiatic route. In the sailing vessel days that strait was of little importance. The vessels from India sailed south across the Indian Ocean; those from China and Japan came down the China Sea and through the Sunda straits separating Java and Sumatra. Under these Conditions of ocean transportation the straits of Sunda were the gateway to east Asia, and Batavia, lying almost at the mouth of the strait, was the great port. With the coming of the steamer passing westward to the Suez route, all this was changed and the Strait of Malacca, between Sumatra and the Malay Peninsula, became the gateway to the Far East. Nearly a cen- tury ago a British subject who could foresee the future had the daring to calmly seize the then unsettled island of Singapore which guarded this passage and then await instructions from home. His commercial and strategic foresight have been well indicated by the progress of the last half century, which has made a great port on this island, and put the naval officer's statue in the central square which bears his name. During this time the port has become the greatest port of the region, a great British fortress, and a great commercial coaling station. Other coaling stations of importance are Hongkong and Shang- hai, conveniently situated on the Chinese shores. There is no iron-clad rule by which a shipowner decides the actual coaling practice to be followed by the captains of his ships because it becomes a new business question with each voyage. If the ship can make its owner more money carrying much freight and little coal, it will do so and stop at frequent intervals for more coal. If such stopping is desired no long route in the world equals this one for coaling opportunities. A vessel can sail over it from the remotest port in the Gulf of Mexico to ice- bound Vladivostok in east Siberia without ever being compelled to carry coal for a voyage longer than that between Aden and Colombo, a distance of less than 2,200 miles. The vessel from the Mexican Gulf, if it so desired, could get coal at Havana, Norfolk, or Bermuda; the vessels from New York occasionally in times of great stress of freight and high rates call at Fayal or St. Michaels in the Azores about 2,000 miles out from New York, and thence onward the succession of ports is continuous. 766 COMMERCIAL GEOGRAPHY The leading ones actually used by the various lines are Gibral- tar, Algiers, Port Said, Aden, Colombo, Singapore, Hong- kong, Shanghai, and Yokohama or Moji. The coaling question may sometimes assume another aspect to the shipowner. If freight rates are low and the amount of freight scanty, for the two usually go together, the cost of stopping at coaling ports may make it unprofitable. In every case there are port dues to pay, usually a high price for coal; there is always loss of time, and usually quarantine expenses, pilotage, and the possibility of quarantine delay. For these costs there are in times of low freights no compensating returns and it will therefore pay the steamer to carry as much coal as possible from the original port, as in cases where vessels are known to have steamed without stop from Great Britain to Japan. This is, however, unusual, although the reduction of the stops to two, one each at Singapore and Port Said, the best ports, is not uncommon. The fuel supply for this route in the near future may be con- siderably modified. At present the abundant coal supply of China is not mined enough for export and the steamers are using inferior Japanese coal in Chinese ports. It is probable that the magnificent supply of the Celestial Empire may in the near future materially alter the coal supply of Oriental ports. Another change of much greater possible extent may come about through the use of oil as a fuel for steamers. It has many advantages and is beyond the experimental stage. If it should become the general practice of ocean vessels to use this fuel, the Mediterranean-Asiatic route is particularly well supplied with oil. Eastern America produces about a third of the world's supply and supplies western Europe. The rich oil fields of the Caspian Sea produce about as much as eastern United States and the point of shipment at Batum on the Black Sea is adjacent to and midway along the route. Very promising fields are being developed toward the other end of the route in Burma, Sumatra, and Borneo. It is also fairly well established that there are great oil resources in China. A Trunk Route. — Of all the world's ocean routes the Mediter- ranean-Asiatic is the trunk line par excellence. This comes about from its length and its location between the two northern THE MEDITERRANEAN-ASIATIC ROUTE 767 and the two southern continents of the eastern hemisphere, which it serves by numerous lateral branches, finally reaching in the west the United States, where its termini include the widely separated points of Galveston and Boston. The indented coasts of Europe and Asia furnish from every great gulf and sea a branch to the main trunk route. In this respect it is quite the peer of any railroad system and in its structure bears considerable resemblance to the Pennsylvania Railroad — probably the best located railroad with regard to traffic in the whole world. Traffic. — The traffic upon this great route, which almost circumnavigates the world, is as varied as the peoples and lands which it reaches. For convenience the traffic may be considered in six different groups. While two of these groups are confined to a single continent each, and in that respect have certain local aspects, their trade is international. First — The Traffic of the Mediterranean Waters. — The Medi- terranean itself is about 2,000 miles long; and, including the Black Sea, it is nearly 3,000 miles from Gibraltar to the most remote indentations of the Russian Empire. This may properly be called the most magnificent system of inland waterways in the world. Its waters give ocean transport to ten independent countries and many colonies. Through the navigable rivers of south Russia and the Great Danube, it reaches far into the heart of Europe. From prehistoric times it has been the scene of busy commerce. Before the days of the compass its many islands favored navigation from landhead to landhead and it is thus possible to traverse its whole length with reasonable safety by keeping in sight of land. In the present epoch of steamers it is busier than ever. A good example of this is the great Italian Steamship Co., which possesses over 100 steamers and serves no less than seventy-eight ports on the Mediterranean system. These disbursers of Italian produce and collectors of Mediter- ranean goods gather products at Genoa and Naples to be sent across the Atlantic in ocean steamers belonging to the same company. This is a common system in European commerce and in the Mediterranean. It is also done by the French lines assembling at Marseilles; by Austrian lines assembling at Triest; and, to a lesser degree, by the Spanish, the Hungarian, and the Russian steamship companies. 768 COMMERCIAL GEOGRAPHY This Mediterranean traffic is between two distinct economic districts — a food-importing district and a food-exporting district. While Italy, France, and Spain are great agricultural countries, they are also manufacturing countries and must import both food and raw materials. The east Mediterranean region, comprising Hungary, which reaches navigation at Fiume on the Adriatic and at the river ports on the lower Danube, the Balkan states, Turkey, and Russia, is essentially in the raw material producing stage. Grain and other agricultural products are the chief exports, and to these, the east end of the Black Sea adds ores and the vast petroleum exports of Batum. This gives the basis for a lively exchange of manufactures from the west for the wheat, corn, Tye, oats, and oil of the east Mediterranean. Second — Traffic between Western Europe and the Mediter- ranean. — Great Britain and the other countries adjacent to the North Sea use great quantities of the sub-tropical orchard and garden produce grown along the shores of the Mediterranean proper, from Spain to Asia Minor inclusive. Chief among these products are wine, oranges, lemons, figs, raisins, and early vege- tables. These edibles in great quantities go to the northwestern countries, and the heavy populations of the manufacturing districts adjacent to the North Sea also use large quantities of the grain, ore, and other raw products from the Balkan and Black Sea region. The return cargoes in this trade consist in point of bulk primarily of coal of which over 20 million tons a year pass from the Welsh fields to the Mediterranean ports. The next in bulk are the forest products of Scandinavia which are in great demand in the populous and essentially timberless Mediterranean. In point of value these bulky articles are rivaled by the machinery, cottons, and other manufactures of Great Britain, Belgium, and Germany. Third — The Traffic between the East Indies and the Orient. — The term East Indies — following the British classification — includes India itself, the mainland to China; also Singapore and the adjacent islands. Here is a large traffic and one which promises to continue its growth, for it has a firm basis in economic conditions. Japan has become a rapidly increasing importer of food and raw materials. Chief among these imports are cotton, rice, and sugar, all of which are produced in south Asia; THE MEDITERRANEAN-ASIATIC ROUTE 769 the cotton in Hindustan; the rice in Burmah, Siam, and Indo- China; the sugar in Java, the Philippines and other scattering localities. In return for these commodities Japan sends coal as far as Singapore and some manufactured goods to all the coun- tries mentioned. As Japan increases in industry, and China with her vast populations follows in her wake, this trade between temperate Asia and tropic Asia promises to largely increase. Fourth — Traffic between North America and the Mediter- ranean. — This is, in its present routes, a new trade. There was a time not long ago when direct steamer lines from north Europe to America took from Europe the products of all parts of the world, including the Mediterranean. To a limited extent this practice of trans-shipping at Liverpool or London the products of Italy, Spain, Greece, and Turkey, still continues, although between 1890 and 1912 it has been greatly modified by the establishment of new lines of steamers between New York and Marseilles, Genoa and Naples. The process has gone even further and the desire for direct shipment has caused lines to be established between New York and Constantinople and the Black Sea, thus avoiding the trans-shipment of eastern Mediter- ranean goods at western Mediterranean ports, and thus carrying one step further the universal desire for direct communication between producer and consumer. It is natural that an essen- tially agricultural country like the United States should have much more trade with the manufacturing countries of the western Mediterranean than with the agricultural Black Sea region, although we send at times large shipments of agricultural machinery to the Black Sea ports. Fifth — Traffic between Europe and the East. — This is really the first and greatest of them all. In its beginning and down to comparatively modern times this trade was chiefly an exchange of European bullion for the silks and other luxuries of the East. The easy transportation of the steamship era has added to it commodities which before were unthought of. The region of the Persian Gulf now sends to Europe dates, wool, and hides, as well as Mohammedan prayer rugs. The port of Karachi in northwestern India is famous for the shipment of wheat and grain grown in the valley of Indus to the north of it. Beyond is Bombay, which sends to Europe cotton, wheat and a great 770 COMMERCIAL GEOGRAPHY variety of oil seeds from which are extracted scores of the higher grades of oil known in the paint and drug trades. Beyond is Colombo in Ceylon, which along with Calcutta, has of late years begun to export tea. From Calcutta also comes the world's supply of jute shipped chiefly to Dundee for the manufacture of gunny-sacks to be used throughout the world. Indo-China, which may for this purpose be considered to include Burmah, also has its staple export — rice, which is sent in shiploads to all parts of the world, especially to Bremen and London, the great rice markets. Singapore continues the properly oriental char- acteristic of being a great spice center and being the junction point for many small steamship lines. It has an import and ex- port trade of $500,000,000 a year, greater than that of many nations. From Java come annually about a million tons of sugar. The Philippines send sugar and tobacco. China and Japan are the main factors in the world's supply of raw silks and join India in competing in the tea supply. Chinese and Japanese matting, curios, and vegetable oils and extracts practically complete the export trade of these two countries. In return for this varied supply of raw materials and peculiar manufactures, western Europe (chiefly England) is sending rail- road iron, locomotives, all kinds of machinery, cotton goods, clothing, preserved foods, and manufactures and supplies in in- numerable variety. Reference should be made here to the small traffic on the three subsidized colonial mail routes that branch off to the southward. From Aden the German East Africa line goes down the African coast; and a French subsidized line leads to Madagascar, Reunion, and Mauritius. From Colombo a British mail line goes to west Australia; and from Singapore a German Colonial Line traverses the archipelagoes to the meager and unwholesome settlements in Germany's East Indian colonies and to the north coast of Australia. Sixth — Traffic between North America and East Asia. — This was, until a very recent date, very much like the trade from the Mediterranean in that little of it was handled by vessels passing directly between the trading countries. London was the great market from which we received the products of all Asia, and the returning European vessels carried some American goods, THE MEDITERRANEAN-ASIATIC ROUTE 771 although much of the American supply of goods imported from Asia is paid for with European manufactures, which in their turn are paid for by our exports to Europe. About 1900 direct lines of steamers were established between New York, India, China, and Japan. The experiment was instantly successful and the lines have continued, with the addition of others from the Gulf ports. These vessels carry cotton, petroleum, wood, and iron manufactures, tobacco, cotton cloth, and miscellaneous manufactures. Petroleum alone is so much prized by the Chinese that it fills quite the half of all the shipping that goes from the United States to that Empire. The return cargo is much less bulky and many of these vessels return with Philippine hemp, Java sugar or East Indian rice. This traffic, unlike most of the others enumerated before, has no great future over this route because of its almost certain diversion to the Panama Canal route when that great waterway is completed. CHAPTER VIII THE NORTH PACIFIC ROUTE The Commercial Newness of the Pacific. — The Pacific Ocean is the last of the great oceans to become of interest to the world at large. The Atlantic and the Indian have been repeatedly traversed by the representatives of western civilization since the year 1500, but during three-fourths of the period that has elapsed since that date the Pacific has remained a region un- known; and to this day there are in its vast expanse many un- charted islands. When the eastern coast of North America had already produced commonwealths strong enough to declare their independence, the central Pacific was just being explored by its first great navigator, Captain Cook, who lost his life there at the hands of the savages who had never before seen a white man. About 1806 Oregon received its first white settlement, but as late as 1840 a man well-informed for his time stood up in the United States Senate and ridiculed the idea that the Pacific coast of the United States could ever be of value. It is from the middle of the nineteenth century onward that the Pacific has risen swiftly to the important place it now holds in the atten- tion of the civilized world. In 1848 came the gold discoveries in California and the making of a new commonwealth there promptly followed. Three years after the California discoveries the gold cry went up from Australia and there was a rush to that corner of the Pacific. In 1854 the ports of Japan were opened to the world; fifteen years later our first trans-continental rail- way was completed to the Pacific coast; and throughout the last fifty years we have had continual interest in the north Pacific fisheries. Since 1890 the intensity of interest in the Pacific has increased. In 1894 came the Japanese-Chinese War, which signified that there was an Asiatic power. In 1897 the Alaska gold discov- eries placed emphasis on yet another point. Upon the first of 772 THE NORTH PACIFIC ROUTE 773 774 COMMERCIAL GEOGRAPHY May, 1898, Dewey's guns announced from Manila to the Ameri- can world that there were such things as the Philippine Islands. We have annexed Hawaii, have watched the Russian advance to the Pacific, and have joined the world in amazement at the recent Russian defeat at the hands of Japan. Meantime, all the leading powers of Europe have been striving to gain a foot- hold in China, the mysterious Celestial Empire that has proved so inviting to the exploiting and trading nations; and the United States has been digging away at the American isthmus to get a new gateway to the great Pacific. The Steamer Tracks. — All this recent interest centers around regions which are directly connected with the north Pacific trade route. This route is like the north Atlantic route in that the great circle factor is of much importance in locating it, and widely separated regions are brought by the factors of geography to use one and the same great route. The great circle factor is of much greater importance on the Pacific than on the Atlantic, because the regions of importance upon the two ends of the route are in virtually the same latitude, the distance is so much greater that the amount of the northern deviation of the great circle line is consequently increased. There is no part of the world upon which the mercator map works greater distortion. The American-Asiatic cable route via the mid-Pacific islands of Hawaii and Guam to Manila is far from the direct line, but was so placed to be on American soil. Instead of America and Asia facing each other across a wide ocean, a globe shows that the west shores of America and the east shores of Asia are practically a continuous straight line. The effect of this upon trade routes revolutionizes the ideas which one must get from looking at a flat map. The steamer that attempts to pass directly from the ports of Puget Sound to Yokohama will wreck herself upon the rocky shores of the barren Aleutian Islands. Consequently the route is not a true great circle, but is flattened out to the southward from it, so that the vessels may avoid the Aleutian Islands, in sight of which they pass. From San Francisco it is possible for the vessels to make a true great circle up near the Aleutian Islands. The effect of the great circle becomes yet more perplexing when the attempt is made to apply it to the route from Panama to THE NORTH PACIFIC ROUTE 775 Yokohama. The direct line between these two points goes northwestwardly through the Caribbean Sea, Yucatan, the Gulf of Mexico, Texas, Wyoming, Vancouver's Island, the Alaska peninsula and thence southward to Japan. A steamer compromising with these hard facts skirts the shores of the American continent until southern California is reached, and then across the north Pacific Ocean in the latitude of southern Canada. San Francisco is therefore much more nearly upon the actual short route from Panama to Yokohama than is Hawaii, which we are accustomed to think of as being exactly in the path. To stop at San Francisco would require a deviation of but 114 miles from the shortest possible path and the deviation to Hawaii is over 300 miles. The one point that commercially commands the north Pacific route is the main island of Japan, for upon it is the great port of Yokohama, where practically every vessel crossing the north Pacific stops. Here every thread of this great commercial cable is focused to a single point. This spot is exactly on the route and is a great coaling station, being thousands of miles from any other port to the eastward which can have rendered service to the steamer. Manila is the last port of call for the steamers passing between Asia and America; Yokohama as directly on the route to it; and the Chinese ports of Hongkong and Shanghai are almost invariably sought by the same steamers on the out voyage. Owing to the storms of winter there are times when vessels do not go so far north as in summer, but they do not go far enough south to prevent their reaching Yokohoma as their first port. The importance of the trade of the Hawaiian Islands causes the port of Honolulu to be visited en route by the three steamer lines making for the port of San Francisco, although this detour costs these vessels about 800 additional miles of steaming. The vessels from Puget Sound to Asia do not touch Hawaii. Coal Supply and Winds. — Upon most of the great trade routes there has been a sailing-vessel epoch, which has been gradually giving way to the advance of the steamer. There has been less of this upon the north Pacific than upon any of the other great routes, chiefly because the traffic has largely arisen since the epoch of the steamship, and, furthermore, because it is essentially steamer rather than sailing-vessel traffic. This 776 COMMERCIAL GEOGRAPHY part of the ocean, however, is well supplied with the natural conditions for sailing vessels. North of latitude 35° there is a good westerly wind bringing them steadily eastward from Asia. The vessel crossing to the westward beats southward immedi- ately upon leaving an American port; and when the trade-wind zone is reached, turns westward and sails before this wind for thousands of miles until near the coast of Asia; then a deviation may be made to reach the desired ports. The coal supply upon the route is fairly satisfactory, but the great length of the voyage requires that a steamer shall give up a comparatively large proportion of her space for coal purposes. There is practically none taken en route. Fortunately the Japanese coal, lying as it does part way between Asia and America, is admirably located. A vessel a thousand miles out from the Chinese coast takes on Japanese coal very close to the point of its production. Unfortunately there is no satisfactory supply thus far in California, and most of the American coal comes from the region adjacent to Puget Sound. Some Japanese and more Australian coal is imported at San Francisco, and cargoes in sailing vessels regularly come around the Horn from Atlantic ports of America and occasionally from Wales. Hawaii is generally thought of as a coaling station of prime importance. With its large exports of sugar it has the trade condition for furnishing export cargo for the coal carrying ship. Coal is brought in large quantities from Australia and the other coal sources just mentioned, but strange to say it is not the practice of the steamship lines to take coal at this point. The lines from Puget Sound which pass within sight of the Aleutian Islands also make no stops for coal, although there are harbors quite close to the route. Traffic. — The first part of the north Pacific route to attain modern importance was the link between Panama and San Francisco in the early days of the gold epoch in California. Many thousands of men engaged in producing nothing but the precious metal of coinage required a relatively great movement of commodities to supply their every want. For a time the returns of gold production were so great that it paid to produce nothing in California, but import everything from other parts of the world. While the pioneers crossed the continent in THE NORTH PACIFIC ROUTE 777 stage coaches and wagon trains, sailing vessels nocked around Cape Horn with supplies, but this route was so slow and so long that means of communication across the Isthmus of Panama were promptly established; and steamship lines were running from San Francisco to Panama and Nicaragua several years before the opening of the Panama Railway in 1856. These lines connected by overland wagon routes with steamship lines to New York. Over this route there was a lively trade, which increased steadily until the completion of the Union Pacific in 1869 reduced its importance by getting a quicker railway communication with the eastern centers of population. Despite the activity of many trans-continental roads the steamers upon the isthmian route are still running. The north Pacific route has rendered its greatest service as a new road between the West and the East — a new rival to the old routes across Asia, around Good Hope and through Suez. Before the first trans-continental railway was opened in 1869 there was a steamer line from San Francisco to Japan and China. This original line has been followed by a half dozen more. These numerous steamers, which are among the largest in the world, carry outward a much greater amount of cargo than they bring on the return voyage from Asia. A comparison of staples easily explains the reason. America exports coarse cotton cloth and gets silks in return; coarse lumber is exchanged for lacquerware, raw cotton for silk, canned goods and flour for drugs and essential oils, heavy machinery and petroleum for matting, Oriental art goods, and fire crackers. This lack of freightage balance upon this trade route has led to some peculiar movements. An European vessel coming out to China and Japan is in a sad plight for return cargo, so that many of the sailing vessels which go to China and Japan from the north Atlantic have discharged their cargoes (chiefly oil) in the Oriental port, crossed the north Pacific in ballast and returned to the north Atlantic with a cargo of grain secured at Puget Sound, Portland, or San Francisco Bay. Owing to the pro- digious distance of this sail from San Francisco, there have rarely been times when steam tramp vessels could with profit carry these grain cargoes, although they have at times made the voyage. Within the past few years, British line steamers have 778 COMMERCIAL GEOGRAPHY continued their voyage from Great Britain to Japan across the Pacific to Puget Sound, loading there, with grain and other American produce, which is taken to Liverpool by way of China, Japan and the Suez Canal. The Hamburg-American Company also plans to put a line of vessels on this same route from Hongkong. Hawaiian Traffic. — Hawaii has a place in the traffic of this route much greater than her area would indicate. It is a small island best fitted to produce one thing which is exchanged for the great variety of commodities now necessary to supply the wants of civilized man. The Hawaiian staple is sugar, which has reached quantities exceeding 500,000 tons a year. Most of this went around the Horn until the opening of the Tehuantepec Railway. Much of it goes to the port of Philadelphia, although some of it goes to the nearby ports of the Pacific mainland, which are also importing bananas, pineapples, and other tropical fruits from these islands. The frequent service from San Francisco gives that city an even greater importance as a base of Hawaiian supply than as a market for Hawaiian goods. Alaskan Traffic. — To the northward there is an additional stream of traffic. The discovery of gold in Alaska set up a lively traffic with the north. These vessels pass both from San Fran- cisco and Puget Sound, although the latter, because of its near- ness, has a larger trade and a route which lies largely within the shelter of the archipelagoes that skirt the shores in this region. The chief Alaskan ports of Juneau and Skagway are located on the mainland not far from Sitka. The new White Horse Railway gives quick connection with the upper end of the great inland navigation system of the Yukon, which is the one thoroughfare to both British and American gold fields. This same Alaskan thoroughfare is reached at its Bering Sea end by steamers which leave the north Pacific route at Unalaska Island, where the vessels turn northward into the Bering Sea. This route is also followed by a considerable number of whalers having their headquarters usually at San Francisco, but some- times at a Massachusetts port. Another interesting bit of traffic is that arising from the salmon fisheries which dot the American coast from the mouth of the Columbia River to Bering Sea. THE NORTH PACIFIC ROUTE 779 Prospective Traffic. — The prospects of traffic along the north Pacific route are for great increase. Every region adjacent to it is, in the modern sense, in its economic infancy. With their development will come trade. Japan is just entering upon a manufacturing epoch in which, like England, she must import both food and raw materials. There has already been a large trade over this route in carrying to Japan the machinery neces- sary for the development of these industries. This traffic will continue, with, of course, changes in the number and character of the commodities comprising it. Manchuria is the one under- populated part of east Asia, and adjacent to it are over 300 million Chinese who have lived thus far by agriculture and household industries in a region whose coal and other mineral resources are probably unexcelled. Any such industrial awakening on the part of its people must mean enormous traffic over, this route. There is also every indication that the mineral resources of Alaska are of large extent. Our rising interest in distant places, and our abundant capital are going to make industries in this partly explored land, where for a considerable period to come there will be little produced but minerals, and consequently an enormous import of machinery and other supplies from the South. All these will pass for hundreds or thousands of miles over a part of the north Pacific route. It is generally recognized throughout the United States that the whole Pacific coast region of this country and British Columbia is capable of great develop- ment. The growth of trans-continental railways to connect it with the East has completely reversed the prophets of the sixties, who asserted that the heavily subsidized Union & Central Pacific Railway would never have sufficient traffic to make it pay. The rapid increase of these lines can be taken as a prophecy for Pacific trade, for every trans-continental rail- way has some kind of trans-Pacific steamer connections as its western terminus, and the incompleted lines in both Canada and Mexico have contracts for new Pacific steamer lines to follow the common track to Asia. Prospective Port Changes. — This great multiplication of rail- ways and Pacific steamship lines is cutting into the early pre- dominance of San Francisco in this trade. This port had the 780 COMMERCIAL GEOGRAPHY first trans-Pacific steamship line and the first trans-continental railway; and, naturally, in that period she had no rivals. The present leadership of Puget Sound as the American gateway for the traffic of the north Pacific route does not mean that the San Francisco is actually declining or is likely to actually decline in the amount of trade. It means that other trade is arising elsewhere and that San Francisco will have a smaller territory to serve, but, within the smaller territory, a steadily increasing traffic. Upon the Asiatic side Yokohama, Shanghai, and Hongkong promise to remain the great ports, while Manila at the terminus will have a steadily increasing trade. The northern ports of Tientsin, Newchwang, and Vladivostok which are now supplied chiefly by coasting lines from the greater ports, must eventually, with the development of Asiatic railways, have traffic sufficient to merit direct communications, as have the newer ports upon the American side and upon the north Atlantic trade route. CHAPTER IX SOUTH AMERICAN TRADE AND TRADE ROUTES Geographic Barriers to Commerce and Routes. — The geo- graphical conditions of this continent have opposed the develop- ment of commerce and commercial routes, and South America to-day rivals Africa in the extent of its commercially unpene- trated land mass. Like Africa, it forms a solid block of land with a somewhat regular coast line and a consequent dearth of good harbors, making poor facilities for the commerce of the sea to connect with the commerce of the land. When the land is attained, the trader finds access to the interior is difficult because a mountain wall surrounds the greater part of the conti- nent. The Andes extend without intermission along the entire western coast. Upon the east the highlands of Venezuela and Brazil, although not so high as the Andes, bear much the same relation to a large part of the Atlantic side of the continent. Further than this, it is difficult to reach the plateau because of the inhospitable nature of the coastal plain lying between the base of the plateau and the sea. From Guayaquil, 3° south of the equator on the Pacific side, around the northern and eastern parts of the continent to southern Brazil, the shore plain is almost uniformly forest clad, low, hot, and marshy, infested with insects, and subject to malaria, yellow fever, and all tropic diseases that thrive in that climate. This is a constant barrier to the growth of prosperous maritime cities and a hindrance to the conduct of commerce with the interior. As a result, the ports are usually small cities, limited strictly to the purely commercial operations necessary to the hand- ling of imports and exports. Another and usually much larger city is commonly nearby on the more healthful plateau. It is in reality another part of the same economic community. The city is merely divided and only that part remains on the natural shore site which absolutely cannot go up to the more wholesome hills. 781 782 COMMERCIAL GEOGRAPHY La Guayra is the port for Caracas, ten miles away in the moun- tains. Santos is the great Brazilian coffee port, but Sao Paulo forty miles inland on the plateau is the real center of the region. Rio Janeiro is an exception to the rule in that it is a large city, but Petropolis on the heights twenty-five miles inland is the place of residence for the leading citizens of Rio Janeiro, includ- ing the official representatives of foreign governments. The situation in Santos is graphically described by a local saying that the inhabitants are vitally interested in, and talk about three things — the price of coffee, the rate of exchange for the fluctuating Brazilian currency, and the yellow fever which has for generations been rife upon the low and unwholesome coast. It is easy to see that the climate of the coast has been a great drawback to the settlement of the continent by the Europeans. If the eastern coast of North America had presented so unfavor- able a front to the colonists the progress of settlement and trade would have been delayed many decades, perhaps a cen- tury, possibly more; for the reputation of the land might have been made by its coast, and such a repute would not have invited the colonists. The coast of South America has still further drawbacks for commerce. The Pacific shore plain from northern Peru 6° south latitude to 30° south is essentially rainless and desert, except where irrigated by streams flowing across from the Andes. The only South American coasts offering ready access to colon- ists lie between 30° and 40° south latitude and include the agri- cultural region of Chile and the southern states of Brazil, Uru- guay and central Argentina. With the exception of the coffee plateaus near the tropic in Brazil, these are the only parts of the continent in which extensive colonization has occurred and where the European races outnumber the colored races. In many of the tropic American countries there is but a small percentage of white people, the great bulk of the people being the aborigines or, as in central and northern Brazil, negroes and mixed races. The Apparent Advantage of Elvers. — The interior of South America, although cut off by the plateau, consists of a vast plain to which three great, navigable rivers give entrance, and apparent solution of transport problems. The Orinoco, the SOUTH AMERICAN TRADE AND TRADE ROUTES 783 Amazon and La Plata drain valleys whose extent and fertility are only equalled in the temperate zone by the Mississippi, the Yangtse-kiang and the Danube. But owing to the floods, forest, malaria, and other disadvantages of the torrid zone, civilized communities have only been able to avail themselves of one-fourth of one valley, that lying along the southern or temperate part of the La Plata system. No large tropic valley in South America has yet been settled in any modern sense. They have been explored more or less, some of them have settlements here and there, but practically all the land is in a state of nature. 1 A Continent of Short Trade Routes.— As a consequence of the natural conditions outlined above the settled regions of South America are on or near the coasts, and with small exceptions the commercial life of the continent passes along a number of short routes that connect the centers of population with the common highway, the ocean. With the single exception of the rubber gatherer's boat on the upper Amazon, there is no spec- tacular South American counterpart for the long caravan routes that traverse the deserts of Africa or the plains of Asia; no coun- terpart for the long-drawn Trans-Siberian Railway; no trans- continental railway lines like those of North America; no daring schemes like the Cape-to-Cairo Railway of Africa. In mere weight of difficulty, however, the Andes Mountains are the greatest single barrier that modern commerce has assailed. Lacking long routes, South American commerce gravitates by many short feeders to the ocean, the one great highway of commerce, which sweeps around the continent from Panama to St. Roque with a stream that is increased by the contribu- tion of- a multitude of parts, both great and small. Owing to the unorganized internal transportation conditions and the lack of routes for assembling and distributing, the continent requires for its commerce many more ports than does North America, Europe, or Asia. There is a regular service between Europe and ten ports on the Atlantic and Gulf coasts of the United 1 Astonishing proof of this emptiness is furnished by the recent journey of Mr. Sauder of England. To the horror of all Brazilians he plunged into the wilds of Goyaz and followed his compass to Manaos, about 1000 miles. Instead of the terrible and gigantic savage in which all Brazil believed, he found no human being and no traces of them. He reports that in com- parison to it African exploration is easy, and Thibet is child's play. 784 COMMERCIAL GEOGRAPHY States. On the coast of Chile alone there are twelve ports to which the European steamers advertise a service. Other coasts are equally rich in places at which ships stop, although Fig. 235. — The vessel tracks of the Middle and South Atlantic. many of them are far from being satisfactory harbors. For every little port there is an inland route or routes, but many of them are as insignificant as the little-known ports they serve. SOUTH AMERICAN TRADE AND TRADE ROUTES 785 Foreign Termini of South American Trade. 1 — AH South Amer- ican routes alike have Europe and the United States upon their other ends, yet these regions are from 2,000 to 8,000 miles away as vessels go. At the same time there is no trade with Africa just across the south Atlantic in one place but 1,600 miles away. There is physical space for a dozen ferry-like routes if trade called for them, but regions have nothing to exchange unless there is a difference in production and wants. This the two con- tinents lack. They lie in similar latitudes, under approximately similar climatic conditions; there is no great difference in density of population to make one of them a manufacturing region. Step by step we may measure these two neighboring continents down, and the economic basis for the exchange of products is not found to exist ; therefore there are no trade routes. The whole trade in the south Atlantic is that passing between the temperate zones and the tropics and that passing between a manufacturing region and a region producing raw material. "Down to the sea and away to the north " might well be its motto. The Great Route of Colombia. — In the North, the Magdalena River resembles in its service a trunk-line railway. The river itself is the trunk; and, in addition to its navigable branches, several short lines of railway are among its feeders. The river mouth is choked with sand but the two ports of Cartagena and Savanilla are connected by short railways with their river ports, of which Barranquilla on the Cartagena railway is the more important. The river steamboats are of the flat-bottom stern- wheel type used on the Mississippi. The total length of naviga- tion on the river is 900 miles and on the branches 215 miles. Rapids at La Dorada, 592 miles from Barranquilla, make it necessary to use a railway for fourteen miles, after which boats are again used. The lower valley is a green and almost unin- habited tropic forest. The chief centers of Colombian popula- tion, agriculture, and mining, are on the interior plateaus drained by the Magdalena, from which .the short lines of railway and numerous pack trails make connection with the river steamers. At some rainy seasons these pack trails become impassable, even for mules, which get hopelessly stuck in the mud; and at best everything that , is carried to many interior towns must, if it weighs over 100 pounds, go in sections on the backs of mules. 786 COMMERCIAL GEOGRAPHY Consequently the imports of Colombia, comprising as they do the whole list of goods required by a modern community from hoes to pianos, trolley cars, engines, and mining machinery, call for most skillful construction and packing in parts. This extraordinary amount of care is one of the great reasons advanced for the great increase of German trade over the British and American. The Germans want commerce and are willing to cater to it. The English have had it so long that they do not feel the necessity of making such effort. The Americans are in the main so profitably employed with the domestic trade that it is only an exceptional firm that cares to make the effort. The river Atrato, draining a deep valley to the west of the Magdalena, is navigated almost to its source; but the commerce of this marshy valley is served by one or two small steamers setting out from Cartagena. Colombia pays for her small import with coffee from the pla- teaus, gold from the mountains west of the Magdalena, rubber and gums from the lowlands, bananas from the northern coast, where an American owned steamship line calls for them at Santa Marta, and hides from all inhabited parts of the country. Colombian industry and hence her trade are in a depressed condition due to the ravages of destructive wars waged by rival chieftains in their attempts to gain control of the custom-house, the chief objective of revolution in many Spanish- American countries. The Routes of Venezuela, the Northeast Coast, and the Lesser Antilles. — The center of Venezuelan population is on the cool plateau around Caracas, where there are some highways and several short railways united into a system reaching the seacoast at the ports of La Guayra and Porto Cabello. The territory served by these ports is of comparatively small area, and is limited to the highlands east of Lake Maracaibo, and north of the Orinoco Valley; but commercially this district outweighs the rest of the country just as southern Canada outweighs the rest of the Dominion. Venezuela with its plateau population is strikingly like Colombia in its commerce except that its centers of population are nearer the sea and do not have to depend upon a long river to reach a port. The asphalt of Lake Maracaibo district replaces SOUTH AMERICAN TRADE AND TRADE ROUTES 787 the gold of Colombia as a natural asset easily accessible for export. The longest trade route of Venezuela is that furnished by the navigable Orinoco. Steamers can ascend for a thousand miles and sometimes small ocean-going vessels go as far as Bolivar, but European and American goods are usually transferred to local vessels at port of Spain, Trinidad. Not long ago the entire river service consisted of one steamboat, and the great plain of the Orinoco with its millions of acres of grass and forest is practically unused. The heaviest commerce in all this region is furnished by the asphalt from the island of Trinidad, adjacent to Venezuela but under British control. No product could be more conveniently placed for export than the asphalt of Trinidad Lake, the present chief source of the world's supply. As it is taken out of this natural retort it wells up from the bottom in a few hours and the place is again filled. This unending supply is located so near the sea that an overhead cableway less than a mile in length carries this gift of nature from its original location to the hold of the ocean steamer. A line of vessels does nothing but carry this product to New York. Tramp vessels by the score carry it to other American ports, to Europe, and to almost all parts of the world. With the exception of this one great product, the other exports of this district are in comparatively small quanti- ties. From Trinidad alone the cacao bean, a highly valuable product, outranks the asphalt in value, although from the stand- point of ocean transportation it is almost negligible. The Guianas, like Venezuela and Colombia, belong to the commercial circuit of the Caribbean. This body of water, called by the Germans the American Mediterranean, is prac- tically surrounded by continental shores or strings of islands, and lends itself naturally to skirting voyages. The fine English mail steamers from Southampton enter the circuit at Barbadoes, a great port of call where branch lines connect with the lesser Antilles to the north and with British Guiana on the south. This branch line handles most of the mail and package business of British Guiana, leaving the sugar for tramp steamers. From Barbadoes the Royal Mail steamers go to Trinidad, the ports of Venezuela, Colombia, Colon, Jamaica and thence with pas- 788 COMMERCIAL GEOGRAPHY sengers, mail, and bananas to New York where they receive cargo brought across by the fast trans-Atlantic liners and retrace their way to Southampton by the same West Indian and South American ports visited on the out trip. The Dutch subsidized mail line makes a similar circuit between Amsterdam and New York via the Guianas, Venezuela, and the lesser Antilles. Other lines make the Caribbean circuit from France, Canada, and New York, so that the transportation facilities are good. The Trade and Soutes of North Brazil. — From the Orinoco to Bahia, 13° south, there is a succession of ports, each the outlet for small coast settlements. Along the whole length of this coast, approximately 2,000 miles, there is but one route to the interior, the Amazon. This river and its branches afford a magnificent system of inland waterways running through a region almost entirely covered with forest and at certain seasons it is even covered for many miles with flood waters from which only the tree tops and a few islands of dry land emerge. This valley, which might rival or double China in population if it were utilized, has a forest so exuberant that man can only get and use a few of its by-products, sarsaparilla, nuts, rubber, and the sickly population probably numbers less than one to the square mile. The principal industry is rubber gathering, although some Brazil nuts and cocoa are exported. The recent increase in the use and price of rubber has brought prosperity to the Amazon valley; its three ports, Para at the mouth, Manaos 860 miles up stream, and Iquitos 1,100 miles beyond in eastern Peru, having a busy trade. For the number of people involved the trade of the Amazon is heavy and, upon its import side, varied. The people of the tropic settlements produce little but their exports; and import from the Portugese farmers in the mother country surprising quantities of fruits, vegetables, and other products of agriculture. Steamers from England, calling en route at Portugal, regularly go as far up as Manaos, 15-foot boats to Iquitos and some of the branches are also served by steamers. There are many streams in the Amazon system that could be made navigable by the use of American "snag boats" such as are constantly employed in pulling logs and other obstructions out of the Mississippi River. Some authorities place the possible SOUTH AMERICAN TRADE AND TRADE ROUTES 789 navigation of the Amazon Valley at 15,000 miles, but the part at present navigated is far below that. The Amazon receives now the commerce of a considerable region in eastern Bolivia, since the completion of the only important improvement on the whole system, the building of 200 miles of railway, now completed, to connect the navigable lower Madeira with its Bolivian branches above the 18 cataracts. It is estimated that there are 3,000 miles of navigable rivers in the Bolivian plain, a region that has been greatly isolated because of the separation from the Pacific by the Andean wall and from the Atlantic by the Madeira Falls, around which occasional small quantities of import goods have been taken up the river by native porters and boatmen. An attempt some thirty years ago to build this railroad was made by an American party, which met gloomy failure and was driven out much reduced by famine and the almost pestilential fevers that overcame them in the tropic forests around the cataracts. The present enterprise at railroad building there has been prosecuted under somewhat more favorable conditions, resulting from greater knowledge of sanitation gained at Panama. Between the Amazon and Rio Janeiro, Brazil, is an, exporter of sugar, cotton, tobacco, and hides. After the Amazon, the next in length among Brazilian inland trade routes is that from Bahia to the upper course of the San Francisco River. Bahia is the center of an important coast district and the terminus of a railway 300 miles long connecting with the steamers on the San Francisco above the falls that break its lower course as it descends from the plateau. This inland waterway is navigable for about 700 miles, but the population and commerce of the upper valley are slight, the greater part of the commerce of Bahia having its origin in the coast districts. Pernambuco is another important port of a coast section much like that about Bahia. The Railway Net of the Coffee States. — The greater part of Brazil's foreign trade originates in the Amazon and in the two ports of Rio Janeiro and Santos, the chief ports of Brazil and the ocean termini of the trade routes over which passes Brazil's leading export, coffee. Brazil's rubber district and her coffee district are farther apart and more thoroughly separated physically and commercially than the Washington wheat country 790 COMMERCIAL GEOGRAPHY and Alaska. The Brazilian coffee district occupies a broad plateau and has a railway system which has developed into the only railway network in tropic America, with outlets at the two ports, Rio and Santos. These roads also carry the Brazilian manganese ore; and the traffic on the Santos line has recently made it necessary to double track the road from the port to the inland metropolis, Sao Paulo, which is a city European in population as well as in appearance, being largely inhabited by thousands of newly arrived Italian immigrants. The extremities of this Brazilian railway net reach by devious routes points as far as Cleveland and Columbus, Ohio, are from Philadelphia and Baltimore. As this plateau produces more than half of the world's supply of coffee, and as the United States is the greatest coffee-consuming country, the commercial relation between that country and Rio and Santos is heavy, though one-sided. We import Brazilian coffee by the tens of shiploads, but export to Brazil by the shipload, so that the balance of our trade is very much against us. On the other hand, we export to Europe much more than we import, while Europe manufactures the kinds of clothing and luxuries required in Brazil, so that the result is a curious triangular trade whereby Brazilian coffee goes to the United States and the United States pays for the coffee with cargoes of agricultural produce and manufactures sent over the North Atlantic trade route. Europe, in turn, pays for the American cargoes by sending shiploads of manufactures to the Brazilian coffee growers. This peculiar traffic movement has long been recognized, steamship lines have been organized to follow the lead of economic conditions, the vessels making triangular voyages between Rio Janeiro and Santos, New York, Liverpool, or Manchester. Rivaling coffee in bulk is the coal import of about a million tons, chiefly from England. The River Plate Valley. — Various European lines call at the small ports of agricultural South Brazil, Paranagua, Porto Alegre and Rio Grande du Sul ; but the River Plate or La Plata Valley is the next trade route of importance on the east coast. Here one of the great rivers of the world, under the names La Plata, Parana and Paraguay offers an open route far into the interior. Ocean steamers ascend in large numbers to Rosario, 230 miles above Buenos Ayres. Commodious river steamers SOUTH AMERICAN TRADE AND TRADE ROUTES 791 ply regularly from Buenos Ayres to the ports of Paraguay. 1 From Asuncion, small steamers wind through the swampy forests to Cuyaba, 680 miles to the northward in the heart of the tropics. By this circuitous route the Brazilian governors go out to their posts at Cuyaba, the capital of the remote and sparsely peopled state of Matto Grasso, which is larger than Great Britain and France. This wild, little known, semi-arid highland has until recently had only a few settlements and no industry except a few diamond mines and cattle ranches. The commerce of the upper Paraguay is correspondingly light. 2 From Paraguay to the ports of Argentina and Uruguay there is a lively traffic in mat6, hides, oranges, vegetables, and other sub-tropical produce sent to the colder lands down stream. The one railway of Paraguay running southeast from Asuncion is being extended to connect with a northeastern line from Buenos Ayres. The Argentine Routes. — The fertile plain of Argentina to the west of the lower Parana arid La Plata is low, healthful, of easy access to the sea, rich in sheep and cattle, wheat and maize, and possesses the best railway net in South America. The foci of these lines are the ports of Buenos Ayres and Rosario. Their advantages can only be appreciated when we speculate upon the advantages that would result if Duluth and Chicago were seaports. Rosario has such a good harbor that grain sacks slide by gravity down chutes from the warehouse on the bank to the steamer in the river. Westward from longitude 64° west, the rainfall is insufficient for agriculture and the network of railways gives way to. four single lines going directly across the 1 The dependence of Paraguay upon this river is thus depicted by an American Consul Report, April 18, 1911. "Paraguay is shut in on the west, north, and east by hundreds of miles of thick, almost uninhabited forest country. On the south the greater part of the outlet is barred by swampy land, practically without population. From the day of its dis- covery to the present time the country has had only one artery of exit and entrance, the Parana River. Both the Parana and the Paraguay are difficult rivers to navigate. They are shallow and full of sand bars and other obstructions, and in time of drought become so low that even ships built especially for the service are frequently delayed for days. To this inaccessibility may be largely attributed Paraguay's backwardness; not directly, but indirectly, for its isolation has made immigration of progressive people and adoption of progressive ideas very slow." 2 Recently an industrial railroad has been built eastward from the upper Paraguay. Most of the work is being done by Jamaica negroes and the en- terprise is European; the financial magnate, an American. Jamaica negroes also built the railroad around the falls of the Madeira river. 792 COMMERCIAL GEOGRAPHY plains to the irrigated districts at the foot of the Andes. Two of these roads lead to the northwestern province of Tucuman, the sugar producer, 900 miles from the Atlantic ports. A third railway is the Trans-Andine line, finished in April, 1910. It shortens by many days the winter journey between Buenos Ayres and Santiago, which had previously required a steamer journey through the Straits of Magellan because the mountains could not be crossed. It will also make possible a Pacific outlet to the important fruit and wine industries of Mendoza and San Juan, sub-tropical Argentine provinces at the foot of the Andes, much nearer the Pacific than the Atlantic. The wheat-growing and stock-raising industries are extending to the south and southwest, and including the lands of Patagonia. Railway extension is following those changes, and the new south- ern port of shipment, Bahia Blanca, is rising in importance like a new Galveston. Already it is the center of several lines from the wheat district to the north and there is prospect of the early completion of the line across the plains to the lake district in the southwest. The more abundant rainfall in the vicinity of the Andes south of 40° south produces some forests and excellent pasture, promising good traffic for new railways. The Parana Valley and the Argentina plains are agricultural in the American sense. They are exporters of grain and animal products. They began commerce as a pastoral region, exporting such valuable produce as hair, wool, hides, tallow, and bones. Thirty years ago experiments proved that Argentina could grow wheat; less than twenty years ago she began to export the heavy surplus and is now -an important factor in the world's supply. Of late years corn and flaxseed have also entered the list to a lesser degree. Meanwhile the production of animal produce is in no wise diminished. Here, in this remote corner, where animals were so cheap as to be slaughtered for their hides, tallow and bones, the great firm of Liebig began then to make meat extract, a product requiring a minimum of transportation. Of late years refrigeration has made possible a large export of meat from this district and the cattle at times are even carried the long journey to Great Britain alive. Here is a rival of the United States having more sheep and over half as many cattle and an insignificant home market. These ports export in most cases SOUTH AMERICAN TRADE AND TRADE ROUTES 793 to our market, Europe, the same things we export to it. Hun- dreds of steamships loaded with grain and meat annually make this voyage. The return cargo of manufactured goods fills but a portion of the ships; others take coal, which is by all means the bulkiest import of the region, Great Britain alone send- ing a million tons to Argentina; and so cheap are the out freights that even bricks are carried from Europe to the southern hemisphere. Although commerce is predominantly with Europe there is a basis here for American trade. We are importers of wool, skins, and hides, and since Argentina has become an agricultural country, she is an importer of agricultural machinery, in the manufacture of which we lead the world, so our steamship lines to Argentina, although less numerous than those of Europe, are prospering. The southern part of eastern South America is a part of another triangular vessel movement. Argentina exports more in bulk and value than she imports. South Africa imports much more in bulk than she exports, so the vessels that discharge at Cape Town, finding no cargo there, often swing across the south Atlantic to the mouth of the La Plata, load a return cargo for Europe, and join the great procession northward bound along the coast to Cape St. Roque where the Europe and America bound ships separate. South of 40° south latitude, South America has no important trade routes. It is a region which but a little while ago was called Patagonia, and was left as the unchallenged and unex- plored domain of wandering savages, but is now very rapidly being converted into sheep ranges. The only port of importance that has yet risen in this region is Punta Arenas on the Strait of Magellan, the base of supply and export for hundreds of miles of coast exporting the products of sheep ranches and some gold mines. The Commercial Isolation of Pacific South America. — Pacific South America is a commercial world to itself. The Strait of Magellan alone is as long as the distance from Hull to Bremen. It is crooked, narrow, rocky, and beset with snowstorms and shipwrecks, so that vessels usually tie up at night. The com- mercial part of Chile is farther away from Buenos Ayres in both 794 COMMERCIAL GEOGRAPHY time and actual distance travelled than New York is from France. As a consequence the vessels that trade between Argentina and Europe do not go to the west coast and the west coast liners do not stop at the east coast except occasionally to call at Montevideo for coal. Vessels north bound for America usually coal at Barbadoes, for Europe at St. Vincent. The most important coaling station on the west coast is Coronel on Concepcion Bay in southern Chile where there are mines right beside the sea producing about a million tons per year, much of which goes directly to ships' bunkers, while north Chile im- ports her coal from Australia and Britain. The Character of the Coast District. — The western or Pacific side of the continent, because of the narrowness of its plain, and difficulty of travel in its slope, has a multitude of small and often inferior ports. In 4,000 miles there are but six railroads that cross so much as one range of the Andes; only five railroads reach the plateau, and none cross it to the east slope except the Trans-Andine line to Argentina which reaches the part of South America having the best outlet to the Atlantic. Few coasts are so devoid of back country. There is not in this whole length of the continent even a second-class navigable river and only in part of Chile and in western Ecuador is there any valley worthy of mention. The agricultural region of Chile lying between 30° and 40° south consists of a long narrow valley between the Andes and a low coast range in which frequent breaks give access to the ports of the Chilean coast. The valley resembles the valley of California and chief of the ports is Valparaiso, the beginning of a trunk line of railway which has many small feeders and traverses the agricultural region to Port Montt, a frontier port on the forested shore of the Chilean inland sea, at the extreme end of the valley, 700 miles south of Valparaiso. This road is now being actively pushed northward by the Chilean government which, with its war-like ambitions, wishes to free itself from the dependence upon the sea which is now so absolute. This trunk railroad, now 1,100 miles long, has 850 miles more under construc- tion and the rest surveyed. It is to connect Port Montt (latitude 42°), on the southern gulf in the land of heavy rain, with Arica (latitude 18°), 2,132 miles away in the tropic desert. It will probably be a long time before commercial needs can make the SOUTH AMERICAN TRADE AND TRADE ROUTES 795 northern half of the road economically profitable. It crosses and connects a succession of little spur lines each of which serves its purpose by connecting some mines with the sea. South American Minerals Support Governments. — In the arid coast plain of northern Chile, the port of Iquique is the terminus of a short but very important railway that connects the most important nitrate of soda refineries with the seacoast and makes Iquique the greatest nitrate port in the world, with yearly ship- ments of nearly a million tons. Other similar ports in the same vicinity swell the total exports of minerals to the north Atlantic to over 2 million tons per year. The mineral wealth of this west coast seems destined to the support of dynasties. During the third quarter of the nineteenth century the Peruvian government lived and grew reckless on the income of the guano deposits of the Chincha Islands. At the present time the Chilean administration similarly subsists on the nitrate taxes. During the colonial period the Spanish monarchy had similar support. Within less than 30 years after the discovery of America the hardy Magellan had rounded the continent of South America and the Spanish conquerors shortly established an empire along the Pacific shores of South America, whose exports almost alone supported the Spanish monarchy for two centuries and a half and made it the dominant power of Europe. This trade was peculiarly one-sided. It consisted of the exchange of authority and regiments on the one side for gold and silver on the other. The Spanish conquerors found great stores of precious metal in western South America ; and for many years continued the supply by compelling the natives to work the mines, whose produce was carried back to Spain in the royal galleons. In 1575 Sir Francis Drake, the English explorer and buccaneer, entering these harbors, found heaps of gold and silver and piles of wheat lying practically unguarded upon the wharves, awaiting the coming of the Spanish king's tribute ship, the only ships ever before seen in those waters. The Steamship Lines. — The baffling winds and calms of this coast caused it to have a steamship line to Panama (1840) before there was such a line across the Atlantic. But the heavy com- merce then as now (1912) depends upon the Magellan Route. In the past twenty years a number of steamship lines have been 796 COMMERCIAL GEOGRAPHY established between Europe and the west coast of South America; and three lines run by Americans, with their headquarters in New York, go around the continent and as far north as Peru or Ecuador. All of these lines carry outward a general assortment of manufactures, machinery, clothing and the supplies for a raw material producing country. The return cargo consists pre- dominantly of nitrate of soda from northern Chile and, to a limited extent, of sugar from Peru, copper, silver, and gold ores from various points along the coast, and tobacco, hides, and mis- cellaneous agricultural products: About the beginning of the century a German steamship company, the Kosmos, extended its west coast line northward to Central America, Mexico, and the United States, so that there is now a foreign steamship service from Puget Sound to Europe by way of the Strait of Magellan as well as by way of the Strait of Malacca. There is, however, but a comparatively small amount of through produce carried by this line. It is really a coasting line loading and unloading its vessels several times between British Columbia and the snowy regions of Magellan Strait. The Kosmos line is one of many that carries from agricultural Chile to the nitrate fields the varied and heavy freight consumed by the desert population. Much of the mineral export of this coast goes to Europe and America in tramp vessels many of which come across the south Pacific with coal from Newcastle, Australia; and some even bring coal to the Chilean smelters from Wales. The Andean Railroads. — North of the Tropic of Capricorn the conditions of the eastern side are again repeated, and the district of greatest population shifts from the coast plain, as in Chile and Argentina, to the plateau, as in Brazil and Venezuela. This Andean highland, the highest plateau outside of Asia, runs at an elevation of 8,000 to 14,000 feet through Bolivia, Peru, and Ecuador and sinks to the enclosed valleys of Colombia where the Cauca River basin east of Buenaventura has an elevation of 3,300 feet. The plateau is enclosed on the eastern and western side by the Cordillera of the Andes, which present a front that is very high, uniform, and difficult of ascent. Over this barrier the trade routes must pass. South of the equator there are numerous trails established by the Incas and followed by trains SOUTH AMERICAN TRADE AND TRADE ROUTES 797 of llamas and mules since the Spanish conquest. Within the past forty years four railroads have, by fearful effort, 1 been built to the plateau and have become the chief means of com- munication with the sea. The port of Antofagasta, in northern Chile, is the ocean terminus of the longest of the plateau railways. The line is between 700 and 800 miles long, and is being extended. It crosses the desert of Atacama and climbs to the plateau of Bolivia, which it traverses in a northerly direction to La Paz and Oruro where it connects with the steamers on Lake Titicaca. This lake was attained many years ago by the Peruvian line that connects the Pacific port of Mollendo with the lake port of Puno. The lake was already navigated by steamers before the railroad reached its shore, the steamers having been carried up in sections on mule back. The steamers cross the lake to the Bolivian town of Chililaya, which along with Oruro, for years the terminus of the Antofagasta line, was the base of caravan trade to La Paz and other plateau points. Sometimes as many as a thousand pack animals could be seen at one time loading goods for the mines and settlements across the plateau. The Peruvian railroad extends northward from the lake and is intended to reach Cuzco, the ancient Inca capital, part way down the slope toward the Amazon. This railroad and the one to Antofagasta carry a limited amount of freight that is destined to, or comes from the eastern slopes of the Andes, but the chief dependence of the railways is upon the mineral and pastoral products of the highlands. Large arid plains there are covered 1 The difficulties of Andean railroading are illustrated by the first trans- Andean line that was formally opened, April 5, 1910. "The tunnel is 12,000 feet above sea level, between Valparaiso and Buenos Ayres. "Heretofore winter travelers have been compelled to go round by the Strait of Magellan, which means a cold and stormy voyage of fourteen or fifteen days. The tunnel project after being twice abandoned was finally accomplished by an American syndicate organized by W. R. Grace & Co., of New York. "On the Argentine side the railway tracks are brought up the mountains by a series of 'rack sections,' or zigzags, as far as the first tunnel, called El Navaro, which is 5,325 feet long. Then, by a steel viaduct, they cross a tremendous gorge to the second tunnel, which is 15,195 feet long. "On the Chile side the mountains fall so rapidly that it was necessary to build a series of screw-shaped tunnels describing a corkscrew 27,840 feet long and dropping 2,762 feet in that distance. The aggregate length of the several tunnels is eleven miles." {Philadelphia Ledger, April 6, 1910.) 798 COMMERCIAL GEOGRAPHY with salt and borax; the historic Potosi mountain of silver and tin has never been worked by scientific methods, yet the plateau is one of the important tin districts of the world. Copper, gold, and other minerals seem to be abundant and their exploitation has but begun. Tens of thousands of square miles of mountain pasture support the llama and alpaca, while the sheep of Bolivia and Peru (according to some estimates) rank in number with those of leading American sheep states. A new railroad from Arica in north Chile to the plateau was about finished January 1st, 1913. Peru has another plateau railway extending from Callao past Lima to Oroya and Cerro de Pasco, an important mining district on the high plateau. A few years ago Cerro de Pasco ores were being carried on mule back a distance of ninety miles to Oroya. This railroad was built by an American in the days of Peruvian prosperity, at a cost of $200,000 per mile through the terrible Andes, which, like the Mollendo road to the southward, it crosses at an elevation greater than that of Pike's Peak or Mt. Blanc. But the mineral resources of the plateau are great enough to warrant such effort. The Peruvian coast, like that of north Chile, has several short lines. They serve the coast settlements and sugar planta- tions in an arid plain where 11/2 million acres are irrigated with Andean snow water and another million acres may be irrigated later. The Ecuadorean Railroad and Commerce. — The fifth Andean railway is in Ecuador. This country possesses a fertile and well-watered plain between the mountains and the Pacific. Here is the port of Guayaquil, the gateway to forests producing palm nuts and cacao; but the truly equatorial climate causes the center of Ecuadorean population to be in the enclosed plateau about 40 by 300 miles lying between the ranges of the Andes con- taining the world-famous volcanoes Cotopaxi and Chimborazo. Here nearly a million people lived until near the end of the first decade of this century, entirely cut off from all communication with the commercial world, except by a pack trail descending from the 10,000-foot plateau by perilous ledges and crossing swamps that often become impassable in the rainy season. A 350-mile railroad has at last been constructed from Guayaquil SOUTH AMERICAN TRADE AND TRADE ROUTES 799 to Quito, the capital. It opens no new trade routes, but will revolutionize the methods and commerce of an old one. It makes possible, for the first time, the participation of these people in world's commerce. This road practically annexes to the com- mercial world a new province containing a million people. Their commerce is likely to be of limited extent because they live in the temperate zone climate of the high plateau where the country is so rough that there is small likelihood of their having any surplus of wheat, corn, or beans to send any farther than to their neighbor of the tropic plain, if perchance they can compete even there with temperate zone breadstuffs. Their exports are, therefore, likely to continue largely of hides and wool, a little rubber from the eastern forests, and minerals of which the country claims considerable store. The imports comprise the whole list of manufactures and supplies needed in a modern city and in a surrounding farming district. The Route to Western Colombia. — The northernmost Andean trade route connects the Pacific port of Buenaventura, in Colom- bia, with the enclosed valley along the upper course of the Cauca River. This stream is a branch of the Magdalena and therefore drains into the Caribbean, but the mountains of central Colombia cut it off from the Atlantic by a high plateau and convert the valley into impassable narrow canyons with tumultuous water- falls. The Pacific is reached by the passage of a single range of the Andes less than 6,000 feet high, hence nearly all commerce to and from the valley passes over the trail from Buenaventura on the Pacific to Cali on the Cauca, where the traffic divides to go up and down the valley. A short railway runs from Buena- ventura to the foot of the mountain; the remainder of the distance is covered by pack animals. This valley differs from all the other regions within the Andes and tributary to the Pacific in being low enough (3,000 to 3,500 feet) to be thoroughly tropical in its production and trade. The Panama Canal and the Extension of Andean Trade Routes. — The trade routes of western South America will be materially affected by the opening of the Panama Canal. At present these routes are all feeders to the great ocean trunk line, which must pass around the entire continent to reach the markets of the north Atlantic, which are almost the sole markets for 800 COMMERCIAL GEOGRAPHY South American products. The steamship lines running to Panama carry the mails, passengers, and a limited amount of freight, but the main current of commerce is via the Strait of Magellan. The opening of the new outlet toward the north will change the direction of the commercial current and the land routes of western South America will have their termini from 2,000 to 8,000 miles nearer the markets of the north Atlantic. This advantage will give a reduction in costs, a speedier delivery of goods that will stimulate the industries, aDd extend the rail- roads and trade routes of the Pacific side of the continent. In the Andean region of Bolivia and Peru the opening of the canal promises to materially affect the Pacific routes by extending them down the eastern slope. The probable extension of railways and mining will intensify the present demand for the sub-tropical and tropical food supplies produced in the fertile valleys of the eastern slope, and desired on the plateau, a fairly populous region of temperate climate. Pack trains now supply La Paz and other plateau towns with lowland produce. Industrial development will give efficient railway service from the Pacific to the plateau, and, coupled with the greater demand for agricultural products of the east slope, will be the ability to transport engineering supplies and extend the plateau railways into the lower country. Such exten- sions are a part of the plan of each of the three Andean roads of Bolivia and Peru and even of others that have not yet left the Pacific plain. The Antofagasta road has reached La Paz, standing at the head of the valley of the River La Paz flowing to the eastward. Abundant water supplies will furnish electric power if it is required. Many streams pass through 10,000 feet of descent in a short distance. The agricultural produce brought up to the plateau is and will continue to be paid for largely with goods imported from United States and Europe. The communities of the eastern Andean slopes trading chiefly with the plateau will tend to use the route for the export of such commodities as they may send to foreign countries, and the trade routes from the Pacific will extend at least as far eastward as the navigable waterways of the Amazon system, where they will make possible the development of trans-continental routes, where, for thousands of miles, the continent is now utterly un- SOUTH AMERICAN TRADE AND TRADE ROUTES 801 crossable except by the hardiest of exploring parties proceeding at the risk of life. The activities of the American financial genius, Farquhar, promise rapid developments in South American railway exten- sion. It was he who built the Madeira railroad. He has ac- quired thousands of miles of railway in Uruguay, South Brazil and Bolivia and a transcontinental line from Rio Janeiro to North Chile is proposed. CHAPTER X THE TRADE AND ROUTES OF AFRICA AND THE GOOD HOPE ROUTE The Newness of African Commerce. — Although Africa was circumnavigated before America was discovered, the sinister title of "Dark Continent" has stood into this very decade for the mysterious continent, devoid of commerce, but filled with the hidden dangers of the venomous unknown. African commerce has been thought of in terms of beads and savage barter, but now no continent is changing faster than Africa, since improvements in transportation have at last reached the "Dark Continent." Its present commerce is relatively small, but a much more active future is promised as a result of the new transportation routes now being opened in all directions. African railroads and steam- boat lines are being pushed much faster than commerce actually warrants because colonial governments and the colonizing powers in Europe are building lines into the wilderness to subdue terri- tory in the hope that commerce will come later. Africa remained a closed continent until the end of the nine- teenth century because the climate is usually bad for Europeans and because geographical conditions made the interior hard to reach. The regular coast line possesses very few good harbors. The continent generally is a plateau with abrupt descents toward the sea and a level interior, in some parts flooded during the rainy season. The great rivers, which in Europe, Asia, and America offer easy navigation far into the interior, in Africa come tum- bling down toward tide level, blocking the navigation. These falls may make wondrous power some day, but for the past they have kept the continent closed. In the tropic sections the coasts are usually low, swampy, malarial, and unwholesome, almost prohibiting land transit to the interior and giving to the explorer and newcomer a most unfavorable idea of the entire continent. Only at the extreme ends of the continent have we had a coast 802 THE TRADE AND ROUTES OF AFRICA 803 along which human beings could prosper and white men live in any approach to comfort. Fortunately there also was the Nile, the one river which, despite its ten cataracts, has erstwhile Railways: In Operation under Construction Steamship Lines — Navigable Rivers — -■■■-■*» Camel Routes - Man Caravan Routes Ox Cart Routes o ago 400 boo 890 1090 Boalc of Statute Miles Cape Town^^^£g\, C.of Good Hope-- ■* Wi AMERICAN BANK NOTE CO.,' Fig. 236. — Trade routes of Africa. been of some service to navigation and has in its valley sheltered one of the oldest and most historic civilizations. The Commercial Zones of Africa. — The continent is further divided along east and west lines into five distinct economic 804 COMMERCIAL GEOGRAPHY zones, within each one of which the similar economic conditions of the people have not permitted extensive exchange, and between which the natural barriers to travel and transit have been almost Regions of large commerce. Regions of important commerce. Regions commercially undeveloped. Desert or unproductive regions. Fig. 237. — The trade zones of Africa. (After Robt. M. Brown.) prohibitive of any kind of communication, except that carried on by the exploring expedition. The best of these five regions, the temperate extremities of Africa — Barbary States and the Cape region — have not offered a favorable base for African THE TRADE AND ROUTES OF AFRICA 805 development because they have a semi-arid climate and are cut off from the extensive and torrid interior by the two remaining economic (or uneconomic) regions, the Kalahari desert in the south and the vast stretches of the Sahara in the north. Despite the blistering blank of the deserts that have cut off the temperate and sub-tropic ends from the tropic middle there has been a limited trade across the wastes to the very large region compris- ing tropic Africa. In its eastern reaches the arid part of south Africa has more rain than Sahara, and east of the mountains the trade winds give good rainfall for there is here no moisture-block- ing land mass like Arabia. The Transportation Methods of the Old Africa. — Three dis- tinct methods of transportation have prevailed in the different parts of Africa. Wagon trains drawn by oxen have carried trading expeditions from the cape to the Zambezi River; and the well-known caravans of the Sahara have kept up a feeble trade between Morocco and the Mediterranean ports on the one hand and Timbuctoo, Lake Tchad and other Soudan points on the other. The interesting and picturesque "ship of the desert," the camel, and the camel caravan, have been much emphasized in the education of the youth of western civilization, and it is therefore easy to overemphasize their importance in world commerce. Statistics of the Sahara caravan trade, which sets out from Algiers, Tunis, and Tripoli, indicate that it amounted at the beginning of the twentieth century to but little over half a million dollars annually. Central Africa has the third and least efficient means of trans- portation. Between the Soudan and the Zambezi the meager commerce, until recently in the hands of Arabs and negroes, has been borne in canoes or by caravans of men, because the climate was fatal to beasts of burden. Some ivory, rubber, skins, palm nuts, and other products of high value were carried to the coast by these laborious means, and bartered for European goods brought by the vessels that traded along the coast. The Partition of Africa and the Reconstruction of the Routes. — Excepting Egypt, Barbary, and the Cape, all of which are in the sub-tropical extremities, the commerce of Africa was too small, its prospects too unfavorable, to tempt the colonizing powers of Europe till late in the nineteenth century. Then 806 COMMERCIAL GEOGRAPHY came the scramble for African possessions; as the nations began to stake off their homesteads then others rushed in before it became too late. The whole central region of darkness was quickly divided; and a new era in African commerce began. The European powers have annexed, divided and traded land, and reconstructed the map. Now the European pioneers, explorers, capitalists, and colonizing governments have begun the laying out of railroads and steamship lines to replace the feeble means otherwise provided. Naturally the easiest way to begin was to send good steamers to the coast. The ocean must ever be the great thoroughfare of African trade. No other continent promises to be so abso- lutely dependent upon ocean commerce, for Africa has less pros- pect than any other continent of developing manufacturing and agriculture that will supply her own needs, and therefore will have greater dependence upon other continents whose products she can get only by trade across the sea which skirts her even coasts. The coasting steamers of England and Germany have already well attended to Africa's ocean routes. Scores of African coast ports are now regularly visited by European steamers and the continent is regularly circum- navigated in both directions. From this base the attack upon the land has begun. From important ports railroads are being or have been built inland to tap the navigable lakes and rivers, and pierce the very heart of the continent with the steam-driven freight carriers of civilization. Victoria Nyanza, Tanganyika and Lake Tchad are no longer names of mystery. These lakes, like the Congo and Niger rivers, have steamboats on them ; and the London daily papers are only a month old when they get to Lake Albert Nyanza. The Leading African Railways. — The most important railway systems of the continent are the Egyptian and South African. The Egyptian line now ends at Khartum in the Soudan, at which point it connects with steamers on the upper Nile which continue the service to the boundary of the Uganda Protectorate, 5° north latitude. The new transportation facilities carry the products of the Nile Valley to Alexandria, are stimulating Egyp- tian industry, and steadily increasing the commerce of Egypt, which has already given Alexandria the heaviest commerce THE TRADE AND ROUTES OF AFRICA 807 handled by any port of Africa. It is a rather surprising fact that even in Egypt highways are little used and that the donkey and camel are the chief means of carrying produce to the railroad and the steamboat. The South African lines are making greater industrial changes than are the Egyptian railways. Egypt has always had its Nile, but South Africa has had only its veldt and its oxen. The railroads which are so necessary are going in many directions to develop a constantly enlarging frontier. Cape Colony, Natal, the Transvaal, and Orange River Colony are a pastoral and mining region, resembling some parts of the western United States and having an area a little larger than Texas and New Mexico. This region is in the early stages of ranching and agriculture, is being rapidly settled and has an expanding railway net. The backbone of this railway system, the trunk line running north from Cape Town, is being pushed steadily northward. In 1910 it was far beyond the Zambezi and more than half way from the tropic to the equator. In 1911 it had reached a point 165 miles beyond the boundary of the Belgian Congo. It has five side lines connecting with the ocean at Port Elizabeth, East London, Durban, Lourenco Marques and Beira. These roads carry down to the sea the wool, hides, and mohair of the ranchmen on the arid plains and the gold and diamonds from some of the world's greatest mines. In exchange comes a great variety of European and American manufactures needed in the mine, farm, repair shop, and home. As is the case with most such regions the leading classes of imports are iron and steel, including machinery, clothing, and food. Cape-to- Cairo Railway. — These two British railway systems of north Africa and South Africa are the backbone of the Cape- to-Cairo railway project, which will get its first through connec- tion by the use of steamships on the lakes and upon the Nile for several degrees in equatorial Africa. The all-rail route was found to be practically impossible where the tremendous inunda- tions convert large areas of the upper Nile valley into a condition which is neither land nor water, but an impassable tangle of aquatic vegetation that baffles all man's land or water vehicles. In its modified form the route can be completed easily, but with 808 COMMERCIAL GEOGRAPHY the original plan it could be built only by selecting a new route in equatorial regions. This impressive enterprise was the dream of Cecil Rhodes, an empire builder. It will be built, but as a carrier of through traffic its prospect is not bright. It will be 6,850 miles in length and at the end of 1911 four-fifths of it was in operation. The only road to which it can be compared is the Trans-Siberian, and Africa needs such a line far less than Asia. The Cape-to- Cairo line does, not tap a land-locked, remote continental center. When completed, it will be a very long railway paralleled the whole way by the open sea from which it is easily accessible and with which it cannot compete in freight rate, if perchance it can in speed. There can be no better indicator of its probable traffic function than an examination of the traffic on that part of the Cape-to- Cairo line which already reaches nearly 3,000 miles from Cape Town into the tropics far beyond the Zambezi. This road has already five side connections tapping it from the south and east and the completed line will probably have as many more. The chief function of the Cape-to-Cairo line will be to connect a number of shorter lines that come inland from the various eastern ports. There is surprisingly little freight passing from Cape Town to Johannesburg and Pretoria, half way along the first 2,000 miles already in operation. These cities receive most of their imports through the side railroads from Delagoa Bay and Durban, a tendency which will leave the completed Cape-to- ■ Cairo line no more through trade than exists on the line from Bordeaux to Odessa. The side lines which will break the hope of the through traffic are being constructed in advance of the through lines, as was the case with the line from Beira. The line from Mombasa to Lake Victoria 585 miles (the Uganda Railway), piercing the very equatorial middle of the route, has been com- pleted for several years. It connects the steamers on Lake Victoria with the Indian Ocean and also promises to be a link in a system across Africa from east to west. A railway is projected 1 1 There is a mighty difference between the seriousness with which we can take the projection of railways in Tropic America and Tropic Africa. Many of the American governments are poor, weak, corrupt, and properly devoid of credit. They cannot build roads or operate them ; private enterprise must therefore build them for profit and then endure the disturbances of civil THE TRADE AND ROUTES OF AFRICA 809 from Stanley Falls on the navigated upper Congo to the African lakes, so that this district will probably be able to export its produce by the east or west route. In the next colony to the southward, German. East Africa, a subsidized railroad, is being finished in less than contract time. It connects the port of Dar-es-salam opposite Zanzibar with Tabora, a town of 40,000 people on the plateau 528 miles inland. It is expected that the men now employed as carriers in the man caravans will be of great benefit as laborers on the plantations. A railroad is also planned from Lake Nyassa to the excellent har- bor of Pemba. Large areas in this east African region, now coming into the European commercial zone, are high, with a climate dry enough and cool enough to be free from many tropic disadvantages, and Europeans are now beginning to colonize here in the hope of producing cattle and other agricultural produce in large quanti- ties. The plateau near the Uganda railroad is 5,450 feet high at Nairobi and European ranchers have taken up a million acres of land. In the southeastern part of the Belgian Congo, a few white colonists are settling in an area estimated to have forty million acres (five times the size of Belgium) suitable for white colonization. The traffic possibilities of the central African railways may therefore be great. West African Highways. — West Africa shows an amount of railroad building that is likely to be surprising to any one who has not followed it closely. On the west coast the German railways run from Walvisch Bay on the Tropic of Capricorn to Windhoek, 237 miles from wars. The African colony represents the firm hand of Europe and abundant credit. The European government backs up its colony; the colonial council dominated by Europeans uses the colonial credit revenues to build and operate a railroad at a loss or no profit in the hope of building up the colony. Thus the British East African Protectorate spends $28,000,000 to build the Uganda railway. After having been in operation several years it carried during the fiscal year 1911, 77,000 tons of freight, 400,000 pas- sengers, spent a million dollars, took in a million and a half, leaving net earnings of half a million which should all be spent to keep the meter gauge line in order. This possible dividend of less than 2 per cent, after years of waiting is no surprise or deterrant. It is the European way of doing things. In the same year the management began a 93-mile branch line to connect the Soda Lake with the main line 282 miles inland. In Latin America a ruling dictator will grant concessions (franchises) for railway building and the concessionaries try to tempt private capitalists to build the line. Meanwhile the railroad is "projected." 810 COMMERCIAL GEOGRAPHY the coast and to Tsumet, 359 miles from the coast. The German Colonial activity has resulted in the construction in a few years of 1,000 miles of railroad in this southwest African Colony where the rainfall is so slight that the chief dependence of com- merce will be upon copper and other minerals. At present the trade is surprisingly slight. There is scarcely cause for the British alarm that has been expressed in some quarters for fear that the Windhoek road of 24-inch gauge, may cross 700 miles of desert and supply European goods to the cities of the Boer colonies at the expense of her own shorter and more efficient railways. It would, however, save some 2,000 miles of sea travel. In Portuguese Angola, in 10° south latitude, the Benguella rail- way with terminus at the Lobito Bay, is being pushed rapidly eastward, 200 miles being open in 1910. The plan is to connect it with the Cape-to-Cairo line 1,200 miles to the eastward, but the immediate object is to tap the famous Katanga Copper district. From Loando and Massamedes in the same colony railroads are being pushed eastward. These roads are in a colony said to be rich in malachite, copper, iron, petroleum and salt. At present rubber and coffee are the chief exports and . textiles the chief import. The Congo Biver Route. — -The Congo River is at present the longest and the greatest central African highway. Eleven steamers ply between the seaport of Banana at the mouth, and Matadi, less than 100 miles inland, where a 250-mile railway connects with the steamers at Leopoldville, on Stanley Pool above the numerous falls. The commercial changes of the new Africa can be easily inferred from the effects of the railroad from Matadi to Leopoldville. The journey used to require 20 days, with great loss of life. The freight rate was 2 £ per load of 65 to 75 pounds, about $250 per ton. The journey now takes two days and the freight rate is $3 per ton. From Leopoldville eastward the Congo is navigated for 1,200 miles to Stanley Falls on the equator. Here another railroad, to be com- pleted in 1910, connects with several hundred miles of navi- gable waterway on the upper river, giving steam service 2,250 miles from the sea. Several branches are also navigable. Still further extensions are promised, in railways now building from Nyangwe, on the navigable upper Congo, to Lake Tanganyika, THE TRADE AND ROUTES OF AFRICA 811 900 miles, with its steamboats; from Stanleyville below the falls to Lake Albert Nyanza, and from Stanleyville to the rich copper deposits in the Katanga region of the Upper Congo. In 1911 there were thirty-seven steamers on the Congo above Leopoldville and a contract had been let to lay a 250-mile pipe line along the railroad to enable the river steamers to use crude oil instead of wood. The commerce of the Belgian Congo, over $30,000,000, 1910, practically that of the Congo River, is large for Africa, and shows rapid increase. The total imports and exports were twenty-five times as large in 1900 as in 1887, and doubled in the next 10 years. The chief exports are rubber, ivory, palm nuts, palm oil; the chief imports cotton cloth and metal wares. The Trade and Routes of the Gulf of Guinea Region. — Rail- road building and the opening of trade routes are going on quite as rapidly in the jungle-clad region of the equatorial forests and the Gulf of Guinea, the late haunt of the slave, as in the less humid and more wholesome southern region. The natural riches are great; the population is large; and the whole district, except the small territory of Liberia, 1 is in the hands of energetic colonizing nations with strong governments and abundant capital. In German Cameroon 320 miles of railway are planned; but, in the large British territory of Nigeria which joins it, much more extensive commercial equipments are in progress. Akassa, the chief port, has several hundred miles of navigable lower Niger adjacent to it, with twenty-two government steamers and many barges upon it; and, from the head of navigation, the government has completed a 400-mile railroad (3 1/2-foot gauge) to Kano, a caravan trade center and commercial metropolis in the latitude of Lake Tchad in the Soudan, 900 miles (4 days) from the sea. This is one of the least known but apparently the most populous and promising parts of tropic Africa. The latest geographers report cities of 60,000 to 100,000 people, who are, for Africa, industrious; and the climate and the country are suited to live 1 Liberia was established under American auspices in the administration of President Monroe as a free state, a refuge for freed slaves. It has been almost swallowed up by the encroachments of Britain and France and was recently saved from what threatened to be final absorption by the inter- vention of the United States. 812 COMMERCIAL GEOGRAPHY stock. It is a transition region between the desert to the north and the jungle to the south, and is said to be good for cotton growing. It is Africa's land of promise, with a cotton area in Nigeria alone of five-sixths as large as that of the United States, and the British government is not neglecting it. Two railroads have already been built to the Niger, which is being bridged (1911). One city on the road from Logos to the Niger, Ibadan, has 200,000 population. West of this is the French Colony of Da- homey with the port of Kotonu, which had, in 1908, 192 miles of railroad, going northward into the interior, 125 miles under construction and the whole line to be 400 miles long. West of Dahomey is German Togoland where the port of Lome had in the above mentioned year 100 miles of railroad in operation and 108 under construction. West of Togoland is Ashanti or the British Gold Coast Colony. Its port of Sekondi, terminus of a 168-mile railway line, is regarded as the scene of important future trade for which jetties, piers and storehouses are already built. Be- tween Ashanti and Liberia is the French Colony of the Ivory Coast, which, extending from the port of Petit Bassam (now Port Bouet), had 124 miles of railway and more under construction (1909). West of Liberia is British Sierra Leone with the port of Freetown whence a 30-inch gauge railway runs 227 miles into the interior to gather up their exports of rubber, kola nuts, ginger, peanuts, and palm nuts. The rapidly-growing trade of all this Guinea region is primarily the export of rubber, palm oil, palm kernels, mahogany, cocoa, and a few forest products in return for textiles, metals, liquors, salt, etc. The West African Route to Timbuktu. — Aias for the myths of geography, Timbuktu, with its jingling rhymes, typical of remoteness, has become a commercial reality of steam and rail and telegraph; and its safe steam route to the sea has sadly cut into the traffic of the tedious caravans that had for ages wended their way from one oasis full of robbers to another on the long journey to the Mediterranean coast. To reach the region of Timbuktu, another far-reaching trade route is being established in Senegal, French West Africa. The chief port is Dakar with six lines of European steamers calling. From Dakar a railroad 164 miles in length connects with Saint Louis at the mouth of the Senegal River, a stream which has been much improved for navi- THE TRADE AND ROUTES OF AFRICA 813 gation so that steamers now ascend in the rainy season to Kayes, 570 miles. Kayes in turn is the western end of a 344-mile rail- road to the navigable upper Niger, on which steamers run to a point 150 miles below Timbuktu, where the river becomes choked with flying sand from Sahara. The Algerian Railway system has already crossed the Atlas Mountains; but, if continued across the Sahara, it will be for political and military, and not for commercial purposes; and it is not likely to play an important part in the economic future of the western Soudan. French publicists are, however, strenu- ously urging the construction of a line to Lake Tchad and the central Soudan. A more promising and certainly a more natural route to the Lake Tchad region is that afforded by the lower Niger and its navigable branch, the Benue, coming from the di- rection of Lake Tchad. There will soon be even a second rail route to the upper Niger, for the French are building a second road, 365 miles in length, from the port of Konakry, capital of French Guinea, to the Niger at Kourassa and 49 miles farther to Kankan. The road was about half done in 1908. The trade of Senegal differs from that of the other colonies to the east of it in that peanuts comprise the bulk of the export. The Barbary States. — The trade routes of north Africa are very simple. In French Algeria and Tunis the railroads serve the ports of Oran, Algiers and Tunis, where many steamers call and whence direct lines go to Marseilles, which is one of the great markets for the agricultural products of the semi-arid Bar^ bary States with their wheat, wine, olives, wool, and early vege- tables. Magador, Tangier, and Rabat in Morocco and Tripoli in Tripoli are the centers of caravan trade in regions yet without order. Minor Lines of Transport. — Africa has of course many minor trade routes and some railroads that do not merit consideration among the leading routes. For example, there is a very long list of little stopping places on the west coast of Africa where the European steamers get the mahogany, rubber, palm nuts, and ivory which the natives assemble by any and all means in their power. At several points on the east and west coasts are short lines of railway reaching inland from coast ports. Some of them may 814 COMMERCIAL GEOGRAPHY become routes of importance. Probably the most promising is that from Djibouti, opposite Aden, which is intended to reach the Abyssinian plateau, and develop a large railway trade in place of the present caravan traffic. The highlands of Abyssinia possess a more wholesome climate than most parts of Africa, and a vigorous people. If peace and settled political conditions pre- vail, the Abyssinian railway may become one of the most pros- perous in tropical Africa; at present it has the drawback, unusual in Africa, of having no government to build or subsidize it. In conclusion the two main facts should be kept in view — that the main problem for African trade is in every case the estab- lishment of rail outlets to the sea; and, second, that the interior has important isolated waterways which it has been the first problem of the railroad builders to tap and develop. The almost feverish activity at railroad building in tropic Africa and European dependencies in Malaysia in comparison to the lethargy that prevails in similar independent American regions is interesting evidence in support of Mr. Kidd's 1 thesis that the enterprises and governments of the Tropics must be dominated from the temperate zone. The African trade, like that of South America, is served in different sections by different sets of steamship lines. This is very properly so, not only because of distance, but because of the different commercial requirements of equatorial savages in breech cloth and imperial British in broadcloth at Cape Town. South African Connections.— The first trade region in point of age and present importance is that of British South Africa, served by. several lines of splendid steamers working in unison and giving service from Liverpool, New York, London, South- ampton, and the Continent. The liners engaged in the South African trade pay no heed whatever to all the rest of Africa, but steam directly from Europe and America to Cape Town and usually skirt the coast to Lorenco Marques, stopping at Port Elizabeth, East London, and Durban. Tropic West Africa. — The trade of tropic west Africa is served by a number of lines of steamers that skirt the coast from the Sahara to the Kalihari deserts. The number of ports visited is indefinite, some of the lines going all the way to Walvisch Bay 1 Benjamin Kidd, Control of the Tropics. THE TRADE AND ROUTES OF AFRICA 815 and others attending to the needs of various smaller sections of the coast. These steamship lines make of Liverpool, London, Hamburg, Antwerp, Havre, and Marseilles the great depots of west African trade; and, from and through these ports, America and the rest of the world do most of their trading with the African coasts. Liverpool specializes in mahogany logs and divides the rubber with London and Hamburg, Antwerp gets the ivory, and Marseilles is the leader in palm oil and peanuts. East Africa. — The trade of the east African coast is served by several lines of European steamers — English, French, and Ger- man — that come through the Mediterranean. One is a line of subsidized German steamers which come down the east coast, from Aden past German east African colonies and home by the Cape and the German Southwest African colonies. These Ger- man steamers pass over this route alternately in opposite direc- tions. A line of smaller steamers connects with dozens of steam- ers a month at Aden, and runs up and down the coast to Zan- zibar, an important trading center and the capital of an island producing nearly $2,000,000 worth of cloves per year. A steamship line runs from Zanzibar to Bombay and practically all of the commerce of the coast is carried on by a few thousand East Indians. Like west Africa, the chief imports of east Africa are textiles, metals, foods, and liquors, and the exports are hides, rubber, spices, and coprah. 2. THE GOOD HOPE ROUTE Separated from, yet attached to, the trade of- Africa is the Good Hope route. This is the oldest of the great ocean trade routes. It is practically co-eval with the history of America, and the commercial history of this contested route is told in the colonies and peoples that are now to be found in South Africa. The Portuguese discovered and for a time monopolized the route, and their decayed colonies still exist to the north and west of the Dutch states. When the Dutch had triumphed over Portugal they rejoiced in the monopoly of the commerce of the Far East. In the seventeenth century this trade was carried on almost exclusively by the way of the Cape of Good Hope, where the Dutch made settlements that served as a half-way post and 816 COMMERCIAL GEOGRAPHY « o a J) H I o THE TRADE AND ROUTES OF AFRICA 817 victualing station for the ships bound on the long and tedious voyage to the Indies. Then followed a century of commercial and naval struggle between Holland, France, and England, with the triumph of England. Her ships became the predominant ones rounding the Cape. She won and yet controls the colonies which had their start as the Portugese and Dutch half-way posts on the route to India, and her people drove the Dutch back toward the Portuguese. The Good Hope route is really a group of routes rather than a single route and actually narrows to a single track at no place in its prodigious length. The nearest approach is just below the point of Africa, where for a short distance the steam and sail tracks are brought near each other. It is at least threefold beyond that point; and, like the Mediterranean-Asiatic, it has double termini from the eastern and western shores of the north Atlantic — the English Channel and the New York Bay. Beyond the point of Africa one branch turns to the north and follows the east coast of Africa, another goes to the East Indies, and a third directly to the south shore of Australia. The steamer tracks in the Atlantic go so nearly north and south that there is little great circle curvature noticeable; but the great circle route from the Cape to Wellington, New Zealand, cuts off 750 miles from the distance between the same ports via Mel- bourne. Unfortunately, the great circle reaches a latitude of so much ice and bad weather that it is not much used as a route. Sailing Vessel Tracks. — The Good Hope route passes over a part of the world containing great expanses of ocean and com- parative barrenness of land, giving sea voyages of great length between the isolated land areas. In this respect it differs radically from the Mediterranean-Asiatic route. The great dis- tances from the Cape of Good Hope to Europe or America, or to any other lands, have combined with the favorable winds of the Atlantic and Indian Oceans to make this route the last great stronghold of the sailing vessel. Indeed, until quite recently it has been declared that this was a stronghold from which steam could never displace sail. This prediction has, however, been disproved by the great improvement of the steamer and its adoption within the past fifteen years for a part of the trade of every important division of 818 COMMERCIAL GEOGRAPHY the globe, including the various subdivisions of the Good Hope route. The peculiar location and windings of the sailing tracks are explained in terms of the prevailing winds. For the sailing captain the quickest way is the shortest, regardless of actual dis- tance; for the steamer captain the shortest way is usually the quickest. Or, putting it in another way, the steam navigator being practically independent of wind and current, thinks in miles and goes from point to point and headland to headland in nearly straight lines. The sailing captain thinks in days. If the vessel makes 30 miles a day by the direct route and 100 miles a day by the circuitous route where the winds are good, he makes a great detour and saves time. The peculiarities of wind and current often make detours advisable. In fact, it is almost in- variably true that the steam route and the sail route between two points differ in location, and if they do happen to agree one way they are apt to differ on the return, for it is uncommon for the sailing vessel to go and return over the same track. All of these sailing peculiarities are admirably illustrated on the Good Hope route with its double sets of crooked sailing tracks. To understand them one must know the main facts of the wind systems. In the Atlantic north of 25° or 30° north latitude, depending on the season, the wind, except when disturbed by cyclonic storms, is normally from the west at all seasons, and from the southern edge of these westerlies, down to the vicinity of the equator, the trade winds blow uniformly from the northeast. South of the equator the trade winds are duplicated, but blowing this time from the southeast. Near the latitude of Good Hope the prevailing westerlies are again reached. They blow here with great force ("roaring forties") and sweep unimpeded around the world. The trade winds blowing from Spain toward Brazil make it necessary for a vessel from New York to go nearly across the Atlantic with the westerly wind before turning into the trades in company with the European contingent, which has had a very direct sail. The southeast trades can be crossed at best advan- tage by taking a right-angle course, close to the coast of Brazil, and proceeding southward into the prevailing westerlies before THE TRADE AND ROUTES OF AFRICA 819 which the vessel rides as far as possible before turning northward to her destination. A glance at the map shows that the combined result of the northern and southern westerly winds is to give the track from New York to Good Hope the shape of a rough letter S reversed. Vessels rounding Good Hope from the east hug the coast as closely as possible to avoid the west winds, and if bound for New York they have a direct course going with one trade wind and at right angles to the other. The Indian Ocean has a different wind system, with a peculiar- ity in it. In the winter it is like that of the Atlantic, minus a northern zone of westerly winds. In the summer the northern (northeast) trade wind is reversed, and blows toward Asia as a strong southwest wind called the monsoon. These winds make it necessary for the winter vessel from Good Hope to Bombay to creep around by Ceylon to get in a position to cross the northeast trade wind at a right angle by going up the coast of Hindustan. When the summer monsoon begins, the out-going vessel from Bombay must take the same track as the in-coming vessel in winter, for in no other way can she utilize the southwest monsoon which sets squarely toward the coast. Coal Supply. — The coal supply upon this route is unsatis- factory, both in the supply along the route and the conditions for transporting it thither. In this respect it is probably the worst of the great Ocean routes — another factor helping to explain the late survival of the sailing vessel preeminence there. The vessels starting from Great Britain or the United States do not approach another coal-producing country until Australia is reached, full half way round the world from the starting-point. Cape Verde Islands possess coaling stations that are sometimes used; but the dearth of any adequate return freight from this region, as is the case at Cape of Good Hope, makes high-priced coal at the few ports along the route. Consequently, the vessels going to Africa or Australia aim to make little use of intermediate coaling stations, although in their total C a P e Town and Cape Verde are stations of importance, being passed each year by many ships. Traffic. — The maps clearly show that this is a long route for any of the Asiatic traffic. The opening of the Suez Canal, with 820 COMMERCIAL GEOGRAPHY its short-cut connection, was a great blow to the traffic of the Good Hope route, which, before that time, had almost had a four- century monopoly of the trade between Asia and the West. The growth of the Suez traffic cut into the Good Hope traffic, but the great expansion of commerce during the past forty years has caused a rejuvenation of the commerce which passed to and around the Cape. Australia and Africa have risen from the ranks of outposts of civilization to states producing and consuming freight by the millions of tons. By 1910 an occasional vessel desiring to go east was too deep to pass through the Suez Canal, which the proprietors were thus compelled to deepen. The traffic of South Africa is a very peculiar one in the world's trade. It is a region of sparse population and comparatively recent settlement. Such countries are usually producers of large quantities of raw material and consumers of manufactures, which comprise a much smaller tonnage. Such has been the commercial history of practically every country in the New World; but, owing to the scanty rainfall, which precludes extensive agri- culture in South Africa, and the great predominance of gold and diamond mining among the industries there, South Africa im- ports several million tons per year of coal, lumber, grain, flour, machinery, and general manufactures, and pays for them in such valuable commodities as gold, diamonds, ostrich feathers, wool, mohair, hides, and skins. The old saying that "good goods come in small packages" here holds true, so that a vessel carrying a cargo to South Africa faces the almost inevitable prospect of going away practically empty. The Cape is therefore a scat- tering point for vessels in ballast seeking freight. Some go west to South America, others pass to Bombay for grain and cotton; to Rangoon for rice; to Java for sugar; or to Calcutta for jute. The largest traffic movement that passes the Cape is the trade of Australia. Despite the existence of the Suez Canal and the splendid German and English steamer lines which reach Australia by that route, the bulk of Australian commerce follows the cheaper open-sea route around Africa, which is after all but 1,000 miles longer. Only the mail, passenger, and a limited freight traffic are taken by the lines on the shorter, but more expen- sive Suez route. The cargo steamers, of which there are many, THE TRADE AND ROUTES OF AFRICA 821 find it more profitable to follow the ancient way discovered by De Gama than the new one dug by De Lesseps. A third traffic division parsing South Africa is that in the sail- ing vessels, which still set out from Europe and the United States for east Asia. This traffic out-bound is very largely composed of refined petroleum, which is consumed in astonishing quantities in India, China, and Japan. These vessels commonly enter east Asian waters by way of Sunda Straits, between Sumatra and Java ; and return by the same route, although there are times in winter when the dangers of the China Sea are avoided by a detour, taking the vessel around the continent of Australia before it turns north to reach Asia. A common return cargo for these ships is East Indian sugar or rice. Upon the whole, the traffic and the consequent vessel move- ment upon the Good Hope route are peculiarly one-sided. Much (in tons) goes out and less returns, and at every turn the ships leave this route and go seeking cargo to return to the north Atlantic by some other route. The traffic of the Good Hope route has limitations upon its future. There are not at the present time 10 million people in South Africa and Australia combined. Owing to the limited agricultural resources of these British colonies the population will not grow rapidly. That of Australia is almost static. Any trade to east Asia cannot be expected to pass around Africa indefinitely with the present decline in the use of the sailing vessel. The trade of the Good Hope route is therefore largely limited to such part of the Australian and African traffic as will continue to use it in preference to some other route, as Panama and Suez. This trade from the regions now containing 10 millions must naturally be vastly less than that of the Medi- terranean-Asiatic route, which has upon its lines a population nearly a hundred times as numerous but with far fewer com- mercial wants than the inhabitants of the British colonies in the southern hemisphere. These people are, and will continue to be, among the heaviest per capita traders, while the Asiatic peoples are and will long be among the lightest. The future of the American trade with South Africa and Australasia is particularly bright, because these British colonies are in the same stage of industrial development as parts of the 822 , COMMERCIAL GEOGRAPHY American West. We have had experience with their kind of physical problems, our agricultural machinery is adapted to their kind of land, as our mining machinery is adapted to their mines, and there is every reason to expect a continued and increasing trade in American machinery and supplies for the development of these new lands, while our mills and tanneries are increasingly dependent upon their wool and hides and skins. The fact that South Africa has not been equipped by nature to start off as a great grain grower by extensive agriculture does not prevent her from having room for considerable areas under irrigation and possibly for grain growing without irrigation if improved varieties of grain are used. The same developments can extend Australia's production. Freight Kates to Australia. — Freight is carried from the north Atlantic to Australia halfway around the world for half a cent a pound — emphatic illustration of the fact that water trans- portation is cheaper by far than land transportation. The vagaries of freight rate, as set by man in the exercise of the commercial propensity to get all he can, are well illustrated by the following extract from the published report of the Man- chester Association of Importers and Exporters of 1910. "At the present time textiles from New York, with trans-shipment at Liverpool, are carried by the White Star Line to Melbourne at 37s. 6d. ($9.12) per ton, while the rate charged for carrying textiles of British manufacture from Liverpool to Melbourne is 55s. ($13.38) — and by the same steamer from Liverpool." The explanation is found in the fact that there was a rate war on between New York and Australia and a rate agreement was in force between England and Australia. CHAPTER XI THE TRADE AND ROUTES~OF~AUSTRALASIA AND THE SOUTH PACIFIC A Watery Desert. — The South Pacific and Indian Oceans are a realm of waters, almost a world of waters, a saline, watery desert in which Australia and New Zealand are but little more than oases, and one of them, Australia, is largely desert. Com- pared to this wet desert the world's dry deserts are but insignifi- cant scraps. The Pacific is classed as one of the oceans, but it is almost as large as all the rest of them combined. It is more than twice as large as the Atlantic and has an area estimated at 70 million square miles — four times as large as Asia, ten times as large as North America, more than one-third of the entire surface of the globe — one and a third times the area of the entire land surface of the world. Its width along the equator between the mainland of Asia near Singapore and South America is practically half the circumference of the globe and nearly four times as wide as the North Atlantic. Nor is the Indian to be classed among the minor oceans. As Australia and New Zealand are the dominant and almost the only commercial factors in the South Pacific and Indian Oceans, their trade and commerce should be first described. The Routes of Australia. — The problem of Australian routes is fundamentally different from that of Africa. There is no populous rain-drenched interior, with mighty rivers tumbling with the power of Niagara over the margins of a continental plateau. About all that can be said in a commercial way of much of Australia is that it is on the map. It is an immense arid and semi-arid stretch with a good eastern margin and a fair southwestern corner. Large tracts in the central and western parts have never been crossed by any explorer, and many explorers have perished in attempted explorations. The agri- culture is practically all east of the Pacific watersheds except 823 824 COMMERCIAL GEOGRAPHY a little in south Australia and a few irrigation settlements; and by the time the western boundary of New South Wales is reached the desert becomes practically absolute and even the hardy sheep herder must give up. The most spectacular route in all Australia is for the trans- mission of ideas not goods — the desert telegraph line erected at great hardship across the center of the continent to the north shore, there to connect with the Asiatic cable system and Europe. :33" ^b*-. WESTERN APBTKAEIA ! **»' A V iS T R\A SOUT' *=» / , / = / / °j , / New r~l. n ^"w" T C Coral •TEEKltrORYi < ^^S "^- \ C MM 1 , o n/w e: a l?t h ^Longreach "•ylRocknamro 4^ Ubany L| I 0----N- !■ AUSTBAlTi\Ai »»nl>« y. QIBrJ Vi £7 hull / Brisbane T 7 / / NorfoHcI^ S 6' sO C ^E' A\N /m Auckland? ^North Island U Railroads: in Operation under Construction t-t- Steamship Lines: — Cable Lines: — «-■■■ ' Ar | yrv!fi&atu»o«ton Tasmanip? ^H bart ^^^" —*-4 f^ob DOMISIOlTOF ■"HEW ZEALASI^-V'"^elling South Island^ JV 7^ Invereargill£f*cV "Orci, Scale of Statute "Miles Fig. 239. — Trade route map of Australia. The proposed 1 railroad over this route is a political not an economic expedient. The next most spectacular thing is the pipe line which carries water from the mountains back of Perth (west Australia) many scores of miles eastward into the desert to the new town around the gold diggings of Coolgardie. 1 "The Commonwealth Government pledges itself to build a railway con- necting Port Darwin on the north, the port of the Northern Territory, with the railway system of South Australia. It is estimated that this railway expenditure will amount to about 850,000,000. This Northern Territory has 523,620 square miles, or about one-sixth of the total area of Australia. Except for the small settlement at Port Darwin, it has scarcely any white population, most of it being an empty wilderness, the total population of the territory being estimated at 2,967 people, of whom two- thirds are Asiatics" (U. S. Con. Report, Jan. 5, 1911). THE TRADE AND ROUTES OF AUSTRALASIA 825 The inland trade routes of the continent are exceedingly simple, consisting, aside from a little fitful navigation of the Murray and Darling Rivers, of comparatively short railway lines from the few good ports to the farms of the coast lands and the pastures of the interior. These ports, in the order of their importance, Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide, have a surprising concentration of the population of the colonies in which they are located, usually about a third of all the people being in these cities. This seems to be a condition common in newly settled regions, and a duplicate is found in our Pacific coast. The good harbor seems to get the start; the railways are built there; trade centers there; and this advantage of an early start gives no other place a chance to make a beginning. In Australia the additional political advantage of their being colonial capitals is also an important factor in letting the three ports monopolize the trade of large states. This gives great simplicity to the trade routes, which consist merely of rather thinly developed railway nets, with their foci at the port-capital. It is only in recent years that these capitals have been connected by rail. The almost unsettled Queensland, with its long coasts, has more ports and less railroads. The chief port is Brisbane, a city of 140,000 — about one-fourth the population of the colony — • which does much of its trading through Sydney, with the assist- ance of coasting steamers which do an important trade in Australia. The whole northern and northwestern coast is virtually uninhabited, and the trade of west Australia is chiefly gathered at Freemantle, which has a railroad to the gold-fields in the desert. This road is now being connected by the Govern- ment, with the railway out of eastern Australia. It requires hundreds of miles of track through this uninhabited arid waste. It promises to be another monument to politics, not industry. Australia's Trade Connection with the Eest of the World. — Australia is practically at the other side of the world from the United States and Great Britain, and is at the end of all routes that reach it — the European mail route that comes down from Ceylon where it leaves the Mediterranean Asiatic route, the smaller branch line that threads its way from Singapore through Toures Strait to Brisbane and Sydney, the freight lines that 826 COMMERCIAL GEOGRAPHY pass Good Hope, and the steamer lines from the Pacific coast of the United States and Canada. From the standpoint of traffic the Good Hope route far out- weighs all others. Australia sends over this line to Great Britain frozen meat, wool, hides and skins, butter, gold and copper. In return for these staples come British machinery, cotton goods, woolen goods and a whole list of manufactured articles that are required by a highly civilized agricultural community doing but little, manufacturing. Australia sends wheat, but sometimes the conditions which prevail in South Africa are repeated in Australia, and there is no export. The chief products are meat and wool — which have an average value of nearly ten cents a pound — supplemented by a large amount of gold and some copper. Consequently, the Australian imports of lumber, wood, and bulky manufactures sometimes make more tons than the export; and the vessels in Australia are in straits for out-freight. This situation is mostly found in the port of Sydney, which is due to its being the terminal port for nearly all vessels going to Australia, and the natural end of a voyage. Fortunately for the vessels seeking profitable employment, Sydney has the great advantage of being near the Australian coal-fields at Newcastle but 60 miles away. This lack of other export freight has placed Australia in a position to ship coal from the east coast as a ballast substitute. It is carried to Java, Singapore and even East Indian ports, where rice is secured. Sailing vessels take coal to Hawaii, a sugar-exporting island, or to San Francisco, where wheat is secured, or to Chile, where it is exchanged for nitrate of soda, thus permitting vessels to circumnavigate the world. The traffic from New York over this route to Australia fills many ships a year and is largely composed of lumber and wood manufactures, iron and steel goods, agricultural and other machinery, leather goods, and a host of miscellaneous small articles. We import but little from Australia except wool; and, as we get much of that via the London auctions, the vessels that carry American produce out usually join the Sydney fleet that goes cargo hunting. New Zealand. — New Zealand, long narrow islands with a row of good harbors, exceeds Australia in the simplicity of its inland THE TRADE AND ROUTES OF AUSTRALASIA 827 routes. Invercargill, Dunedin, Lyttleton, Wellington, Napier, and Auckland — all have short railways to the farms and ranches. It differs from Australia only in that the better rainfall makes better grass and hence a better supply of butter for export. Otherwise it is like Australia in its exports and imports, which are predominantly with Britain, and the place where half the property of British Australasia is still owned, the natural market for the products and the place that most Australasian families still think of as the old home. Fig. 240. — Routes of Southern and Eastern Pacific Ocean. W — winter. S — summer. Some steamers go directly to New Zealand from New York and Great Britain, but they usually stop en route at Melbourne, and some continue the journey from Sydney to Wellington. There are good inter-colonial steamship lines between the various Australasian ports. The Route across the Pacific. — Although Australia and New Zealand are upon the edge of the Pacific, their commerce 828 COMMERCIAL GEOGRAPHY has surprisingly little to do with that ocean. As a result of its enormous size the rather surprising fact develops that the Pacific Ocean is practically not crossed by any important trade routes — they skirt its shores. (A globe is necessary for correct impression.) We have already seen in the account of the north Pacific trade route how that route follows the shores of the American and Asiatic continents from Panama to Singapore. The trade of South America follows down the Pacific shore to creep out of that ocean through a hole in the mountain wall — the Straits of Magellan. The Australian coal ships swing across the southern margin of the ocean to the nitrate ports and then follow the shore. Even the route from Australia to Panama, in taking advantage of the great circle, swings so far to the southward that it passes between the islands of New Zealand and follows much nearer the edge than the middle of the ocean. Some scattering vessels — chiefly sail, go with Australian coal ballast into the north Pacific, but the only trade route in all this great ocean that may really be said to cross it, is that connecting Australasia with the Pacific coast of North America. The ports of Vancouver and San Francisco are connected with Australia and New Zealand by three rather infrequent lines of steamers. Two of these call at Hawaii and one at Tahiti, in the Society Islands. This is at present the quickest mail route from Australia to Europe because it uses the fast trains of America and the north Atlantic steamers, but the commerce is feeble both in fact and basis, since California and Australia are alike in products, race, density of population, and climate, and there is almost no cargo for the mail steamer to carry northward, and but little to go southward but lumber. Winds and Fuel Supply. — In most parts of the ocean the Pacific is well suited for the sailing vessel. In its northern and southern parts the trade winds blow as in the Atlantic, and to the north and south of these wind areas are the same zones of the west wind. The working out of the leading south Pacific vessel tracks shows most plainly the effect of these winds. The winter route from Sydney to San Francisco, for example, goes to the south of New Zealand and nearly 2,000 miles east of it before turning northward into the trade winds. By this deviation the vessel can pass through the southern trade winds almost before the THE TRADE AND ROUTES OF AUSTRALASIA 829 ■wind and take an approximately right-angle course across the northern trade-wind zone. The summer route between these same two ports shows the effect of the same winds, but also shows that the zones have shifted somewhat to the north with the movement of the seasons. The fact that the trade winds always blow away from the coast of lower and southern California makes it necessary for all sailing-vessel tracks into San Francisco to make a wide detour to the north to avoid the trades and come in before the west wind. The two great defects of the Pacific as an ocean for the easy devel- opment of sailing routes are the large zone of calms in the equato- rial region west of South America, and the ferocious storms of the Cape Horn region. The sailing-vessel route from San Francisco to Callao in Peru is a striking example of the influence of the doldrum or calm zone, to avoid which the vessel passes nearly 2,000 miles to the west of its destination and more than 1,000 miles to the south of it to get the proper angle to sail across the trade winds and entirely avoid the zone of calms, in which the vessels idly drift for days together. There have even been cases of whaling ships which have started from the southern hemisphere to make the northern whaling season and have entirely missed it by floating for months like seaweed in the doldrum calm. The winds around Cape Horn blow with a force rarely met elsewhere, and almost continually from the west. In ad- dition to this, snows and storms are of exceedingly frequent occurrence, and it is by no means uncommon for vessels to spend ten, twenty, or even thirty days in almost the same spot, beating vainly against the wind which will not let them round the cape from the Atlantic into the Pacific. This accounts for the fact that the sailing vessels regularly go to Australia from the Atlantic by way of Good Hope and return by Cape Horn, and there are cases of vessels that have tried to get into the Pacific around Cape Horn,- and after vain effort have given it up and gone eastward before the west wind to reach Chile or California. In the early days of steamers to Australia, the Peninsular and Oriental Steamship line (British mail) used to send its steamers home from New Zealand by the Straits of Magellan, thus regu- larly circumnavigating the globe, although no South American 830 COMMERCIAL GEOGRAPHY freight was sought except that of the Chilean port of Punta Arenas in the Straits. The route was selected because of the greater ease of steaming with wind and current and has now been given up in this period of more powerful and economically operated steamers. For steamers, the coal supply of the Pacific is better than one might expect from a consideration of the mere factors of size of the ocean and length of the routes. At each of the four corners of the Pacific is a coal-field — Japan, British Columbia, east Australia, and Chile. The central Pacific throngs with unnum- bered islands, many of them having good harbors, and about five of them being coaling stations. These are New Caledonia, Fiji, Samoa, and, to the north of the equator, Guam and Hawaii. Of these islands, not one, however, is regularly used as a coaling station by an important line of steamers, the common practice being for the regular vessels to proceed from mainland to main- land without adding to their stocks of coal. But each of the four coal-producing regions at the ocean's corners possesses important coaling stations for ocean steamers — namely, Japan, British Columbia, Australia, and Chile. The Future Traffic of the Pacific. — In the future as in the present the mid-Pacific promises to remain a realm little crossed by trade routes and bare of industry or the hope of industry. A vast stretch of ocean lying between New Guinea, Hawaii, and Japan is large enough for a continent, but absolutely uncrossed by any trade route worthy of the name. In this empty sea a new island might remain undiscovered for decades unless some whaler, or some investigating Drake or Darwin chance to sight it. With the exception of Hawaii, the only Pacific island producing large quantities of freight is the French island of New Caledonia, not far from Australia. The exports of nickel and other ores from this island furnish employment for a considerable number of vessels homeward bound for Australia. With these two exceptions, the vast Pacific is bare of islands which are capable of supporting commerce in any large modern sense. The myriads of coral islands are almost uniformly low and compara- tively barren. Most of them are unpeopled, and those that are inhabited, produce little but the coconut palm. The lands upon its southwestern edge partake of the inhospitality of its THE TRADE AND ROUTES OF AUSTRALASIA 831 middle, for in New Guinea and adjacent islands the cannibals are still eating exploring parties and it is small wonder that about the only vessels visiting these shores are the subsidized lines which the Germans send out in their effort to build up their sickly settlements into a colonial empire. The adjacent part of Australia, Queensland, has less than one inhabitant per square mile, including cities of about 200,000 total population; and most of the shore of northern Australia is of no more use to civilized man than is the middle of Borneo, or a section of Amazonian forest, five miles from a river or a part of Canada inland from Hudson Bay — all of which are utterly unused. CHAPTER XII THE WORLD CARRIERS AND THE PANAMA CANAL World commerce has a world mesh of trade routes. It also has world carriers in fleets of tramp steamships standing ready to go anywhere that ships can sail, and to pass from route to route as wagons pass from street to street. It also has world carriers in steamship companies whose services overreach any trade route and render astonishing feats in connecting a com- mercial community to its world environment. While we have long since learned to think of railroads as sys- tems, we are still prone to think of steamship lines as doing what the early railroads did — merely connecting two places. This idea must be discarded. The law of growth among steamship lines works surely to the development of trunks and branches, a development which has already taken place, although the branches are fewer than upon railroads. The improvement of the steamer and the use of the ocean cable gave the needed regu- larity, dependableness, and knowledge for the organization of ocean commerce and transportation into a regular and systematic service akin to that of the railroad. The great ocean lines sail with precision and regularity. To secure the supply of freight for these great lines, their managers have been compelled to establish smaller lines to supply and distribute the necessary cargo. The largest trans-Atlantic lines are, without exception, thus equipped at one or both of their termini. The North Ger- man Lloyd and the Hamburg- American connect at their European ends with lines running to South America, east Asia, and other distant parts of the world. They also connect with smaller lines plying to the near-by European ports and with steamers on the German rivers. These two German companies carry the same system even farther. Their trunk lines to east Asia are fed at Singapore and other eastern ports by lines of smaller Ger- 832 THE WORLD GARRIERS AND THE PANAMA CANAL 833 man steamers which traverse the eastern archipelagoes and the Asiatic coasts and rivers, collecting cargo for the trunk line sta- tions of the large steamers bound for Bremen or Hamburg, at which ports it is distributed by the European distributors referred to above or sent on to America by the trans-Atlantic lines. The Wilson Line from New York to Hull connects in that city with an enormous fleet of small steamers which thread the coast of the North Sea and reach all ports of importance in Scandinavia and along the Baltic. Some of the other British trans-Atlantic lines connect with British coasting lines and with the lines to Australia and other British colonies. The French and Italian trans-Atlantic lines are fed by fleets of Mediterranean coasters and trans-oceanic liners at Havre, Marseilles, and Genoa. The Cunard Line, giving a service from New York to Liverpool and from New York to southern Italy and Fiume, Austria, has a line connecting Liverpool and Fiume. These steamers call at more than twenty ports and gather freight which is to be transferred at the ends of the route to the next steamer bound for America. Other examples of this systematic trunk and feeder development of ocean service might be mentioned; but they would show no feature differing from the development of the examples cited or from the railroad and its branches except that the ocean service of single companies at times circumnavigates the globe and covers a much wider scope of territory than any railroad system the world can ever serve. The company that runs a line on one route only is at the mercy of any local fluctuation in traffic. A strike even might spoil the profits of a quarter; so might a drought or any local uncontrollable disturbance. Then, too, there are seasons in nearly all trades during which the traffic is abundant and others in which it is scarce. Just after harvest time, wheat, corn, and cotton go forward in quantity and the trade falls away to small proportions as the next harvest approaches. The steamship company with many lines can have its annual work evened up by seasonal prosperity in one quarter as dulness comes in another. Instead of having ships half idle on its one dull route, it can shift them to the prosperous route. As the vessels get old and anti- quated for the finer routes they can be shifted to a slower and inferior route. The greatest advantage, however, is the picking 834 COMMERCIAL GEOGRAPHY up of freight for the main lines, just as the branch roads feed a main trunk railroad. All these forces are welding the ocean carriers into ever- growing systems. The best example of this wide-reaching world carrier is fur- nished by the Hamburg-American Steamship Company. This one company dominates the metropolitan city of Hamburg and connects it with Montreal, Portland, Boston, New York, Phila- delphia, Baltimore, Newport News, New Orleans, and Galveston in the eastern United States. It sends steamers to Mexico, Central America, Panama, Colombia, Venezuela, and several services to the Lesser and Greater Antilles. They go to the Amazon, to the ports of central and south Brazil, to Uruguay and Argentine Republic, to Chile and Peru and on up the Pacific coast of America to the ports of United States. In Europe they circumnavigate the British Isles, skirt the coast of France, Spain, Portugal, and Italy, to the head of the Adriatic; they go in the Baltic to Russia and Finland and Sweden, and out in the Atlantic to Iceland and North Cape, and on to Arctic Spitzbergen in the summer. In Africa it touches at Alexandria and down the whole west coast as far as the mouth of the Congo. In Asia it serves Aden, the ports of Arabia, Persian Gulf, Ceylon, Calcutta, Straits Settlements, China, Korea, Siberia, Japan, and finally — and possibly most remarkable of all — it sends steamers thence across the Pacific to Portland, Oregon — a grand total of sixty- eight services crossing every ocean, touching all continents and every geographic and commercial zone. Extensions are in contemplation or contracted for. 1 Equally suggestive and almost equally far reaching is the joint organization of railroad and steamship lines. This practice, common in America, Europe, and Asia, probably reaches its highest development in the Canadian Pacific Railway which operates in connection with its trans-continental railway line a trans-Atlantic service to Europe and a trans-Pacific service to Japan, China, and Hong Kong. It also has a steamer line on the American Great Lakes. 1 As the book goes to press the news comes of the formation of larger and yet more comprehensive groups of British lines formed by the union of the Cunard Company with other companies serving practically all im- portant parts of the world. THE WORLD CARRIERS AND THE PANAMA CANAL 835 THE PANAMA CANAL Into this complex maze of world routes served by world carriers comes a new factor, the Panama Canal. This water- way will add to or take from everyone of the great ocean trunk routes. The north Atlantic, the Mediterranean Asiatic, the Good Hope, the South American, the north Pacific and the Pacific Coast (North American) Australasian. There is no continent, almost no important country even, that will not find a rearrangement in the route by which its goods go and come by sea. To their great relief, steamship lines by the score will rearrange their itineraries, and the tramp freighters by hundreds and thousands will find themselves unloosed from harassing restrictions and free to work their way around the world with a freedom that will redound to the benefit of hundreds of millions of men. The start forward to this, the greatest readjustment of all time, is not unlike the general movement that follows the signal of a policeman in a crowded street when he releases two masses of waiting men or vehicles after a parade has passed. The possible freight for the Panama Canal lies in four main zones; Pacific North America, Pacific South America, Australasia, and East Asia. Excepting the first, all of these are marginal traffic, traffic that can seek an alternative route. The great question is — What does it cost the ship to go around? To the time charterer the cost of ships in the market enables him to tell to a nicety what they cost — and this cost varies with freight rates, and they fluctuate through hundreds of per cents. SAVINGS BY THE PANAMA CANAL Nautical miles Days at 10 knots Days at 16 knots 5,666 23.1 14.2 5,666 23.1 14.2 4,403 17.8 10.9 1,540 5.9 3.5 836 COMMERCIAL GEOGRAPHY SAVINGS BY THE PANAMA CANAI^- Continued Nautical miles Days at 10 knots Days at 16 knots Liverpool to Yokohama -694 -2.4 -1.3 -2,776 -11. -6.8 -150 -.6 -.4 -2,336 -10.8 -6.1 1,564 6. 3.5 7,873 32.3 20. 7,873 32.3 20. 6,610 27. 16. 7 3,747 15.1 9.2 3,768 15.2 9.3 1,876 7.3 4.4 -18 41 3,932 15.8 9.7 New York to Adelaide 1,746 6.7 4.0 2,493 9.9 6.0 8,868 36.4 22.6 5,705 23.3 14.4 4,742 19.2 11.8 To appreciate fully the influence of the canal on rerouting of the world's shipping is a puzzle that requires careful working THE WORLD CARRIERS AND THE PANAMA CANAL 837 out. Will a tramp ship, returning to New York or Liverpool from a particular port, say Valparaiso or Sydney or Yokohama, use the Panama Canal ? The answer to that question is decided of course by the balance sheet. We can tell pretty well how much time it will save. But what is a ship's time worth? Its value fluctuates. Plainly the use of the canal by tramp steamers will fluctuate. In all four of the Panama trade zones the Pacific liner is getting an ever greater hold and the liner is rarely interested in getting to any one port. She makes a voyage and calls at many ports. The line manager is interested in getting to or from the end port of his chain. Thus Callao and Antofagasta and Iquique may be very important to the tramp, but the West Coast liner usually calls at each of these and at many other ports besides. The line manager in this region has two things to do; one is to call once at a whole string of ports, and to get his ship full of nitrate of soda so that she is sure to have a cargo. Nitrate is to the West Coast liner something to fill up on, a kind of traffic life pre- server. A Liverpool liner to South America usually finds Coronel, the South Chilean coal port (as far from the equator as New York), the farthest place in which it has interest, and the same vessel may and often does serve the coast to Guayaquil on the equator. The question then resolves itself into getting to or from Guayaquil and Coronel, and Coronel is but 1,089 miles (four days at 10 knots, 2.3 days at 16 knots) farther via Magellan than via Panama. It therefore looks quite feasible for those European vessels to go down through the Canal, deliver their manufactures, finish their business at Coronel, and come home by Magellan, even though the straits will put up the insurance and may make a delay of a day. So far as the United States is concerned, the westward jutting continent of South America increases Coronel distances, with savings of 13.2 and 8.1 days for 10- and 16-knot speeds to New York and 17.7 and 10.7 days for similar speeds to New Orleans. Australasia offers an interesting line situation. The line traffic is in the main a three-port service to Adelaide, Melbourne, and Sydney. From New York to Sydney the saving is nearly 4,000 miles, and when the end port, Adelaide, is reached, the 838 COMMERCIAL GEOGRAPHY ship is still 1, 746 miles nearer home via Panama than by Good Hope. And then there is the coal monopoly of Sydney to serve as a magnet to coal-using vessels. Those facts seem to incline the New York Australasian trade to the Canal. New Orleans would have greater distance savings, but there is small comfort for any canal enthusiast in the dis- tance figures from Britain to Australasia. If we wish to contemplate the greatest change that the canal will make we must look at the commerce of the Orient and of the Pacific coast of America. We have here a blind alley. The canal will open out the blind end. The trade of China and Japan is peculiarly one-sided from the tonnage standpoint. This has caused one of the most astonishing voyages in the world — the continuance of European liners from Japan to the United States for part cargo and their return to Europe via Japan and China and the Suez Canal with its high tolls. The Panama Canal will be a great gain to the owners of such lines. The blind alley will open. By sending the vessels on to the eastward they will reach Liverpool in about half the time now required to go via the Arabian Sea. One of the most interesting things in all the Pan- ama traffic re-arrangements will be this round the world move- ment of vessels engaged in the Oriental trade. The table of distances shows that Yokohama is surprisingly near the distance divide from Liverpool by the two canals and it is quite likely that the advantages in favor of Panama will offset that differ- ence. The magnets of American freight and probably also of American coal, will continue to exert their influence and the ships of Europe and eastern America may go around the world one way or the other according to the demands of particular services. It is thus plain that every one of the great Trunk Routes of the sea will be materially affected in this rearrangement of the world's ocean freight circulation. CHAPTER XIII THE TRADE CENTER AND ITS DEVELOPMENT i. THE DEVELOPMENT OF COMMERCIAL CENTERS The Origin of Towns and Cities. — An examination of the meth- ods and causes of commerce leads to an inquiry into the causes of the growth of cities. Not only does the larger current of international trade always pass from one city to another, but the same condition is also true of domestic trade. Cities and trade are continually exerting reflex influence, the one upon the other and, to understand the large commercial movements, we must understand the economic functions and origins of the city. The origin of the town goes back into the early history of the human race — to the days of the first permanent settlements and the first regular trade. The present-day metropolis is but a town grown large through trade, and the same laws govern its growth and push it from its village beginning to its metropoli- tan ending. The beginning of commerce is a barter between two individuals. Each has a surplus of a particular article and each finds advantage in the exchange of that surplus. The most complex phases of present-day commerce are but the outgrowths of this simple exchange of goods, complicated by the numberless wants of man, the variety in natural resource, the world-wide distribution of industry and the myriad complexities of invention and manufacture. The rise from barter to money and the expansion of trade to international proportions have produced many institutions. First and most fundamental among these is the trade center or distributing center. Granted riches and neighbors, trading man soon develops so many wants that it becomes inconvenient to visit individually the various people with whom he wishes to trade, and some common meeting place is the result. Many previously isolated individuals now have a place for common activity; some of them a place for common residence; and a 839 840 COMMERCIAL GEOGRAPHY market place or fair, a village or a town comes slowly into being. It is interesting to note in this connection that in many European cities this plot of ground where the primeval trading took place continues to this day as a market square, as in Antwerp, Brussels, and many other cities now grown great. It is also to be found in many a small country town. The normal trading town is, there- fore, manifestly and most naturally located in some spot easy of access, some spot with a superiority of access usually due to geographic causes. If the superiority of access is sufficiently great the settlement around this market place becomes a city with international trade, for the market village and the metropolis are alike the products of economic forces that differ only in scope, not in kind. The Kinds of Cities. — In examining into the causes for the growth of commercial centers, one should note the distinction between industrial and commercial causes — between industrial and commercial cities. Examination shows that most cities have both commerce and industry in some degree. The mere numbers of people inevitably produce a certain minimum of trade and manufacture. As a commercial city increases in population some local industries usually spring up. And similarly the growth of a manufacturing city usually develops some commercial activity. But, in the main, the city exists because it is either a commercial or an industrial center, the one activity being only secondary or tributary to the other. In most cases it is easy to characterize the world's leading cities as belonging to one or the other of these classes. For example, Pittsburg, Pennsylvania; Birmingham, England; and Lyons, France, will be classed at once as industrial cities. New York, Liverpool, Hamburg, and Hong Kong will be classed as com- mercial cities. The purest examples of commercial cities are to be met with in the unhealthy seaports of the torrid zone where the conditions of life are so bad that only the most com- pelling of operations are there performed. Such a city is Port Limon, Costa Rica; Santos, Brazil, or Banana at the mouth of the Congo. Here are centered the strictly port or commercial activities that must be by the water's edge; while all other activi- ties seek better locations. In some cities the commercial and manufacturing influences THE TRADE CENTER AND ITS DEVELOPMENT 841 become difficult or even impossible of accurate discernment because political reasons have interfered with, or combined with the workings of geographic forces. Where several cities have approximately equal natural advantages, the selection of one of them for a national, state, or county capital will be the deciding factor that raises it far above its rivals. This force has made Paris and Berlin the great cities that they are, and the city of Washington, in a location fixed by statute and without either manufactures or commerce, exists because it is the place of residence for the thousands employed in the administration of the central Government of a rapidly growing nation. The commercial city or distributing center, its causes and some of the influences affecting it, will be considered here. At the present time, students, publicists, and lawmakers are devoting much attention to commerce. It is necessary that there should be a clear understanding of the way in which commerce, and particularly international commerce, is carried on and why it is carried on in certain cities. Without such an understanding, legislation in favor of commerce must sometimes miss its goal and expenditures for the promotion of trade must sometimes be made without results. The Place of Transportation in Making Commercial Cities. — Some advantage in transportation is the most fundamental and most important of the causes determining the location of a distributing center. It may almost be said to be the only cause for the formation of such centers. For some reason or reasons, a particular place is more conveniently and cheaply reached by many people than any surrounding point; and, as a result, they naturally exchange commodities there. The country store is located at the crossing of roads. There also is the village. In a mountain country the market town is at the junction of two, or, still better, of three valleys. Another favorite location is the end of a mountain pass, or a gap that is a thoroughfare between two valleys. If rivers are difficult to cross, settlements will spring up at the safest ferries or fords. In a level plain, a town will be near its center, and a focus of roads or railroads in such a plain, fertile and populous, will almost surely make a city. Any one who is familiar with the geography of a country district can see examples illustrating any or all of these forces. 842 COMMERCIAL GEOGRAPHY The head of navigation on a river is a location far more com- manding than any of those already mentioned. Here all the trade that goes by the river must be changed from one method of conveyance to another. Here goods are collected from the surrounding country for shipment by water. Here the people who bring the goods buy their supplies. Here also must be merchants, forwarding agents, and the repairers of wagons and ships. A town or even a city arises. It is interesting to note that towns of this class were relatively much more important in 1800 than in 1900. In the first named year a river offered a much greater relative advantage for cheap transportation. But few localities could support populous settlements without water transport, for the alternative was the heavy, creaking wagon miring in the mud. The cost of carrying goods by wagon was so great that in a short distance it equaled the value of the goods and set a narrow territorial limit to commerce. So a navigable river gave its valley a cheap outlet to the sea, and the river port was a close rival in importance to the seaport. But in 1900 the railroad carried most of the freight which 100 years before depended upon the river. As a result, many places of leading importance in 1800 had in 1900 become insignificant towns. The new means of transportation, namely, the railroad, had built up prosperous cities where under the old conditions cities were impossible. Examples of this shrunken importance may be found in abundance in the basin of the Chesapeake. With its many estuaries there were numerous ports of nearly equal size in 1800, when George Washington's Alexandria was an important and prosperous place. But Baltimore has long been the seaport of the Chesapeake and Alexandria would scarce make a good ward in the rival that now serves her by rail with many sea-borne products. The railroad train has rushed past the river port to the seaport and the giant ocean steamer has taken the trade. The most commanding location for the commercial city is the safe harbor which is, or may become, the natural outlet for a rich and popu- lous territory. It has in greater degree and in greater extent the advantage that is to be found in the location of all the smaller distributing centers that have been cited above. It is a con- venient place for the breaking of cargo. It is the extreme point THE TRADE CENTER AND ITS DEVELOPMENT 843 that can be reached by the most favorable means of transporta- tion and one where operations must begin on a smaller scale and a more expensive method. Here the ocean steamer dis- charges its freight, which is taken forward to its destination by- smaller and more expensive carrying agents — the coasting vessel, the river boat, the railroad, to some extent the wagon, and, in some countries, even the pack train. The great seaport exists because it is a place for the breaking of cargo of ocean ships, just as the country store exists because the boxes and wagon loads of miscellaneous supplies must there be divided up into numerous small packages for the individual consumer. The Conditions for the Further Else of Seaports. — Seaports are the focusing points of the commerce of both land and sea. Nearly all land commerce and land routes go to and fro between ports and interior points. All ocean commerce is a movement of ships and goods from port to port. What is a port; what makes a port? Any place where ships can unload in safety their goods upon the land may become a port, but among thou- sands of such places a few hundred actually do become ports because of their location with relation to adjacent, accessible seats of human enterprise. They rarely become ports because of any production within the port itself. The activity of the port begins primarily because it has particular advantages of access to populous regions and also particularly suitable access to the sea over which the commerce of the regions is to go. It must be a point as far inland as possible so that the importer and exporter may have the largest advantage of the cheaper freights possible on large ships. Therefore the greater ports are at the heads of bays and gulfs rather than on peninsulas and headlands. The rugged west coast of Great Britain offers many bays and harbors for the shelter of shipping, but none of the small ports on projecting Cornwall displaces Bristol as the leading harbor of the southwest of England, for Bristol is far inland on the head of a bay. In the same way Liverpool, the great port of the west, has grown up on the indented coast of Lancashire, and not on some of the equally safe bays of the projecting coast of Wales. Similarly, Boston and New York are on bays that indent the main land, not on those more easy of entrance but near the end of Cape Cod or Long Island. 844 COMMERCIAL GEOGRAPHY Besides easy access from the sea, the great seaport, the inter- national trade center, must have easy access to the land and to the centers of population that it serves. This access is best supplied by a river valley with the water transportation on the river itself and canals and railroads that can be built most easily along watercourses. Nearly all important seaports are at, or near, the mouths of rivers, navigable or otherwise, and, in regions having navigable rivers, the largest cities are in locations having the best communication with the interior. New Orleans, on the lower Mississippi, has been, from its settle- ment, the unrivaled metropolis of the coasts of the Gulf of Mexico. Philadelphia, Boston, and Baltimore were the rivals of New York till the opening of the Erie Canal made the Hudson the outlet for the Great Lakes and of enormous territory in the center of the continent. With this advantage New York has gained a foreign trade exceeding that of all the other Atlantic ports combined. If the break in the Appalachians had been at the head of the Delaware, the Susquehanna, or the James, the location of our great commercial metropolis would surely have been different. The improvement of the railway and the cheapening of rates have caused the Erie Canal to carry a declin- ing proportion of New York commerce, but the level country through which the canal passes is also the most favorable for the building and operation of railroads. As in America, so in other continents, the navigable river has dominated the growth of seaports. It is not by accident that London and Liverpool are upon the Thames and the Mersey with their canal connections with the interior. Hamburg has outstripped Bremen because the Elbe is navigable even beyond the Austrian boundary, but the Weser gives Bremen only inferior communication with the "hinterland." The Nile has made Alexandria; the Ganges, Calcutta; the Yangtse-kiang, Shanghai; and Hong Kong, the island distributor for south China, lies directly at the mouth of the West River, the great highway of the southern provinces. The Commercial City Becomes Industrial. — Being the dis- tributing and supply point for such a region, the port has an excellent supply of raw materials, and becomes a favorable location for the establishment of manufactures. This is especially THE TRADE CENTER AND ITS DEVELOPMENT 845 true of those industries requiring imported raw materials. To industrial development along this line is due a large share of the growth of all the larger seaports of the world. New York is the first city in America in the value of its manufactures. Intermediary or Entrepot Trade. — In addition to and distinct from the in-coming and out-going trade of the dependent and industrial districts, is the commerce of the second kind — the distribution of foreign goods to other foreign countries. Thus London and Liverpool have in the past had a large commerce in articles that did not originate in England and were not intended Fig. 241. — Diagram to illustrate the origin of entrepot trade. (From bulletin of American Geog. Soe.) for consumption in England. London was the largest distributor of foreign goods. The London merchant was a middleman in international commerce; consequently, England gained in riches from this source. But the chief reason for the growth and prosperity of London was not her foreign distributing trade, but the commerce that came to her as the local center of a great industrial population and the commercial capital of the country where the most highly developed manufactures in the world fostered the largest import and export trade. The chief basis of a city's trade under modern commercial conditions is to be found in the industrial districts of which that city is the imme- diate distributor, and not in the business that comes to a city 846 COMMERCIAL GEOGRAPHY as a commercial intermediary. This intermediary, or distribut- ing trade, national or international, is the second step in the development of a city. The first step is the establishment of many lines of transportation giving connection with the various countries engaging in international trade. These are only built up and in the main supported by local demand and local production. In the diagram C represents a commercial city that succeeded in establishing direct connections with S, H, 0, R, T, and L, A, N, G, because the industrial districts around C could in part at least consume the exports and supply the imports of these outlying regions. Once these lines of transit were in operation, it was found that the consumers of G wanted small quantities of the goods produced in T, A, or R, and that the people of T, A, and H wanted the products of G. This trade was small, and the cheapest way to carry it on was through the existing connections, via the center C, which in time became the emporium whence the products of G and N were supplied to all the other countries, and whence G and N imported the assembled products of many lands. The Economy of the Entrepot. — This may look like a wasted method with useless travel, but the movement of goods may be in such small quantities that it would not furnish sufficient cargo to justify sending a ship from G to N. Such roundabout commerce is taking place to-day and has been taking place since commerce began. There are many places about the Gulf of Mexico and the Carribean Sea that within recent years had so little commerce and hence so little transport connection with each other that the most convenient way for a traveller or for freight to move from one to the other was to go via Europe or the United States. This has even been true between the neigh- boring islands of Cuba and Jamaica or Cuba and Porto Rico. Persian rugs go to Constantinople, thence to Hamburg, thence to South America, Scandinavia, and Canada. For C one may substitute, according to the period of which he speaks, Venice, Bruges, Antwerp, Amsterdam, London, and, to a lesser degree, New York and Hamburg. It will be observed that each of these cities was the metropolis of a large industrial population and had important commercial activities of its own THE TRADE CENTER AND ITS DEVELOPMENT 847 before it rose to the point of controlling the commerce of other countries. Ports for Raw Materials and for Manufactured Goods. — One of the changes in the world commerce of the past century has been the pronounced separation of ports into classes. One class is the raw-material port, and another is the manufactured-goods port. The two are steadily growing more distinct at the present time. This has resulted from the vast multiplication of the bulk of commerce — a multiplication which is in turn the result Fig. 242. — Variations in the foreign trades of ports. Comparison of net register tonnage and value of goods. Cardiff is a port for coal and ore. Liver- pool for cotton and manufactures. (After J. Paul Goode.) of the numerous industrial changes brought about during the past hundred years by the application of steam and electricity to so many of man's activities. Its commodities have changed from the small-bulk and high-value goods such as tea, silk, furs, spices, and luxury goods to the cheap and bulky raw materials — grain, lumber, petroleum, ore, and the coarser fibers. Spices, although we use more of them than ever, have gone to the tenth place in the exports of India. 848 COMMERCIAL GEOGRAPHY The filling of the channels of trade with the many bulky, cheap, or perishable articles has produced new trade conditions with less dependence upon great ports and distributing centers. Cheap and bulky goods usually go to the best advantage in full cargo lots; and, as the vessel has to depend upon no other freight, it can load at any small port near the place of production. It is easy and profitable for a vessel to go to a small port of Florida or Georgia for a full cargo of phosphate or lumber, to a Chilean outport for nitrate of soda, to a West Indian outport for iron or bananas, to Cardiff, Wales, for coal, or to a convenient railway terminus in the Argentine Republic for wheat. These goods may also be imported by a small port for use in local industries that do not require a large population for the manufacture and distribution of the products. A railway, a pier, and suitable warehouses may enable a small town to export or import raw material in bulk. The raw-material port therefore may be, and often is, a small port. Relation of Trade in Manufactures to Great Ports. — In con- trast to this, only a large city can import or export cargoes of highly manufactured goods. These articles are consumed in small quantities. Much choice is exercised in their selection and purchase by the consumer. The retail dealer must exercise similar care and discretion in the selection of his stock. He can do this best in a great wholesale market where he can go from place to place and take advantage of the competition and variety of stock of many wholesale merchants. This is to be found only in a great city. This gives the city holding the trade in manufactured goods the conservative force that comes of its being known as a market. The trade in manufactured goods therefore continues to cling to the older distributing centers and devious routings long after it is possible to make direct shipments. The nineteenth-century development has been not so much a revolution as a new growth. The old commerce of 1800, the trade in high-value goods, stays, much augmented, in the old centers; and the new commerce in bulky raw materials goes to them and also directly between small ports. This gives to the trade of almost all ports a one-sided characteristic which has a profound influence upon the ocean-carrying trade. The THE TRADE CENTER AND ITS DEVELOPMENT 849 greater number of the world's ports are either importing or exporting ports, and it is unusual for a port to have an equal share of each. Imports Exports Total value, millions Per cent, total U.S. or U.K. Total value, millions Per cent, total U.S. or U.K. New York Boston New Orleans.. Galveston. . . . San Francisco. Puget Sound.. London Liverpool Glasgow Plymouth. . . . Belfast Dublin Dundee $688 93 42 5 48 22 £209 160 15 1.5 8.1 2.7 5.7 57.6 7.8 3.5 .4 4.0 1.9 32.4 24.8 2.3 .2 1.2 .4 .8 $701 96 159 161 28 28 £123 165 30 .17 2.4 .1 .9 37.6 5.1 8.5 8.6 1.5 1.5 23.7 31.1 5.0 .03 .4 .01 .1 This is shown by an examination of the table, which shows for a recent year the value of imports and exports of selected ports and the percentages that these bear to the whole movement of the nation. New York and Boston, the leading Atlantic ports, adjacent to the greatest centers of population and manu- facture, are the cities with the oldest and best ocean connections. They are the leading ports of import and their percentages of imports exceed their export percentages. San Francisco, the old gateway for imports across the Pacific, has a still greater excess of imports and is in interesting contrast to the newer Puget Sound ports. The ports of the industrially newer and less populous South show the trade in raw materials cut off from the trade in manufactured imports. At Baltimore the exports are double the imports, and at New Orleans the same conditions 850 COMMERCIAL GEOGRAPHY are visible in an exaggerated degree. At Galveston, the newest of the important American ports, the ratio of exports to imports has recently changed a little from a ratio of about 100 to 1. Export of Manufactures Is Like the Imports of Manufactures. — In exporting manufactured goods there is the same tendency to cling to the old and great port although the tendency is here weaker than it is in the importing of similar goods. The con- servative force is the fact that manufactures usually go in small shipments of which many are required to fill a single ship. Add to this the fact that the shipper of goods of this class wishes as fast, frequent, and wide-reaching sailings as possible, and it is evident that he can only get what he needs by doing business through the largest accessible port. The United Kingdom, being a nation with import of raw materials and export of manufactures, thus reverses the com- mercial conditions of the United States. The table shows that her small ports, see Plymouth, Belfast, Dublin and Dundee for examples, are importers of proportionately more goods than they export. Indeed, in several cases they export practically nothing and import considerable quantities of the raw products exported from the small ports of America. Another way of classifying this same division of traffic is to say that the raw-material port is the tramp-ship port and the manufactured-goods port is the line- vessel port. 2. THE WORLD ENTREPOT The Natural Trade of an Entrepot. — One commercial center can at times distribute a certain product or products to most of the peoples of the trading world and, for those products at least, it becomes a world entrepot. The commodities that lend themselves to this method of distribution must have special qualifications. The goods must have high value, small bulk, and good keeping quality. By having high value the freight rate is relatively insignificant and the long and devious journeys are not a serious handicap. Having small bulk there is not the demand for a whole shipload of them in any one place, and so it is really cheaper to let them wend their way by transhipments through the common distributing center or entrepot, A second THE TRADE CENTER AND ITS DEVELOPMENT 851 factor of influence is the question of distance. The more remote the origin and destinations of the traffic the stronger is the hold upon this trade of the entrepot with its organization of routes, ready to serve and hard to duplicate. The trade that best answers to this description and is therefore best fitted to be handled through an entrepot is that from the Orient to the western world. For many centuries it has com- prised articles of small bulk and high value — spices, drugs, silks, curios, and tea. These were articles consumed everywhere among the western peoples, but always in small quantities. They were produced in a remote part of the world, and it was commercial economy that they should be distributed among western countries from some western entrepot. The city best fitted to render this distributing service was the one where varied industry had given the most widespread vessel connec- tions. The shifting of this trade from route to route and from center to center is an interesting study of commerce as affected by war, politics, discovery, invention, geographic control, and the economic conditions that resulted from these forces. Owing to this complexity of shifting forces the profits and glory of being the western entrepot of eastern trade have rested in turn with Venice, Lisbon, Bruges, Antwerp, Amsterdam, and London. The Rise of Venice and Bruges. — During the ordered period of the Roman Empire this unimpeded commerce was divided among many cities. After the fall of the Empire in the West, Constantinople, the seat of the strongest European power became the richest commercial city of Europe and one of the important gateways to the East. Since the decline of the Byzantine Empire some one city has controlled a large share or even had a monopoly of the valuable commerce that passed between eastern Asia and western Europe, and this city has then been an object of envy for the trading world. Venice was the first of the series. The products of the Orient were brought over the caravan routes through Persia, Syria, and Arabia to the ports of the eastern Mediterranean, whence they were carried by ships to the western Mediterranean. The foremost powers upon this sea were the city republics of Italy. These republics strove among themselves for the eastern trade. These wars were fights to the finish. There were no half-way measures. They 852 COMMERCIAL GEOGRAPHY were after monopoly, and the fleets of Venice triumphed, but not by accident. Her economic conditions had given her the best fleets and the widest commercial connections, for the city on the tiny islets had been compelled for centuries to carry in ships every article of food and raw material used by her popula- tion. Venice used her advantage to monopolize the eastern trade; and, when necessary, preserved her monopoly by armed force. Europe was compelled to purchase from her merchants silks, spices, perfumes, and other Oriental products. Venice flourished, and bedecked herself with her profits and with the treasures of her victims, so that she is at this moment, after centuries of decay, one of the finest show places in all Europe. One of her assets, if not her chief present asset, is the fact that the people of all nations flock thither to view the remains of her grandeur. In the days of her monopoly the Mediterranean peoples dealt directly with her and regular convoys of precious goods were sent across the Alps and down the Rhine to supply the northern countries. Another part of this northern trade went by the sea routes through the Strait of Gibraltar. But, by land or sea, the chief destination of the eastern cargo was the same — the Netherlands. Here was the greatest center of popula- tion, industry, wealth, commerce, and shipping connections north of the Mediterranean. Here also was the "center of all trade between Gibraltar and Finland." 1 For four centuries Bruges had been the metropolis of the low countries, lying securely on the canals that connected the Rhine with the ocean. By 1488 the silting up of her harbor and the increasing size of ships rendered the port no longer accessible, and in that year many of her merchants emigrated to Antwerp on the more open Schelde. Bruges dwindled, and is to-day of interest because she is a med- iaeval city in the mediaeval shell (wall) undisturbed by the swelling growth that has burst and usually razed the wall of every other walled town of west Europe. The Fall of Venice. — A similar shrivelling fate was in store for Venice. Her ships could ride unchallenged on the Mediter- ranean and carry back in triumph the pillars of cathedrals from Constantinople and choice products of the East, if they could be reached at any port upon the Levantine Seas; but Venice 'Dorn: Die Haven des Weltverkehus, p. 655. THE TRADE CENTER AND ITS DEVELOPMENT 853 could do nothing with the conquering hordes of Turkish horse- men who overran west Asia and interfered with the caravan routes to India. About the same time, Vasco de Gama, the Portugee, discovered the sea route to India; and in 1499 the first merchant ships that rounded the Cape of Good Hope brought Indian cargo to Lisbon. It is said that the news of the discovery of the new route caused stocks upon the Venetian exchange to decline in a day to one-half their former value. In 1504 the blocking of caravans caused the Venetian fleets to return empty and the proposal, two years later, to build a canal at Suez was prophetic but premature. The Rise of Lisbon and Antwerp. — Lisbon quickly succeeded Venice as the European entrepot for Oriental products. The Portuguese government monopolized the spice trade and the profits were 400 per cent. Lisbon, however, lacked the re- quirements necessary for a commercial metropolis. She was not the natural center of a network of local routes that had arisen as servitors of her local industries. She had no local industries of importance; and, as to commerce, she had at best been but the emporium for the comparatively' small trade of the Azores, Canaries, and west Africa. While she had been the head station in the sea trade between Venice and the Netherlands, she was but a ship-provisioning place. She lacked the location and the neces- sary connections for distributing the newly won Oriental products to northwest Europe. Hence, the Portuguese spice importers provided for the distribution of their Indian goods by establishing factories in Antwerp, which had recently succeeded Bruges as the metropolis of the Rhine Delta. While this Lisbon agency business continued, the Flemish manufacturing towns continued to increase in industry and the Flemish metropolis became a market for English wool ; for skins, flax, grain, and wood from the Baltic countries; for metals, hardware, glass, and dyes from Ger- many; for Rhenish and French wines; for Italian brocades; for Spanish fruits; for the products of the Levant, as well as spices from Lisbon. 1 By 1550 Antwerp was the metropolis of Europe, and 2,500 ships lay in her harbor. 2 The Policy and Fall of Antwerp. — It appears that in the 1 Lehrbuch der Handelsgeschichte, Richard Mayr, p.114. 2 Dorn, p. 656. 854 COMMERCIAL GEOGRAPHY beginning Antwerp prospered above the other Netherland cities because foreigners were free to come and trade at all times, while at other cities they were under restrictions most of the year. At that period it was customary for the leading cities to have annual fairs, when traveling merchants traded on equal footing with the resident burghers. At all other times the foreigner must deal through a local broker. Antwerp was at all times a free-trading city and thither the merchants of Bruges emigrated, there the traveling traders from all Europe collected, and the city prospered until the sieges of the Spaniards closed it for a time, and the final subjugation by Spain in 1585 drove away all who would not subscribe to the Catholic faith. In one year 19,000 people, including the leading merchants, emigrated, most of them to Amsterdam, for the Netherlands were still the industrial center of gravity of Europe and the Netherlanders were the greatest traders. Amsterdam thus became the new entrepot for the dis- ribution of Oriental cargoes, for here, as at Antwerp and Bruges, was a natural center for the manufacturing industries of the Rhine Delta and a natural focus of the routes from the northern shores and the southern shores of Europe, from the British Isles, and from Switzerland down the lordly and busy Rhine. In the next ten years — 1585 to 1595- — Amsterdam nearly doubled in size. The Prosperity of Amsterdam and Holland. — The Dutch provinces, being still at war with the now united kingdoms of Spain and Portugal, could not import East Indian products from Lisbon. Accordingly, companies were formed for eastern trade; and in 1595 the first expedition brought the products of the Indies direct to Holland. This circumnavigation of Portugal ended her ninety-six years of monopoly of the shipway to the Indies. Hol- land, like Venice, clinched her advantages. In the first decade of the seventeenth century, the triumphant Dutch navy conquered most of the colonial empire of Portugal; and the Dutch East India Company practically monopolized the trade between Cape of Good Hope and the Strait of Magellan. To monopolize the supply of spices, the Dutch sailed the East Indies looking for and destroying spice trees so the product of certain controlled localities might comprise the whole crop. The merchants of Holland controlled the trade of the Rhine Valley up to Basle, THE TRADE CENTER AND ITS DEVELOPMENT 855 and the old Hanseatic posts had in most cases become their agencies. By 1645 the Dutch fleets had a practical monopoly of the North Sea fisheries; they were doing most of the carrying trade of Europe; and, during the English civil war, they even carried the commerce between England and her colonies. In Colbert's time it was estimated that there were 20,000 merchant vessels in Europe, and of these the Hollanders owned from 15,000 to 16,000. Amsterdam became not only the commercial but also the financial capital of Europe and of the world. The Competition of Holland and England. — The prosperity of Holland brought her into conflict with the rising powers of England and France. In the latter half of the seventeenth century a series of wars with these countries severely taxed her resources. Oliver Cromwell's Navigation Act of 1651 was a direct and severe blow at the Dutch carrying trade, as well as a direct admission that the English could not compete with the Dutch on even terms. By these new regulations only English vessels could engage in the English coasting trade or in the trade with the English colonies. Foreign goods must come to England in the ships of the country producing them or in English ships; and they must come direct, i.e., German or Indian goods could not come via Amsterdam. Further than this, fish that came into English ports must have been caught by English ships. These stringent regulations served to free England from her dependence upon the Dutch vessels, and gradually built up an English marine ; but England's position of independence was not exchanged for that of international distributor until her industries made her the greatest exporting and importing nation. For half a century after the Navigation Act was in force Amsterdam was more important than London, and she was a strong rival for yet an- other fifty years. The Netherlands were the leaders in the tex- tile industries and a potent force in European commerce so long as the system of household labor and hand power prevailed. The age of machinery dawned in England, and with its development came English supremacy. Holland had hands and feet and windmills for driving looms, but England had waterwheels and coal. England's Industrial Prosperity. — England, free from the wars and disturbances of the continent, and a refuge for many exiled 856 COMMERCIAL GEOGRAPHY weavers, had the efficiency of her labor first increased by the use of water-power. Coal was used in the smelting of iron in 1740; and the abundance of these minerals, the bases of manufacturing industry, enabled England to develop machinery, use steam and lead the world in industry. The continuous and destructive wars of the Napoleonic period kept the industries of the entire continent at a standstill, while those of England were undisturbed and rapidly increasing. English commerce and English riches made unprecedented gains because all parties in the continental conflict were compelled to buy English goods. The maritime independence due to the Navigation Acts became naval supremacy through the wars of the last half of the eight- eenth century and the victories of Nelson. By the beginning of the nineteenth century England had most of the eastern colonies that had belonged to Portugal, Holland, and France; and the British East India Company had practically succeeded the Dutch East India Company as the conveyors of Oriental produce. On the basis of the best supplies of coal and iron then available, England had, in a century and a half of undis- turbed internal peace, become the country with the greatest industry and the greatest commerce. She had as a result the best commercial connections and had succeeded Holland as the greatest international carrier. She was the first country to develop a good network of steamer lines upon the modernizing of commerce after the peace of 1815. Lines went to the Conti- nent and to the United States, and from the days of the old British East India Company there had been frequent connection with the East Indies. With this equipment of commercial routes the leadership of England and the entrepot traffic of London were most natural. In this period she called herself the workshop of the world, for which London was the metropolis, the greatest trade center and the distributor of the products of Asia. The star of Amsterdam had set. Relative Importance of Entrepot Trade. — But the importance of this intermediary or entrepot trade must not be overestimated, for it has always been subsidiary to the commerce that is essen- tially local in its origin or destination. This was true of London in 1865 when she was the undisputed world metropolis and it is true in greater degree in the present when her supremacy is THE TRADE CENTER AND ITS DEVELOPMENT 857 passing away. What London has lost and is losing no other single city or country is gaining. The period of the world entrepot is passing. The later entrepots have had a less binding grip upon the trade than their predecessors held. Amsterdam's monopoly was less complete than that of Venice. The pre- dominance of London was never so complete as that of Amsterdam, and London will not even have any single successor unless some unforeseen elements reverse the commercial tendencies of the present. Causes of Decline of World Entrepot. — Two reasons will largely explain the passing of the world entrepot. First, the tremendous increase in the bulk of world commerce. The second grows out of the first and is the multiplication of steamship and railway lines which enables many cities to serve as entrepots for limited areas. On the question of the supremacy of commercial cities, the future cannot be judged by the past. The mechanical improve- ments of the nineteenth century have made a new industrial and a new commercial world which must be judged by the new conditions. The great inventions of the present era have increased many fold the materials of commerce. These changes have permitted a rapid increase in population in commercial countries and have brought about the settlement of new continents. The wilder- nesses of North and South America, Australia, and Africa have become civilised lands having wide commercial relations. Where an occasional trading ship loaded with valuables and trinkets made a bartering cruise in 1800, fleets of steamers assembled in 1900 to carry away the coarse bulky staples of international trade; and, in the first decade of the twentieth century, the progress in this direction has been more rapid than ever. No city could handle it all if she tried; but, nevertheless, England, especially London, had a strong hold during the greater part of the nineteenth century. Other Nations Rise to Commercial Independence. — When Germany, Denmark, France, Belgium, or the United States wanted small shipments of Indian or Oriental goods, it was convenient and financially advantageous to get these goods in England, because Germany, Denmark, France, Belgium, and 858 COMMERCIAL GEOGRAPHY Fig. 243. — The steamer routes of and ports served by the leading Danish steam- ship company with headquarters in Copenhagen — a rising entrepot. THE TRADE CENTER AND ITS DEVELOPMENT 859 the United States had regular and frequent connections with England and England had connections with the Orient. After a century of multiplication of commerce, London is still the leader, and richer than ever; but other cities are also distributing the products of the East since they have developed direct con- nections of their own. Half a dozen British ports have direct lines to the East. German lines go from Hamburg and Bremen, the French line from Havre and Marseilles and the Austrian from Trieste. There are frequent and regular eastern sailings from Antwerp, Genoa and, once a month, from Copenhagen. New York also has regular connection with the Orient, Australia, Cape of Good Hope, the coasts of South America and the ports of the Mediterranean and the Baltic. As England between 1750 and 1850 established the factory system, built up industrial cities, a foreign trade, and lines of communication, so between 1850 and 1912 have the continental countries and the United States experienced the same industrial revolution and the accompanying growth of cities and of indus- tries. The last and inevitable step in the chain of events has been the establishment of direct communications between the Orient and other ends of the earth to give an outlet and supply for these new-grown centers of industry. The increase of direct connection and the growing complexity of the international trade route net is a pronounced and characteristic tendency of the later decades of the nineteenth century and of the present. England retains her position of independence, but other countries — the United States, Germany, Belgium, Italy, France, and Austria — are advancing toward a similar independence. There is a consequent tendency for each country to raise up its own entrepot. We can indeed see the progress before our own eyes, for the centrifugal or decentralizing forces continue. Other Cities Become Entrepots. — Hamburg has, in large degree, succeeded London and Liverpool as the basis of foreign goods supply for Scandinavia and the Baltic; but almost before Ham- burg is secure in her new trade possession, lines of steamers are beginning to carry the products of America and the Orient direct to Stockholm, to Copenhagen and to the Russian ports. In 1912 a Norwegian company started a line from Christiana to the United States. This trade of Scandinavia and the Baltic 860 COMMERCIAL GEOGRAPHY is new and as yet unimportant, but it shows the tendency. Lines from the United States to Genoa have largely displaced trade via Liverpool, and the more recently established New York line to Constantinople and the Levant is cutting off the trade to the United States via Genoa and Marseilles. An examination of port connections the world over will show the same conditions of decentralization and growing freedom from a few great ports that has taken place in Great Britain and the continent of Europe. Two examples will suffice to show the tendency. The increasing trade of the ports of north China adjacent to the Gulf of Peeheelee makes it profitable for occasional vessels to take cargo direct from America and Europe to ports of Tientsin, Nuchwang, and Talienwan. A short time ago nearly all of the trade of east Asia was first laid down at the great entrepots of Hong Kong, Shanghai and Yokohama, for final distribution in small craft. As commercial development on this north coast continues and satisfactory harbors are made, there is less and less dependence upon Shanghai, Yokohama, and Hong Kong and more direct connection with the remote bases of supply at San Francisco, Seattle, London, Liverpool, Hamburg, and Marseilles. Another example 01 this world tendency comes from Australia. For many years the sparse population of west Australia has secured the greater part of its European and American goods by the coasting steamers that came from Sydney and Melbourne. Since 1898 the rich gold discoveries have so increased the popula- tion and trade that the west coast now receives European steam- ers direct, and is in large measure freed from its dependencies upon the east coast cities as bases of supply for European goods. Relative Decline and Absolute Increase. — It must be kept in mind that decentralization does not destroy the old trade center. The statements concerning declining importance are relative, applying to percentage of rapidly growing wholes, and not in any way to absolute quantities. Commerce is increasing with unprecedented rapidity; and the new developments, the new trade routes, are made by and for a part of the new commerce. Mean- while, it is usually true that the particular trade that inevitably belongs to the old center has also increased and, with it, the city's THE TRADE CENTER AND ITS DEVELOPMENT 861 prosperity. It is still a distributing center, greater than ever, but for a smaller territory with increased commercial activity. Antwerp now ranks fifth or sixth among the world's commercial cities, being little more than one of the two chief outlets for the Rhine Valley. But she is about five times as large as when she Fig. 244. — Antwerp has outgrown the fortifications put up as defence against Napoleon III and has port plans that are probably unrivalled for comprehensive system. America can show nothing like it. (After J. Paul Goode.) was the world metropolis, is rapidly outgrowing her new walls, and has under construction harbor extensions that will shelter several times the ships and traffic of her palmiest world entrepot days. No less than $70,000,000 will be required to complete her astonishing new harbor. London's distributing trade has 862 COMMERCIAL GEOGRAPHY suffered from the competition of the revived Antwerp, of Ham- burg, Bremen, Marseilles, New York, and other cities; but London has millions more of people than she had in 1856 when the first Hamburg trans-oceanic steamship line was established, and after fifteen years of planning $70,000,000 are to be expended in enlarging her harbor. New York handles a smaller and smaller percentage of the foreign trade of the United States, but, as other American cities increase their imports and exports, New York's foreign trade reaches a total greater than that of any other city in the world. Effect of Grading Goods. — The question of international distributing centers is not alone affected by routes of transporta- tion and the establishment of direct connections. In general, it may be said that commodities having such uniformity as to be accurately graded and sold by grade, can be and are sent directly to their destination with little regard to the entrepot, while commodities that cannot be accurately described but must be inspected before purchase are often bought and sold at some convenient intermediate point which has come to be recognized as a "market" for a certain commodity or commodities. Wheat is an example of the gradable commodities. A buyer is reasonably certain what he will get when he buys No. 1 or No. 2 of a certain kind of wheat, graded in a certain market. Accordingly, ships load in California, Argentina, or the Atlantic coast of the United States or Canada and start toward Europe. The cargo is sold by telegraph, and the captain of the ship learns his destination by signals as he passes the Madeira Islands, or some point on the English or Irish coasts. Effect of Ungradable Goods. — Such transactions are impossible with the ungradable articles of which wool and ivory may be taken as examples. The value of these commodities is affected by so many conditions that they must be examined before being purchased. The sheep's fleece is often cut into five or six pieces at the shearing table and the wool bale of commerce contains only one of these kinds. The value of the bale depends upon the skill of the wool baler on the sheep ranch. It also depends upon the breed, the ancestry, and the food of the sheep, which affect the length, fineness, and strength of the fiber. The character of the soil in different localities gives the raw wool a varying pro- THE TEADE CENTER AND ITS DEVELOPMENT 863 portion of dirt; the heat of the climate and the variations of the seasons give it a varying percentage of grease; a drought and accompanying shortage of food reduces the physical condition of the sheep and makes a weak place in the fiber. The wool buyer needs to consider all of these factors in purchasing. He must, therefore, see and feel of the wool before buying, and a mistake in judgment may cause large financial loss. The wool buyer is a highly paid expert and it has always been profitable for the wool manufacturers of the United States, England, and the Continent to secure a large share of Australian wool (the highest grade of wool) at the London wool auctions, where inspection is easier than in Australia. Ivory is likewise of uncertain value. The age of the animal and the size and the previous treatment of the tusk, are important factors, and an almost imperceptible fracture may nearly ruin an otherwise perfect piece. Ivory is, therefore, sold by auction. The greatest market is Antwerp, the greatest supply coming from the Congo region. Conservative Influence of an Established Market. — Commodi- ties requiring inspection are not necessarily sold at auction. Private sales may give as firm a hold on international trade, once a city becomes the recognized place to buy and sell certain commodities. The entrepot has a prop in that peculiar and conservative force — the drawing power of a "market." The drawing influence of an established market causes some cities to handle large quantities of goods which might now be handled to better advantage and with less labor elsewhere. The "market" often holds its trade in this day of direct connections by the force of mere custom and conservatism. Such is the Bremen tobacco market, which began with the establishment of a line of emigrant ships to the United States in 1827. At that time tobacco was almost the only return freight, and Bremen became the greatest European tobacco market. " Bremen is the market for hogshead tobacco, and everybody buys here." Such were the words of a Bremen tobacco merchant when asked as to the cause of Bremen's control of the continental tobacco trade. Later came cotton, rice, grain, and petroleum, and its importance in the rice, cotton, and tobacco trade continues till the present. The fact that this city is a great rice market and had good eastern and western 864 COMMERCIAL GEOGRAPHY steamer connections long caused her to forward to the United States some East Indian rice that might just as easily have gone direct to New York. In comparison with Bremen, Hamburg has better steamship connections and decidedly better interior transportation; but Bremen holds the tobacco market and the cotton, rice, grain, and petroleum markets, although Bremen cotton firms have tried to open branches in Hamburg, with the idea that they might eventually move to that city. The Ham- burg branches failed just as have the efforts of London wool brokers to sell Australian wools (fine wools) at Liverpool auctions. In the same way the Liverpool brokers have failed to sell carpet wools (coarse wools) at London auctions. The cause of these failures may be ascribed to the price-setting function of the estab- lished auction or market. In each of the above cases the goods offered in the unusual places were offered at reasonable or even very favorable rates, but the buyers made unreasonably low bids, and later they often paid more for the same goods at the estab- lished place. At the unusual place the buyer has the uncertainty of thinking that he might get a better article or more favorable price at the regular market with its larger stocks; so he bids cau- tiously. In the regular market he knows that here all sellers are bidding for his trade, and he buys. It is a kind of a supreme court of commerce Effect of Abundant Capital. — The capital of the entrepot serves as a prop to maintain its hold upon trade that might by ex- isting direct connections go direct from producer to consumer. The business of the international distributing center therefore increases or decreases with changes in the financial soundness and available capital of the trading countries. The merchants of the great center by having stocks of goods may, in a sense, serve as the bankers for, or partners with the traders of countries where capital is less plentiful. Hence, as capital becomes more plentiful in the various countries, there is less need for and dependence upon the center. The German or Belgian manufacturers may not have the capital to invest in raw materials that must be pur- chased in South America or Asia in large quantities and weeks in advance, even if such purchases are desirable. Steamship con- nections make such a trade possible, but it may suit the manu- facturer better to buy in London or Liverpool in small quantities THE TRADE CENTER AND ITS DEVELOPMENT 865 as needed. A few years ago many German woolen mills had established a direct trade in Argentine wools, to the detriment of the British merchants who had previously supplied them. Financial difficulties in Germany brought failure to a number of German mills and reduced capital and credit to others. The direct purchases in South America had to be discontinued and a larger share of the wool supply again came through the centers of abundant capital — London and Liverpool. This case is an exceptional one in a time when the general tendency is toward the increasing financial independence that fosters direct trade, but it serves as a forcible illustration of the influence of abundant capital on the entrepot trade. The history of the Liverpool cotton market illustrates this general tendency. Three or four decades ago two-thirds of the American crop went to Liverpool, 2 million bales were often car- ried in stock, and the world price was fixed in that city. As the American dealers could not afford to store and hold it, they exported it as rapidly as possible, and, in a few months, the whole crop was disposed of. The continental buyer could not afford to send to America for it all at once, but took advantage of British capital by buying in small portions in Liverpool. But capital has become more abundant in the regions of cotton production and cotton consumption, and there has been a corresponding decline in the international importance of the Liverpool cotton market. American mills consume a larger share of the annual crop; American capitalists are able to hold the raw product; American speculation and American consumption set the world price. In many cases the cotton spinners of the continent buy directly from America; and Bremen, Havre and Antwerp are rival markets with Liverpool. Some hasty purchases or small purchases are made in Liverpool, but the relative importance of that city has declined; instead of importing two-thirds of the American crop her dealers now handle but one-third and instead of two million they now only carry one million bales in stock. The Entrepot Problem Is Universal. — The restraining influences are but exceptions in a general tendency. The day of the world entrepot has passed and its place is being taken by an ever- increasing number, so that we now have a score that are as large as was Amsterdam in her distributing prime, each handling as 866 COMMERCIAL GEOGRAPHY much trade as she did in that day. But the fact remains that of the many, many thousands of towns and cities upon the face of the globe, all but this favored score connect with the great arteries of commerce through some entrepot of greater or less importance. Therefore, it is plain that the problem of the entrepot is universal and their number merely serves to heighten interest in them. The towns that are small, the cities that are poor, and the coun- tries that are undeveloped can get the myriad good things from the remote lands, the different climes, and the scattered mills and factories only through some entrepot that has established its connections with the ends of the earth. New entrepots are springing up all the time; but they come in response to economic law, not legislative statute or personal or national whim. If these laws had been better understood, the American people would not have been so sure in 1898 that Manila was a good place from which to control the commerce of Asia. Manila is not, and, under any feasible conditions of commerce, cannot be an entrepot for Asiatic trade. It can neither assemble nor distribute the trade of that continent with either America or Europe. It bears almost exactly the same geographical relation to the mainland of Asia that Havana does to the mainland of North America. To make Asiatic entrepot matters worse, Manila is the most distant port of Asia except Singapore. Some of the lines from America have added Manila to their list of ports; but it is the end port of the voyage, which naturally takes the ship first to Yokohama, next to Shanghai, then to Hong Kong, and finally to Manila. Manila is the metropolis and natural entre- pot of the Philippine Islands. It can be to them what Copen- hagen is to the scattered isles of Denmark, what Honolulu is to the Hawaiian group, what Havana is to Cuba — the place where their products will be assembled, the place where great ships will unload cargo for distribution by smaller vessels to five hundred smaller ports, roadsteads, and wharves. As the Philippines pros- per, Manila will prosper. If the American Congress throttles Philippine industry, it throttles Manila's trade which handles the products of that industry. In any case, traffic that seeks Asia will go to Asia, whether the Philippines prosper or decline. Hong Kong, Shanghai and Yokohama are Asiatic entrepots, but giving way to newer and smaller ones closer to centers of production. CHAPTER XIV THE WORK OF THE TRADE CENTER i. THE BARGAIN CENTER The Buying and Selling of Distant Commodities. — A city may be a commercial center in two ways — first, as an actual distributer of goods; second, as a transaction center, a place where bargains are made for goods that are elsewhere and which may never be brought to the center. The transactions in C often relate to goods in A to be sent directly to B. The transaction center is the lineal descendent of the eighteenth century distributing center. In the days when the communication of ideas and the carriage of goods depended upon the slow and uncertain sailing vessel, or the equally slow and uncertain means of land con- veyance, it was usually necessary to have the goods on the spot be- fore they could be the subject of bargain or sale. However, the steamship, the railway train, and the telegraph have made a com- mercial world, new in its methods of management as well as in its staple commodities. The telegraph gives instant and constant information concerning stocks on hand, the crop prospects, and other conditions that affect the prospective supply. The steam- ship gives quick delivery; and, what is of equal importance, it far exceeds the sailing vessel in the certainty of reaching port in a stated time. Commercial transactions of to-day may thus con- cern commodities in distant places and for future dates; and, although the movement of the goods may be decentralized, it still remains advantageous for the men doing this work to assemble in groups at some convenient center. Advantages of Centralized Bargaining. — The sales and pur- chases are made in the center because it is easier to carry on such operations where many buyers congregate, where many compete in the same business, and where representatives of many busi- nesses can serve each other. This attracting force is somewhat akin to that of an auction and it draws those engaged in the bar- 867 868 COMMERCIAL GEOGRAPHY gaining or transaction side of commerce into groups that are often quite irrespective of the location of the commodities in which they deal. This centralizing force operates in local, interstate and international trade. It is usually strong enough to collect into a small district of a city all the firms engaged in the same line of business, provided the business is not of the retail nature requiring scattered location close to its patrons. The steamship agents and brokers of London, Liverpool, New York, and Philadelphia are all collected into small districts of their respective cities through which one can walk in a few min- utes. The London wool brokers have their still more restricted locality, and two or three small streets are the headquarters for the general. produce brokers. The same is true of the leather merchants of New York and the paper dealers of Philadelphia. An hour's walk through the wholesale districts of New York, Philadelphia, London, Hamburg or any of the many smaller cities will suffice to give the observer many examples of this grouping of mercantile firms engaged in the same business. Examples of Centralization in Bargaining. — The exchange, of which the stock exchange is a conspicuous example, represents the highest form of this grouping or centralization. There the principal buyers and sellers of a particular commodity actually congregate in a single room to facilitate their work. The exchange method of doing business may be applied to most commodities of which the price may be quoted. London recently' had nine exchanges — a stock exchange, a wool exchange, a metal exchange, Lloyds, the underwriters' exchange, the corn exchange (grain), the coal exchange, the royal exchange (bankers, manufacturers, etc.), the shipping exchange, and the Baltic, an exchange where all commodities are dealt in, especially grain in full cargo lots. New Orleans, Liverpool, and Bremen have cotton exchanges; Louisville has a tobacco exchange ; and Leipzig a book exchange. Hamburg has one very large exchange attended by most of the brokers and wholesale merchants of the city. A variety of transactions take place, but the grouping principle works within this general Bourse or exchange, for there is a steamship corner, a grain corner, a coffee corner, a stocks corner, etc. By similar centralization the manufactured products of an industrial district are usually sold at some central point to which THE WORK OF THE TRADE CENTER 869 in many instances they are never sent, being shipped instead directly from the factory to the point of final destinatioD. Man- chester is the selling center for the cottons produced in a score of smaller cities and towns in Lancashire. Offices in the business section of Philadelphia sell a large part of the manufactures produced in the mills of the suburbs and near-by towns. The same is true in Boston and many other large cities. National Centers for Management of Foreign Trade. — In the same way the transactions of foreign trade are centralized in the commercial metropolis. Decentralization of commodity traffic has been an accompaniment of the growth of the new commerce; but the telephone, the telegraph and the fast mail have helped to keep up the transaction center by putting the selling agent in easy communication with the factories and local centers of the producing and consuming districts in all parts of the world. Sales for the foreign trade or to the distant consumer cannot be easily arranged from cement works located in the Allegheny Mountains of Pennsylvania or Virginia, from the Georgia cotton mills, or from the phosphate mines of Tennessee or Florida. Consequently the selling agencies are in New York, although the cotton cloth may go to China by way of Vancouver Sound, the phosphate is shipped from a gulf port to Japan and the Virginia cement reaches the sea at Norfolk and Newport News, or goes by rail to interior points. The products of the scattered industries of Great Britain are largely sold in London, but tens of millions of pounds sterling worth of the goods thus sold go from the point of production to Liverpool, Hull, Glasgow, Bristol, and other ports for export. Hamburg merchants or brokers sell a large share of the German export manufactures while they are yet in the mill, and the goods in question often go down the Rhine to Antwerp or Rotterdam for shipment. The Paris commis- sionaire renders a similar service in the French export trade, and in many countries the broker who makes a specialty of selling for many persons or firms brings about an important part of the transactions in foreign as well as domestic trade. There is a general tendency toward the establishment of direct connections between consumer and producer, especially when the currents of trade have become regular and confidence is established; but the markets for the new industries or the new lines of trade in 870 COMMERCIAL GEOGRAPHY many of the old industries are found through the agencies of the selling center. Here also the new purchaser usually finds it is easier to purchase his stocks, and at all times the individual trader dealing directly has the opportunity to better his condi- tion by selling through the transaction center and getting the advantage of a competitive market. International Bargain Center. — The transactions of the wider international trade are also centralized. London, the last great international distributer, is still a large international seller. With the convenience of telegraph and cable the London dis- tributing merchant often found that, upon the founding of direct communications between foreign countries, he could continue to hold the business although the goods no longer passed through London. He knew the conditions of both eastern and western markets, and the direct connections that have sprung up merely enabled him to deliver more quickly by shipping his goods direct. By this process, London has come to be a dealer in goods which may never at any time be within 5,000 miles of England. For example, London brokers and London merchants recently had a practical monopoly of the international sales of pepper, Manila hemp, Indian jute, and Burmah rice (the chief supply for the world market). The world's supply of each of these four commodities is produced in a comparatively small region and consumed all over the world. The high value and limited supply of the annual crop would probably lead to disturbing price fluctuations if the central London firms did not act as a sort of regulator. Being in constant communication with their numerous agents in the centers of production and consumption, having a world knowledge of this particular trade, they are able to conduct business more safely than is the firm in New York or Marseilles, should it attempt to buy hemp, jute, or pepper directly from the dealer in the point of shipment. Under such an uncentralized method no man or set of men would have the knowledge of conditions in the producing and in all of the consuming centers; and it is prob- able that some one of the several centers of consumption would get too large a proportion of the annual crop to be successfully sold in its established markets; or it might by delaying purchase get too small a supply, producing scarcity and abnormal prices; or again the entire crop might not be purchased and a surplus THE WORK OF THE TRADE CENTER 871 would be left to disorganize the next year's market. But as it is, ' the London firms have a geographical location that is central to the consuming regions of Europe and America, and because of their knowledge of the requirements of each section the business is conducted much more evenly. A financial disturbance or failure in Spain or Holland or Sweden might cause the sacrifice of a shipment of pepper that had been purchased and was in transit. The Spaniard, acquainted only with a small local trade, would lose heavily by a sudden forced sale; but, if the London house had charge of the transaction, the shipment in question would be transferred to the next best market, which might be in the United States, in Scotland, or in Russia. It sometimes happens that such sudden changes return to the broker's control goods that can be disposed of to good advantage in some other place where a new and unexpected demand has arisen. The commodities that are subject to the centralized control of London sometimes go by London, Liverpool, or Hamburg for convenience of trans-shipment to final destination in America or Europe, but they more often go direct. For example, the Burmah rice goes in full cargoes from Rangoon to Chile, Brazil, and the West Indies. The direct shipment does not seriously affect the position of the London firms. A representative dealer in Manila hemp said that some hemp bound for America is still trans-shipped in London, but that the United States tariff arrangement giving a reduction on hemp imports shipped direct from the Philippine Island would stop this circuitous movement but would not in any way inter- fere with the London management of the bargaining end. The Influence of Capital. — The international transaction center requires a central location, a line of business that is carried on in widely separated places, and, in addition, an abundance of capital. Capital must be more plentiful in the center than in the commercial outposts, for the central management of distant" business operation is only possible by the use of capital from the controlling center. In this respect the relationship to the distributing center is again shown. The London firms can only hold the fiber trades by buying the hemp in Manila and the jute in Calcutta. The rice firms hold the cleaning mills in Rangoon and the other ports in Burmah. 872 COMMERCIAL GEOGRAPHY This central control goes further and sometimes takes a lien on the unharvested crops. The white grapes of southern Spain are usually sold in or through London to offset the account of the merchant-banking firm that has, through its local agent, advanced the money necessary for the expensive oak casks and cork pack- ing. An American importer of these grapes bewailed his inability to buy them direct from Spain, but he could not break the hold of the English money unless he had a bank in Spain. He was not a banker so he got his grapes in London and sent them across on the fast trans- Atlantic liners at little if any sacrifice of time or freights. The super-abundance of London capital gives the London capitalist a controlling voice in the sale of many products. Close Relation to Banking and Industrial Enterprises. — The distant agents for London firms have brought and are bringing to London a great variety of transactions similar to the above. Further examples may be cited in the Persian wools, the dates of Arabia, and the cabinet woods of Mexico and the West Indies. The details of an actual case will illustrate this class of trans- actions. A German firm, half merchants and half bankers, has head offices in Hamburg and branches or agencies in many other cities, among them a port in the Tehuantepec region of Mexico. In this port there was a Mexican promoter. He had a concession from the government to cut mahogany in the woods of the interior; he was familiar with the language of the Indians and with the local labor market; but he had no capital. He ar- ranged to get the necessary money from the banker's agent who was acquainted with the conditions and took the risk as follows: First, the promoter was bound to deliver certain amounts of mahogany as collateral for a certain sum of money for which he was to pay a good rate of interest; second, he was to receive the money in monthly installments as the work of getting out mahogany advanced; and, finally, the agent was to sell the wood, thus securing the payment of principal and interest — provided it brought a sufficiently high price. This was of course a part of the risk incurred in advancing the money. When the work was so nearly done that a date could be set for its conclusion and for the shipment of the lumber, the agent informed the head office in Hamburg. The principals entered into negotiations to secure transportation, and finally chartered a British sailing vessel to THE WORK OF THE TRADE CENTER 873 load a full cargo and proceed to the English Channel for orders. In the meantime, efforts were made to sell the cargo but as no suitable buyer could be found in Germany, it was placed in the hands of a London broker who sold it to a Paris firm who ordered the vessel to proceed to Havre and discharge cargo. As the trading countries come to possess more adequate supplies of capital for their own use, and when the trade assumes larger proportions, the international transaction center loses, at least proportionally. When the buyer and the seller can manage a transaction without mortgaging the goods in transit to a financier in a third country, there is less need of the services of the broker in the international transaction center. There is accordingly a tendency toward a decentralization of management as well as a decentralization in the actual handling of goods. But the two decentralizations do not accompany each other. The direct movement of goods preceded in point of time the direct manage- ment of the business. The latter may be indefinitely delayed. The supplies of capital may remain low, causing dependence upon foreign bankers. Few countries have or promise in decades to have sufficient capital for their own needs. Since the commercial character of the traders in some countries is not reliable, no one dares trade with them who is not fully acquainted with them — which usually means having an agent on the spot, as happened in the Mexican lumber incident described above. The trade of some countries will therefore continue to be largely transacted through the centers in the financial countries, although many products (usually the raw materials) go directly to the ports nearest the points of consumption. In the United States the industries are conducted upon an unprecedented scale, the mercantile classes are relatively re- liable, and the accumulation of capital has been rapid. As a result direct bargaining arrangements have been established, at least for the staples of American trade. There is no sin- gle European center for the trade in American grain, cotton, or lumber. American merchants deal directly with half a dozen European cities. Sometimes a London broker succeeds in placing a cargo of American grain or lumber in some other city, but this is unusual and he must divide his brokerage with the agent in the other port. The Russian grain cargoes from the 874 COMMERCIAL GEOGRAPHY Baltic and Black Sea ports are usually sold by London brokers, although they may go to any continental or British port. The same is true of East Indian teak, West Indian mahogany, and a large share (some merchants estimate it at a half) of the Brazilian coffee that goes to the Continent. Direct Control of Distant Industries from the Bargain Center. — There is still another stage in this bargain center control, the entrepeneur stage. The capitalists, usually European, actually carry on industries and manage them and sell the prod- uct through the headquarters in the capitalistic center. Ham- burg is the market for the German coffee plantations of Guate- mala; Amsterdam is the chief market for the Sumatra tobacco grown in the East by the Dutch companies. The Jarri paving- wood industry of western Australia is all managed in two or three buildings in London. London has thousands of companies doing business abroad, and, if one walks through the business districts and reads the signs upon the office buildings, he can familiarize himself with geographical names in every continent, in almost every country or island with resources to develop and with an adequate capital. It should be emphasized that this capitalistic development has but begun. A mere corner of the world, say a half million square miles or one per cent, of the earth's land surface, has capital to spare; and all the vast remainder of the world must depend upon imported capital for the execution of any consider- able enterprise; such, for example, as the building of a railroad. This is true of the entire continents of Asia, Africa, and South America, the East and West Indies, Australia, Central America, Mexico, Canada, and most of the United States. We still use large amounts of foreign capital, although some of the American people have now begun to invest abroad, and there has long been much control of industry in our western states by Eastern capitalists. Throughout the nineteenth century the countries of northwestern Europe were the sole exporters of capital, and Spain, Italy, Greece, the Balkan States, and Russia are still borrowers. The borrowing countries are in different degrees of poverty; some are much nearer financial independence than others. Australia and India are much richer than Persia or Central i THE WORK OF THE TRADE CENTER 875 America ; but, taking the world as a whole, there is every indica- tion that during the most of the twentieth century a compara- tively small proportion of the world will furnish the capital that will be distributed throughout that part of the earth's surface that contributes commodities to world commerce. The Rise of International Bargain Centers in the United States. — The United States will join Western Europe in capital- izing the world's new enterprises and the financial centers of these countries will be the centers of control of industries in the other continents. As the continent gains relatively on England, Hamburg, Amsterdam, and Paris will continue to rise in impor- tance, while New York promises to take a leading position. This is well shown by the present dominance of that city in the industries of America. There is the headquarters of the United States Steel Corporation, a veritable kingdom in riches, in numbers of persons dependent upon it, and in the scope of territory owned and covered, for its engines throb and its ma- chinery roars in the states that border Canada and the Gulf, the Pacific and the cold New England Atlantic. In New York are consummated the deals in Montana and Arizona copper, Oklahoma oil, Maine spruce lands, Georgia pine lands, Susque- hanna water-power plants, Virginia railways, Florida phosphates, West Virginia coal, Pennsylvania cement works and the charter- ing of ships for Galveston cotton. Most of the railroads of the country have offices there and those who supply them must also have offices there. The list might be drawn out indefinitely, for there is not a state or territory in the Union that does not have lands, enterprises and resources managed from New York, the bargain center of the American people. As this country grows richer and has capital to invest in foreign lands, the office signs of New York become more and more of a gazeteer of the world. The future is suggested by the important place taken by New York in the industries and rail- ways of Mexico and by the Guyaquil-Quito railway which was built by an American company that has its headquarters in New York and did not even list its stocks on the London exchange. New York manages the banana business of the Caribbean countries and the asphalt business of Trinidad and Venezuela, and is striving for a chance to help build railways in China. 876 COMMERCIAL GEOGRAPHY Other American cities will engage in similar distant enterprises'. The era of bargain centers is but begun. 2. THE WORK OF THE MERCHANT OR MIDDLEMAN Function of the Merchant and of Money Compared. — Mer- chants carry od the world's commerce, which consists in buying and selling and carrying. The merchant and money are twins, both called into being when primitive commerce becomes too elaborate for direct barter. While a community and its economic life are so simple that producers can supply themselves with goods by exchanging directly with each other, they use no money, and there is no merchant. But such conditions of simplicity can only exist in a savage community of low forms. To-day most savages use commodities produced by men they have never seen. In these cases money (gold, silver, shells, wampum, pieces of leather, checks, drafts, promises, anything that is agreed upon) serves to transfer the value from one community to another, from one man to another. The herdsman with twenty cattle, fifteen of which are of no value to him if he himself must use them, stores their value in shells or beads, or gold given by some merchant until he can exchange it for furs or weapons. As the money serves to transfer the value of goods, so the merchants transfer the goods themselves and make the link between two producers each unknown to the other. Kinds of Merchants. — As trade becomes more extended the merchant cannot himself know both producer and consumer and another class of merchant arises — merchants who sell to other merchants. With the growing complications of society this process is repeated so that in the present international trade goods sometimes pass into the possession of eight or ten different merchants before they reach the consumer. Some of these merchants perform but a small part of the process of connecting the producer and the consumer, for some mercantile operations are divided into sharp and narrow specialties. With all their variety of work the whole group of merchants may be divided into two classes. (a) Those who only sell goods for other people. (b) Those who own the goods they sell. THE WORK OF THE TRADE CENTER 877 The man or firm owning the goods is commonly regarded as the real merchant, those who sell for others being known as commis- sion merchants, brokers, agents, etc., but their service to society and their part in commerce is the same. The question of the ownership of the goods being sold is a minor detail; the selling is the important part. The Commission Merchants, Brokers and Agents. — The mer- chant who sells goods for other people is a result of widened and well-established commerce. He is to be found in all large centers of domestic or foreign trade, and his chief capital is his knowledge of and acquaintance in the market in which he sells. Some familiar examples are the farm produce commission merchant, the stockbroker, and the real estate agent. In the medium sized and lar,ge cities of America and Europe, the farm produce that cannot be sold by the farmer himself 1 is sold by commission mer- chants to whom the farmer or local dealer has consigned it at his own risk. The merchant has no capital involved except the warehouse and necessary appliances for handling the goods. He is acquainted with the local dealers in his particular line of goods, sells the farmer's produce on the best terms he can, and receives his pay in the form of a percentage commission. The stock- broker goes to the stock exchange, and buys and sells securities for his clients on commission (called brokerage). The money broker takes advantage of his knowledge of the money market. Knowing the reliable borrowers and also money lenders, he arranges loans between these parties and receives a small com- mission. People having lands or buildings which they wish to sell or rent, go to a real estate agent who finds purchasers or tenants, and receives a commission on the purchase or rental money. Brokerage or commission transactions are quite as important in international trade as in domestic trade. Every city that is a "market" in international trade, such, for example, as London, Liverpool, Hamburg, Antwerp or Havre, has many brokers who have an international clientele. Sometimes they handle a certain class of articles; often only a single article. Sometimes a firm of brokers has several members and a staff of clerks, and yet deals 1 By a needless separation of producer and consumer world commerce has greatly and uselessly raised the cost of living. 878 COMMERCIAL GEOGRAPHY in but a single article as wheat, rice, tea or coffee. It is common for the brokers of a city who deal in the same article or articles to form an association for their mutual advantage and for the publication of statistics. London has a Rice Brokers' Associa- tion, Liverpool a Cotton Association, a General Brokers' Asso- ciation and others. The auction sales of London, Hamburg and other cities are but a species of the commission merchant's work. The work of the international broker or commission merchant is similar to that of the local or domestic broker mentioned above, except that the operations cross international boundaries and are spread over a wider area. Within the city of London, a business custom has developed whereby certain classes of brokers perform a unique function. They effect transactions between merchants who may be in the same building. This is not because the merchants are unac- quainted. For want of a better name, the advantage may be called diplomatic. The Briton explains it thus, an explanation which shows the reason that causes many transactions in all cities to be arranged by third parties. If merchants or their acknowledged representatives should meet daily and haggle over prices, set them, change them, promise, threaten and withdraw their threats, there would be a certain amount of fric- tion and personal hard feeling which is not a good basis for con- tinued profitable business relations. Therefore, they make the transaction impersonal by employing a broker. He goes to the merchant and offers to secure certain goods at a certain price. If the price does not suit, the broker may change it later in the day or he may find another purchaser. But in any case the broker is not responsible; he is but the agent. Whose agent he is, the merchant does not know, for any broker may sell goods for twenty-five or ten or maybe a hundred merchants. He is not the representative of a firm, but rather the representative of imper- sonal goods, and this impersonal aspect of the transaction keeps every one in a good humor. The practice really results in the merchants having fewer regular salesmen employed, and expand- ing their force when necessary by the employment of the pro- fessional salesman, the broker. The Selling of Manufactured Goods. — The brokerage and THE WORK OF THE TRADE CENTER 879 public commission business is better adapted to simple and unmanufactured commodities than to the more elaborate manu- factured goods that tend to be suitable for particular markets only. With the exception of real estate and stocks, all of the examples cited above were of articles moving from the district of raw material production toward the industrial center — farm produce going to the city, foods and raw materials going toward the manufacturing and consuming regions of Great Britain, the Continent or the United States. In the case of manufactures, which constitute the bulk of European, and a growing share of American exports, the more exacting demands of the market require more organization for successful selling. Goods are often sold on commission, but it is done by a regular authorized agent who is often the representative of but one manufacturer or group of manufacturers, although he sometimes sells for several concerns. The sales agent and the export commission house serve the distant manufacturer just as the commission merchant serves the distant farmer. The export merchants to whom they sell are in their turn the great rivals of the sales agent and the export commission house. The export merchant is ever striving to get away from both these bargain center sellers, and by establishing direct dealings with the factory, avoid the commissions of the intermediary. The Export Merchant. — The export merchant performs an important and interesting part in international trade, especially between the manufacturing countries of the north Atlantic and the distinctly raw material producing regions of Asia, Africa, Tropic America and Australia. A firm that buys in Europe and sells in Chile or Australia, or both, covers a wide area. The method of organization is somewhat as follows. In the selling country the firm does business as a wholesale house which may carry a large stock of goods. As the value of an established business of this sort is great, the business, if prosperous, is rarely discontinued and is often passed intact from father to son, from partner to partner, from founder to purchaser for generations. These merchants or merchant firms often aim to deal in every line of goods required in such a country as Argentina, Chile or China. Distributing branches are established and the area of operations increased until some 880 COMMERCIAL GEOGRAPHY firms have reached the positions where they now conduct opera- tions in China, India and Australia; or in China, the Philippines, Australia and one or two countries in South America. So thoroughly and extensively is this business organized that it is commonly stated that six or seven firms in Manila transact nearly all of the mercantile operations of the Philippines — a situation indicative of conditions that prevail (though not necessarily in the same degree) in China, Japan and South and Central America. The exporting firms have a similarly thorough organization for the purchase in producing countries of the multitude of commodities which they sell in consuming countries. As England was the first country to have a large export trade in manufactures, most of the export houses dealing with the other continents are English firms whose head offices are yet in London. Although there are, of course, many American, German, French, and Belgian firms also, it is probable that London is still the headquarters for the majority. Originally, London was the place where all the purchases were made, includ- ing such goods as came from America or the Continent. With the growth of manufacturing in America and Germany, it has become necessary for British firms to sell increasing quantities of American and German goods in order that they may con- tinue to supply all the wants of their patrons in Brazil, New Zealand or India. As the use of American and Continental goods increased, London became an inconvenient place to make all purchases and the establishment of branches in other manu- facturing countries has become common. An actual example shows how it comes about. A London firm with a business in Cape Colony had been buying some American goods in London and forwarding them. Then the goods were ordered from New York, and shipped by way of British ports. Then direct steamship lines were estab- lished from New York, and the London firm opened a branch in New York to attend to the American business. There is almost daily cabling between the Cape Town branch and London to order goods, and between the London and New York houses to decide what goods shall be bought in one country, and what in the other. Otherwise, the two purchasing branches conduct THE WORK OF THE TRADE CENTER 881 their work independently and London is only the financial head- quarters and the purchasing center for British goods. Another typical British firm has its headquarters in London, with a branch in New York, and sells goods in Argentina, having its store and warehouses in Buenos Ayres. The London office attends to the purchase of British and Continental goods. Firms with more extensive business often have an American, a British, and a Continental purchasing office. The location of these offices will be New York, London and probably Hamburg, as Germany offers the greatest variety of manufactures. This nearness to the center of production gives the purchaser a better chance to become acquainted with local conditions and to make bargains more quickly and with less cost for cabling, for it is a noteworthy fact that the ocean cable has largely replaced the mails as a means of communication in international trade. Having several purchasing branches it is easier to take advantage of differences in price in the different countries. If prices rise in America, the London and Hamburg offices purchase more heavily. If Germany has an industrial boom and high prices, the New York office may be the scene of greater activity in purchasing. Contrast between Method of Shipping and Purchasing. — It must not be inferred that because the goods are purchased by a New York, Hamburg, or London office, they pass through those cities. When the goods are purchased they are almost always in the factory or the warehouse attached to it. The New York branch of one international exporting house has upon its books the names of nearly 7,000 American manufacturing firms, from which it may buy goods. In Europe it is the same, and in both continents the goods are sent from the factory to the port of shipment in the most direct and economical manner. Hamburg branches of British and American firms buy iron goods in the Westphalian district below Cologne and ship them by the Rhine boats to Rotterdam or Antwerp where they are put aboard the ocean liners for the final destination. London houses buy Manchester goods which are shipped from Liverpool, Scotch iron ware which is shipped from Glasgow, fine clothing in Paris which is shipped from Havre, laces in Lille for shipment from Antwerp. Goods purchased through New York may be exported 882 COMMERCIAL GEOGRAPHY from Boston, Puget Sound, or Montreal. An extreme case is that of the London firm that, having no American branch, pur- chased by cable a lot of provisions in San Francisco and ordered them shipped by direct steamer to Hong Kong where they were trans-shipped to Singapore, the selling center for this particular firm. The Position of Americans in International Trade. — The first trader in the field has a strong advantage over his later rivals. The force that comes from an established trade with regular customers, a good name and wide acquaintance makes it difficult for the new merchant to get started. As a consequence of this advantage of an early start, the mercantile organization shifts much more slowly than the world's industrial or exporting center. The British merchants, the first in the field, have simply bought German and American goods when they became available, and supplied them to their old customers. The German merchant has now gone abroad and is making strong competition with the English, but the Americans have scarcely begun to compete for foreign trade. The great boom in American exports that oc- curred between 1897 and 1902 was not accompanied by a corre- sponding increase in the work of the American merchants doing business abroad. The merchants of other countries, finding our prices low because of industrial depression, bought the goods and sold them again. The development of American mercantile enterprises will come in time, but it is the second step. The first step — the development of the vast domestic resources and the supply of the home market^has thus far occupied most of the enterprises and capital of the American people who, in the main, care and know but little about foreign commerce. CHAPTER XV THE BALANCE OF TRADE AND ITS RELATION TO INDUSTRIAL DEVELOPMENT Definition and Significance of Balance of Trade. — Balance of trade is the term usually applied to the difference between the valuation of goods imported into and exported from a country. Owing to the concepts of a discarded theory of political economy an excess of imports is called an unfavorable balance of trade and an excess of exports a favorable balance of trade. There is such a variety of causes that the excess of exports or imports can have no uniform significance and therefore no significance beyond mere excess in value of the one over the other. An excess of exports, the so-called favorable balance of trade, does undoubtedly mean some credit abroad. It, therefore, presumably means that the exporting people can meet their current obligations and are therefore solvent, but it will not do to carry the figure on and suppose that upon the average it means riches for the nation or the individuals of the nation having this so-called favorable balance. It means more often a moderate but improving state of indebtedness. Nations are made of individuals. To see the trade balance in its correct light compare it to an individual's financial and industrial condition. If an old gentleman retires from Wall Street or London to a fine colonial estate in Virginia or Surrey and from it sends out annually $3,000 worth of produce and has sent to it annually $10,000 worth of produce, no one speaks of his condition as being unfavorable. His neighbors know he is rich enough to live upon his money so that he can sell few things and buy many. Along- side of him may live a f aimer with a mortgage on his farm. He sells $3,000 worth of produce and owing to his heavy interest payments he only has the money to buy back $2,500 worth of produce. If these two men were types of groups large enough to be called 883 884 COMMERCIAL GEOGRAPHY nations, common custom would say that the farmer who was laboring against the mortgage had a favorable balance of trade when in reality he is working arduously, selling the eggs he ought to eat, and going without a new roof on his house; and common usage and terms would have it that the comfortable, rich old gentleman had a very unfavorable balance of trade. As a matter of fact, he can order and pay for the products of all lands. The terms favorable and unfavorable balance of trade are at times ridiculous contradictions, if they are meant to convey the idea of national riches. Excess of exports and excess of imports would be much better terms, because they do not have further implied meanings tending to mistaken concepts. Excess of import or of export is produced by too many different and at times contradictory things to be so simply and categorically defined as favorable and unfavorable. Relations of Money and Bullion to the Settlement of Trade Balance. — There is a widespread failure to recognize the fact that the balance of trade is eventually paid, paid in goods and paid only in goods. It seems difficult for the business man or the student to grasp the fact that money is always really nothing but a medium of exchange, like wampum, something to transfer property as a piping system transfers water. Money may defer real payments, but it must be got before it can be had and it does not pay a nation's debt unless it is bullion dug from the lands of the paying nation, then it is in its production, goods. Further, the goods given and the goods taken in exchange are of equal market value. Money merely enables our goods and labor to pay debts, to pay for other labor and other goods. The goods given and the goods taken tend to balance each other. Trade between nations does similarly balance eventually except for presents (including the funds of emigrants, bad debts and the losses through unsound investments) and is paid in the produce of the trading lands. This produce may be corn or cloth, coal, iron or gold from the mines, or it may be service in a hotel, a hospital or a ship. The point is that it is paid in the products of industry, and money has no more to do with it than would money in the following case. Ten farmers may compose a village. They have empty pockets, but each has $1,000 to his credit in a near-by bank. Some busy day they are animated to buy and BALANCE OF TRADE AND INDUSTRIAL DEVELOPMENT 885 sell from each other, and by noon they have effected transactions among themselves to the extent of $25,000 worth of houses, lands, teams, and cattle and have given fifty bank checks on the $10,000 which has all the morning lain to their various credits in the bank. The bank checks furthermore had nothing more to do with it than so many figures on the bank-book keeper's ledger where they were finally totalled up. The farmers apparently paid with credit slips, but really they exchanged the results of toil. Nations do the same through highly organized and well- nigh invisible financial mechanism for international payment in which gold, except it be mine produce just entering circulation, renders the same service as the bank checks or the figures in the ledger above mentioned. Other Factors That Enter Into the Settlement of Trade Bal- ances. — The keepers of import and export statistics see but a part of the international transactions. There are other factors in international payments than mere import and export, such as the oft mentioned interest money, the expenses of travellers, the payments of international freights and the properties of emi- grants who may be laborers with bundles of clothes or heiresses with millions in securities. The traveller is sometimes a weighty factor; as in Bermuda, for instance, which is thus enabled to import from three to four and one-half times as much value in goods as it exports, and in Switzerland where the traveller leaves over $10 per year for every inhabitant of the country. The capitalists' or the heiresses' securities are still another con- fusing factor; if they are bonds they are deferred payments; if stocks which represent immediate ownership, an immediate transfer of title to property from one country to another is involved. In either case, the emigrated capitalist or heiress can become the actual user of wealth in a foreign land only through the transference of actual goods from the country where the property is, and the receipt of goods of equal value in the country where the owner lives. A British peeress' income of half a million dollars from bonds of a United States corn-belt railroad really means $500,000 worth of American wheat, corn, pork, or other produce sent abroad from America, for by that means only could the farmers who supported the railroad pay their freights, from which the railroad company pays its interest. And unless 886 COMMERCIAL GEOGRAPHY that $500,000 worth of goods or its equivalent reaches Britain, the owner is no more benefited than Crusoe would have been had he on his fertile isle possessed a similar fortune in bonds. A ship loaded with goods purchased with the proceeds of the bonds in the country where the property lay would enrich alike Crusoe on his isle and the heiress on her isle. They both need goods, not documents. Payment In Goods and Promises of Goods. — Our complete commercial and financial organization has made it less visible but it is none the less true that when we go to Europe we pay our way with American goods or the proceeds thereof in government or bankers' promises to pay, while the goods go some other way. It is only in the visibility of the device that we differ from the Esquimaux who would come a pauper from his land of barter in the north unless he brought the furs and products which alone permit him to get our money to pay his way during his sojourn in our lands. Beneath and behind the smooth- running machinery of inter- national financial settlement with its bankers' cheques and bills of exchange, is the commodity settlement complicated by the traveller's payments and by the deferred payment of investments; but, with the exception of the transfer of wealth by the emigrant, which is a gift from nation to nation; there is a final balance in the exchanges of goods, or a promise to balance as shown by stocks, bonds, and financial promises. Bullion dug from a mine in the exporting country and entering circulation is here counted goods, because it is a product of industry and a bank note is not counted as goods because it is nothing more than a certificate or receipt for. goods like a railroad ticket. This pay- ment of goods, present and deferred, combines with normal industrial development to give us four stages in the evolution of the national trade balance which is the annual record of the movement of goods. The Stages in the Evolution of a National Trade Balance. — (1) The first is the equipment stage, in which the people of a country are borrowing heavily from the people of some other country to get the means to equip their land for production. During this period the imports exceed the exports. (2) The sec- ond stage is the interest-paying stage, during which ordinary BALANCE OF TRADE AND INDUSTRIAL DEVELOPMENT 887 wants of import consumption are paid for by exports and in addition other exports are sent out to pay interest, giving the interest-paying stage a surplus of exports over imports. (3) The third stage is the foreign- investment stage, during which the country is sending out food or materials for the building of fac- tories, railroads and other equipment in other countries, still in the equipment stage. During this third stage also the exports are likely to exceed the imports. (4) The fourth and final stage is the interest-receiving stage and the return of investment stage when the loaning country is receiving interest payments in the form of produce and possibly occasional returns of principal. This makes the imports greatly exceed the exports. The First — The Borrowing or Equipment Stage. — We can best understand the working of the first or equipment stage in its influence upon trade balances by taking a particular case. Some Americans with $10,000,000 to invest conclude that they will build a new railroad in Mexico. In the beginning of opera- tions, a number of engineers, graduates of American technical schools, cross the Mexican boundary in a passenger train, promptly followed by many boxes of bacon, barrels of flour, and a miscellaneous assortment of provisions which the Mexican customs officials record as imports into Mexico. The line is sur- veyed and located, and work begins. Carloads of dynamite, trainloads of cement, hundreds of tons of steel girders, thousands of tons of steel rails, hundreds of miles of telegraph wire, millions of feet of lumber in the form of ties and station material, and carloads of provisions for construction camps cross the Mexican boundary and are credited as imports. If a number of similar operations go on at the same time; in other words, if Mexico were on something of a boom and foreign capitalists were busy invest- ing there, it is unquestionably true that the imports would exceed the exports at this time. The pay for the Mexican workers who do the work of construction stimulates the import of consumption goods which indeed is the actual form in which it enters Mexico. Such is the normal condition of a country that is having a lively experience in the equipment stage of its industrial and financial history. We can see that this equipment stage, with its surplus of imports is, therefore, likely to occur in the most undeveloped regions and is really the beginning of participation in the world 888 COMMERCIAL GEOGRAPHY of trade. It will take on added intensity whenever a country experiences a new industrial boom, as occurred in South Africa just after the South African War, in Cuba just after the Spanish- American War, and in Korea, where, after war with Russia, Japan took hold with a firm hand to govern, a strong broom to clean up, and foreign capital goods to develop, so that the trade for 1907 consisted of $8,000,000 exports and $20,000,000 imports. Canada, especially western Canada, was at that time also, as is well known, experiencing a general industrial boom, and a tremendous development in railroad building. These new enter- prises were financed quite largely by foreign countries, but the money went to Canada in the form of goods and showed itself in imports worth $351,000,000 while the exports were valued at $227,000,000. Germany, with colonies consisting of vast unde- veloped areas, is making great efforts to build railroads and other- wise develop her territories. As a consequence her colonies imported $20,000,000 worth of produce in the year 1906 and exported $10,000,000 worth. Panama shows the most delightful example of all. It exists as a freight forwarder and as a kind of construction camp for the world's greatest piece of equipment now under construction, and, in consequence, imports almost five times as much as it exports. Any country with abundant and profitable resources but with little capital is liable to enter this first stage. The wealth of emigrants, always a somewhat confusing factor, is especially so in this stage because of the proportionately greater number of people who transfer their whole fortunes to the new country, a transfer which takes place in the various forms of goods and is never paid back because the owner goes along. The Second or Interest-paying Stage. — All this so-called unfavorable balance of trade for the new country looks upon the surface like loss for the nations which send out the goods without return. The people of the supplying country take the immediate return in the form of printed claims on property, usually stocks and bonds of the enterprises for which they have sent supplies. These are really promises to pay and the real return comes when the newly equipped enterprises make divi- dends and cause the country in which they are located to enter upon the second or interest-paying stage. If some persons BALANCE OF TRADE AND INDUSTRIAL DEVELOPMENT 889 in Boston have spent $100,000 in equipping a copper property in Mexico, that property can only make returns on the invest- ment by yielding copper and the copper can only make returns for the people of Boston by causing a certain value in goods to be shipped out of Mexico in such a way as to place those goods or their equivalent in money or other goods at the dis- posal of the Boston owners. If property in Mexico pays some- thing to the owner in America, something must go out of Mexico to do it. This is a factor toward surplus of exports for Mexico. In addition, ordinary consumption goods are imported and paid for with other exports. We see this interest- paying stage to best advantage in some rather mature countries whose statistics give us small reason to question their accuracy. Australia is well known to be a tre- mendous borrower from England, because the English have built and yet own most of the Australian railroads, hold many state and municipal bonds, and own many Australian sheep ranches, getting their returns in exports, which in 1907 amounted to $339,000,000 for all Australia, while the imports were valued at but $252,000,000. New Zealand with similar conditions exported $86,000,000 and imported $74,000,000 worth of produce. British India, which is almost exactly analogous to Australia in its dependence on foreign capital, exported $562,000,000 worth of products and received in return in the same year but $442,000,000. All of the remaining British colonies had a total export of $553,000,000 and an import of $526,000,000, giving to the entire British Colonial Empire an export excess or so- called favorable balance of trade of about $246,000,000. The Dutch East Indies are controlled to a surprising extent by Dutch enterprise, and the trade statistics show an unusually heavy balance with an export of $130,000,000 — a figure 47 per cent, ahead of the imports of $88,000,000. Russia has been a notorious borrower and figures in foreign trade with exports of $564,000,000 and imports of $412,000,000. The Third or Investing Stage. — The foreign investment stage is hard to single out, because the activities which place a country in this stage are likely to run side by side with those which characterize the second. The best illustration of this is to be found in the United States, where numberless corporation 890 COMMERCIAL GEOGRAPHY managers are from time to time collecting vast amounts of cash for interest payments which they must annually make to the Europeans who hold the stocks of American railways, street railways, breweries and manufacturing enterprises. An inter- esting example of this is the reported instance of the late Queen of Spain, who, during the Spanish-American War, owned a large amount of American Steel & Wire Company's stock and kept it for safety in the Bank of England. While the United States is paying interest money out of the east door to Europe on these vast borrowings of the past, we are sending capital out of the north door, the west door and the south door. The American Consul General in Mexico reported recently that Americans had within a short period of time invested 1500,000,000 in Mexican property. This process is continuing in Mexico, Canada, and in a number of other countries, so that this invest- ment abroad joins with the payment of interest to capitalists of Europe to make our excess of exports over imports surprisingly large. The Fourth or Income Receiving and Return of Investment Stage. — England has more than once been likened to an old gentleman with many money bags which he jealously guarded. Britain has led in the loaning of money to all equipping countries from New Zealand to Saskatchewan, from San Francisco to Cape Town. The enormous results of this now show in an im- port of $3,142,000,000 in the year 1907, which sum exceeds by more than a billion dollars the exports of $2,073,000,000. Germany also is no mean capitalist, as shown by imports of $2,081,000,000 and exports of but $1,629,000,000. France, Holland, and Belgium also belong in this same favored class of interest receivers, having the so-called unfavorable balance of trade which is really a sign of riches. As another explaining factor, the heavy disbursements of foreign travellers in Europe should not be lost sight of in this connection. Many persons who are interested in and affected by the com- mercial policy of the United States seem to think that a country can go on forever sending out more goods than she gets and be better off for it. Yet those same persons would scarcely see wisdom and business soundness in eternally paying out more than they took in. This country is doing it now, because we are BALANCE OF TRADE AND INDUSTRIAL DEVELOPMENT 891 at the same time paying debts and taking deferred payments for our exports in the form of foreign properties, such as Mexican, Ecuadorian and Chinese railways, Canadian lands, and Cuban orange groves and vegetable fields. But just as surely as that money put into these properties is well invested and the proper- ties are sound, they will make returns and will make them in goods. Otherwise, the $10,000,000 of the gentlemen who built the Mexican railroad is gone. If you own a plantation in Cuba and live in the United States that plantation can be of no con- ceivable use to you in an economic sense, unless by sending out goods it enables you in the United States to have goods of some sort sent to you from somewhere; that means imports for the United States; that means a figure in the column of excess imports, the so-called unfavorable balance of trade. The only other possible way for that plantation to be of use to you is for you to go there, and there enjoy the goods which it produces. The inevitable result of safely made, heavy foreign investments upon the balance of trade is therefore to make the imports eventually exceed the exports unless the persons investing abroad emigrate with their money (goods) and live upon their foreign property and take its proceeds on the spot. If a country is willing to export both its capital and capitalists, it can indefi- nitely maintain a surplus of exports. This the Americans have no apparent intention of doing. Therefore, those who are making plans and legislation concerning our foreign trade must expect and prepare for a great increase of imports, if present normal developments of foreign investment continue as they almost inevitably must. CHAPTER XVI THE INFLUENCE OF GEOGRAPHIC FACTORS ON THE COMMERCIAL POLICY OF NATIONS Every nation desires the greatest possible measure of inde- pendence. There are two kinds — freedom in government and self-supporting independence through variety of industries. Political independence is always menaced by industrial incom- pleteness and commercial dependence which a blockade may convert into starvation or humbling hardship to be ended by surrender to the blockading conqueror. As a result of this menace, all the nations of the world have some desire, or effort to establish or maintain the economic independence which alone is the strength to guarantee political independence. This economic independence is attained by two means. First, varied industries which use domestic materials and approach completeness in the supply of national needs; and second, an unbreakable chain of commercial connections, which give access to the ports and products of the trading world and thus give through undisturbable trade the completeness of variety in goods that might arise from the home production resulting from the ownership of a rich continent. Economic Independence through Control of the Sea. — Great Britain offers the one good example of the nation that has rightly felt independent because of the unbreakable commer- cial connections and resultant access to all markets and supplies. These have for decades been guaranteed by her policy of keeping a navy as large as the combined navies of any other two European powers. Unfortunately this method involves armed supremacy, and is only applicable to one nation at a time. The supremacy aspect of the situation is only of real value in war. During peace, when all may use the world's highway, the sea, the nations of the world have a close approach to equality in that economic completeness that comes through sea-borne commerce. It is completeness but it is not independence, for all the single lesser 892 THE INFLUENCE OF GEOGRAPHIC FACTORS 893 nations know that it rests upon the good will of the owners of the stronger navies. But the great advantage of seaports and sea trade makes maritime outlets one of the greatest ambitions of nations. Value of Access to the Sea. — Thus Russia has since the begin- ning of modern times striven seaward from inland Muscovy. When she finally reached the Baltic Sea, she promptly estab- lished her capital there. Not content with ports on the Black Sea, the White Sea and the cold Sakhalin Channel at the mouth of the Amur, she reached out also for the Arabian Sea, the Yellow Sea and the Sea of Japan, where she came into contact with Japan in the war of 1904. Germany stands credited by most observers as casting envious eyes on Holland because this small neighbor possesses the mouths of the Rhine, Germany's greatest natural commercial outlet. Austria and Hungary are jealously developing their respective ports of Trieste and Fieume at the head of the Adriatic; and even friendly Canada laments that the frozen St. Lawrence makes her naturally dependent upon American Atlantic ports during the winter months. To avoid this dependence, the economically uncalled for Intercolonial Railroad has been built in great detour around Maine so that by this route through the snowy woods, Canada can, if need arises, reach the open sea at St. Johns, N. B., without crossing American soil. ' It is also claimed that Canada's good feeling toward England was greatly strained because the mother country acceded to a boundary decision that gave to the United States all the seacoast of Alaska. Economic Independence through Varied Industry. — While sea power as an essential part of economic independence is limited to the nation with a dominant navy, any nation with powers of self defence by land, and land defence is relatively easy, may become independent by the development of varied industry supported within its own territory. This object dozens of nations are now attempting to attain by protective tariffs that cause the establishment of industries because they give a higher price to the manufacturer who produces and sells within the protected country. The same national end is occasionally sought through bounties on production. The geographic conditions in which nations are placed cause them to fare variously with their pro- 894 COMMERCIAL GEOGRAPHY tective tariffs. They have reached a variety of situations in which it is possible to observe the recurrence of phenomena in a way that suggests laws of tariff evolution. The British Tariff Development. — In tariff developments as in other industrial developments England has been a pioneer. There the factory system was first established, and at a time when a general protective tariff was levied on the products of the factory and the farm and the Napoleonic wars gave a rare opportunity for large sales abroad. Great growth of manufacturing resulted and with it great increase of city population. These city dwellers consumed more food than the English farms produced and the importation of grain that paid a high tariff made the price of food so high that great hardship resulted in cities through the high price of grain. This same high price made great prosperity for the land owners through the high rents that they could exact from the renting farmers. Then followed the historic corn law agitation, a strife between a landed aristocracy and the hungry city workers, resulting in the repeal of the tariff and the adoption of the free trade policy. This permitted the import of cheap food which ere long reduced the price of farm produce and greatly reduced British agriculture. It in no way injured her manufacturing interests because no other country had such supplies of coal, iron, capital, and skilled labor, and consequently there was no real manufacturing rival, except an isolated industry here and there like the silk industry of France. This situation of British supremacy and resultant free trade continued unchanged for half a century, during which free trade rose in the English mind to the dignity of a virtue — a piece of accepted morality. The twentieth century saw this position challenged by a strong but unsuccessful agitation for some tariff protection for British manufactures. This resulted from the building up in the United States, Germany, and Belgium of factories that were as efficient as those of Britain. This foreign competition became the more acute because of the practice of "dumping" in the British market, at low prices, the unsalable surplus of factories in other countries. It is quite possible that England, like Canada, will arrange an adjustable tariff to check this practice of dumping. THE INFLUENCE OF GEOGRAPHIC FACTORS 895 German Tariff Development. — Germany has gone part of the way through the course followed by England. Before her unifi- cation, Germany, with many little tariff units, was chopped up into a multitude of local trade units making large domestic trade impossible and causing the continuance of the household in- dustry that England had largely discarded in Napoleon's time. Under a general protective tariff she has since 1870 developed a great factory system and rapidly added to her agriculture a great manufacturing industry. Her cities have grown like those of the American West. Berlin has matched Chicago in the increase of population. As a result the city populations of Germany cannot be fed from the German fields, so that the protective tariff makes high priced food. The English situ- ation of 1840 is repeated in almost every detail. The corn law fight is on. The German nation of 65 million eats costly bread and meat and the aristocratic landholders, estimated by one authority 1 at 300,000 persons, profit by the resulting high rents. The nation also has the advantage of having a large share of its population living under the better conditions of the country, but the German artisans, like their English fellows of 1845, will surely repeal that tariff and get cheaper food before many years or decades have passed. The landed aristocracy is now slowly losing ground in the contest with the landless millions, and only holds its own by a voting system based on a mediaeval class dominance. Holland and Belgium, too weak to be naval powers, too small to have widely varied industries, or many raw materials, and too populous to feed themselves, have low tariffs, approaching free trade, in food, raw materials and manufactures. No other policy seems possible to them. A tariff at any point would embarrass some industry unless levied upon a pure exotic, and it then becomes a mere revenue measure like the English tariff on tobacco. Tariff Development in the United States. — The United States is, of all nations in the Western World, best fitted for eco- nomic independence through a wealth and variety of natural resources permitting an almost completely satisfying variety in production. The Americans have been but a handful, riot- 1 See Forum, September, 1901. 896 COMMERCIAL GEOGRAPHY ing in the richest abundance of resources to which the hand of man was ever laid. We have been large producers of all important foods and raw materials except rubber and tin, while our supply of cotton, tobacco, petroleum and copper almost verges on monopoly. On this basis of opportunity the protective tariff of the Civil War, laid first as a war measure, produced prompt and surprising growth of manufactures. The protective tariff was then continued as an industrial measure, our factories throve tremendously with the aid of imported labor, and for some decades the United States has been pointed out as the most conspicuous success in the attainment of national independence through varied industry stimulated by the protective tariff. It is probable that there has been a general under appreciation of the part that wealth of resources has played in this develop- ment. Within the United States the different sections of the country have furnished an interesting but easily explained medley of opinions on the tariff. New England has wanted a tariff on cloth and shoes to protect her textile mills aDd shoe factories, but she has wanted no tariff on the raw material, wool and leather, which she did not produce. The wool growers of Ohio have wanted, and generally succeeded in getting, a tariff on raw wool, while the cattle-producing states have desired tariff on hides. Massa- chusetts, a coal buyer, has wanted no tariff on coal that she might get it cheaply by boat from Nova Scotia or Wales, while Penn- sylvania, a coal producer, has held stoutly for a tariff on coal. Some southern states, exporters of cotton in which they had no rival, and importers of nearly all manufactures, have been thorough free traders until the lumber industry sprang up within their borders, and then their congressmen voted for a tariff on lumber. Many other examples of the origins and changes of tariff attitude in the various sections of the United States might be shown to follow closely upon industrial condition and indus- trial change. We have attained our rapid distinction in manufacture while the nation is still an exporter of food and raw materials. As to stage of evolution of tariff policy we are still far behind Germany, although there are signs that we are beginning to approach her condition. While not importing much food, we are using an THE INFLUENCE OF GEOGRAPHIC FACTORS 897 increasing amount of imported raw material and the cry of "free raw materials" that is now heard is the first symptom of the approach of the American counterpart to the so-called agrarian question in Germany and the corn law agitation in England. If the United States begins regularly to import wheat the tariff question will assume a new intensity through the class conflict between the rural wheat grower and the urban wheat user. The Orient furnishes two admirable examples of the influence of geographic conditions on national policy in fields other than the tariff. The Chinese Policy of Isolation. — China has persisted in ignor- ing foreign nations to the great mystification of many West- erners. "Let us alone," was China's expressed sentiment toward all peoples. She was often considered benighted but her policy was probably wise and it was certainly of natural origin. There was little that the world could give her be- cause she was a world in herself. The summer rains of China stimulated agriculture, which availed itself of rich alluvial plains near the sea, while in the north were extensive deposits of fertile Loess, the most indestructible of all upland soils. Reaching from the latitude of Havana to that of Newfoundland, her forests ranged from bamboo and oranges, to pine and spruce; her grains from rice to wheat, corn, millet, barley and rye. In the south was cotton; in the center, silk; in the north and west, the wool and hides from the flocks that roamed the 2 million square miles of arid and semi-arid ranges in the provinces. The mines yielded iron, copper, gold, and silver. The careful husband- men raised pigs and poultry in vast quantities and the fish supply of sea and river was supplemented by fish culture in which the Chinese have led the world. From north to south the grand canal passed between the latitudes of northern Florida and Philadelphia and connected a set of inland waterways probably better and more used than those of any contemporary nation of 1800 or 1850. While the domestic system of manufacturing continued in both East and West, the West had little for China but silver. In 1819 a British publicist lamented the fact that America had in the furs and ginseng of the forest the only com- modities except bullion that the Chinese would take in pay for tea which the west desired, and which the western merchants 898 COMMERCIAL GEOGRAPHY took over the junk side in the Chinese harbors. Naturally China wanted to be let alone by those who had nothing for her. The discovery of petroleum and the invention of machinery, both of which China needs, have given to that country the desire for imports, the basis for a foreign trade, and following that a foreign policy. Along with a foreign policy comes the development of a national sentiment in which China is making great progress. Chinese students now in American universities did not when in school at home know there was such a thing as China. They knew of their own town or district, and the province, but the term China meant no more than Asia. Out of this chaos, the new economic conditions are raising a new concept, China, just as the concept United States rose out of separated colonies and finally in the railroad epoch became United States is rather than United States are — a grammatical record of a profound change in sentiment made possible by communication. Japan Becomes a Manufacturing Nation. — Japan furnishes the second Oriental example of geographic influence upon policy. Like China she had for centuries lived within herself supported by agriculture and household industry. As she approached the limit of possibilities in that direction, western ships visited her shores. Her insular location made easy the infiltration of foreign ideas and foreign goods which her meager resources caused her to desire to import. Japan adopted western learning and western machinery and was seized with the ambition to be a world power. This required armies, navies, arms, railroads, and the mechanical equipment of the inventive west. In the attempt to equip herself with these things Japan realized her poverty, which was intense alike if she would buy or manufacture at home. Her dense and diligent population could not wring a surplus from the scanty land. There was no surplus of rice, and it is now regularly imported, as are also flour, beans, tobacco, and most of the little meat that they eat, and even phosphate with which they fertilize the fields. To complete the list of her limitations we need but to point out the poverty of factory materials. There is no wool or leather, but little cotton, no rubber, no iron, and inferior supplies of coal. Yet the increasing population of Japan must support itself by manufacture, or emigrate, or starve. There were no suitable places for extensive emigration, so the demand for manufac- THE INFLUENCE OF GEOGRAPHIC FACTORS 899 turing and the trade in raw materials and finished products was imperative. Japan Becomes Possessed of Colonies. — As the Japanese realized that they must become like England and live by manufacturing, they appreciated the importance to themselves of Korea and Man- churia. They had long imported from these quarters beans, bean oil, and bean cake (for fertilizer), and the trade with these regions promised to be of prime and increasing importance as the country went over to the factory and commercial basis. Korea had un- used rice and barley land, promising minerals, and good forests. In Manchuria, corresponding to our upper Mississippi valley and part of the Canadian Northwest, is the finest stretch of unused farm land in the Mongolian world. Manchuria also has forests, coal, and other minerals. These regions would furnish Japan with food, take her manufactures and the thronging emigrants, and would put her in an independent position resembling that of China and the United States. Japan's war with China in 1893-94 was little more than a neces- sary expedition of conquest, and the conquest was provided for in the treaty of peace. Then a coalition of European powers took from her the fruits of the war and handed over to Russia, Port Arthur and the railway, that modern burrowing root of the tree of conquest. Japan, landless, crowded, threatened with suffocation, prepared herself for mortal combat as probably no nation ever did, and when Russia laid hands on Korea, she sprang and fought, and to the profound astonishment of the world, won for a second time the possibility of a large part of that eco- nomic independence which has enabled China to scorn the world and has made the United States to be unique among the nations. In the desire for an acquisition of a colonial empire, Japan is by no means unique, she is merely late. Most of the other powers have had colonies or the desire for them for many decades. The Reason for Colonial Possessions. — Despite many philan- thropic protestations, the commonest working theory of colonies is the same as that which causes the imposition of protective tariffs to reserve the home market to the home manufacturer. The colony merely enlarges the home market idea through the agency of some arrangement whereby the enterprisers of the home country have advantage over foreigners in availing them- 900 COMMERCIAL GEOGRAPHY selves of the economic opportunities created by the colonies. Chief among these devices to attain special privileges are pref- erential tariffs, concessions of lands and other resources, favor- able franchises to corporations, and favorable navigation laws. The dominant idea back of the acquisition of colonies is the securing of markets. Owing to the instinct for national com- pleteness men sacrifice the known mutual advantages of trade, for every nation is glad to sell and chary of buying. Selling abroad is almost always regarded as an economic virtue for a nation. At the same time it is a corresponding or greater virtue to supply wants at home. Abundant selling and meager buying is the im- possible and contradictory ideal for which most nations strive. Owing to this preference it is easy for any people to buy but often difficult for the people of one nation to sell to those of another. Hence the strife for foreign markets which can be made absolutely secure only by possession. Hence the international scramble for colonies which has caused so many wars in these last two centuries and has resulted in the loss of independence for nearly all of Asia and the speedy partition of Africa — the last free land for the colony grabbers. No publicist doubts that the Monroe Doctrine is the only force that has for decades prevented the partitioning among the market monopolizing powers of Europe of all that part of the New World south of the United States. If nations put no more obstructions in the way of the individ- ual's buying than they put in the way of his selling, and gave all individuals an equal opportunity to develop resources, the desire for colonies would largely die, and the map of the world would look very different from that which now exists. Nations would actually be trying to persuade each other to take possession of certain unruly peoples and give good government and hence per- mit the creation of commerce for all to share. Such a millenial dream is very far from the existing world condition of rivalry, and oftentimes of jealousy and threatened war among colonial powers. Japan, like the United States, was very late in having any de- sire for colonies. Japan had first to abandon the domestic sys- tem before she realized any need for markets and colonies, but she then needed them more acutely than any other nation ever needed them, and she accordingly changed her policy with the THE INFLUENCE OF GEOGRAPHIC FACTORS 901 most astonishing rapidity. In a very short time she became possessed of colonies, the desire for which is a psychological and political response to the economic fact that a nation has emigrat- ing people who need homes or manufactures for which she desires markets, or both. One of the most interesting aspects of international relations is the complex of activity and the maze of fictions and pretenses by which nations express and often try to hide the desire for colonies. The Process of Acquiring Colonies. — The way nations impelled by these forces gradually absorb weak countries is well illus- trated by the fate of North Africa. In 1840 France sent an armed force into Algeria (Turkish territory) to protect her missionaries and from that foothold her power has extended until she owns Algeria and Tunis, although Turkey still nomin- ally claims them. Egypt is still nominally a part of the Turkish Empire, but out of the franchise to build the Suez Canal came a French and British influence that has now resulted in the practical rule of Egypt by a British agent and a British army. In 1904, France and England arrived at an agreement (entente cordiale) concerning Spheres of Influence in the Mediterranean. France agreed to give England a free hand in Egyptian affairs in return for surrender by England of any exclusive interests in the western Mediterranean. Since 1840 France had been gradually extending her control in north Africa until she had absorbed Algeria, Tunis, the Sahara, much of Soudan and was far on the way toward an absorption of Morocco through the extension of influence over customs, police and banking. The removal of England left Morocco apparently to the mercy of France and Spain. Spain had for centuries held a few towns opposite Gibraltar. In 1905, Germany interfered, alleging that France was aiming at commercial monopoly in Morocco. As a pretext for German interference, German subjects had concessions to build certain public works, especially a mole in Tangiers. She demanded that an international conference be held to determine the status of Morocco. Members of this conference, held at Algeciras, Spain, were England, France, Spain, Germany, Austria-Hungary, Italy, Belgium, Netherlands, Portugal, Russia, Sweden, Morocco, and the United States. 902 COMMERCIAL GEOGRAPHY This is the full list of the Caucasian Colonial powers plus Sweden. After long conference the demand of Germany for a share in control of Moroccan affairs was not granted. The police of the country were placed in French and Spanish control, as were also the finances, and the reduction of Morocco went on with quicker pace in the campaigns that were promptly waged against her disorderly tribes. Within five years after the Algeciras con- ference the right of France and Spain to partition Morocco was recognized by treaty. The Mohammedan tribes will make it a task of many costly campaigns. This brief account of the passing of north Africa from inde- pendence is typical of the modern process of Colonial acquisition where there is not enough land to go around. Middle Africa with its many ignorant, unorganized and weak tribes was merely parcelled off by the nations as town lots might be parcelled by a syndicate of purchasers — England, France, Germany, Austria, Italy, and Spain, each taking a piece. The most refined methods of annexation are through loans and railways. The weak nation borrows, and the interest is not paid. The lender takes possession of the custom houses to collect the interest on the debt and it is very easy for custom house control to spread to the control of the towns and then the country. Thus the United States became the dominant force in San Domingo by common consent when Europe threatened to do it if we did not. By the railway conquest, the undeveloped nation agrees that a railway shall be built in its territory by representatives of some more powerful nation. Such were the Russian railways, across Manchuria to Vladivostok and to Port Arthur. The railways and the workers thereon required protection. The difference between police protection and an army is a line that has never been pointed out and Russian soldiers in great multitudes entered Manchuria, which the whole world recognized in a few years as essentially a Russian province, as Egypt is an English province, despite the sovereign claims of an ornate Khedive in Cairo and a despotic Sultan in Constanti- nople. By the War of 1904 Japan took the rights to some of the Manchurian railways from Russia by force. China was no less dismembered by the change in concessionaires who were really conquerors. INDEX Abyssinia, 7. Africa: East, 809, 815. South, 98, 138, 341; diamonds 638-639; gold, 633-635; os- triches, 254; sheep, 174; trade routes and connections, 807, 814; traffic, 821; wheat, 45; wine, 254. Trade and trade routes of, 802- 822; commerce, newness of, 802; commercial zones, 803; Congo river, 810; East Africa, 815; Gulf of Guinea, 811; Old Africa, transportation methods of, 805; railways: chief, 806; Cape to Cairo, 807, West Africa, 809; reconstruction of transporta- tion routes, 805; tropic West Africa, 814. See Good Hope route. West, 113; palm oil, 599-600; rubber, 546; steamship connec- tions, 814; trade routes, 811, 812. Agriculture, in domestic epoch, 26; in commercial epoch, 28; inten- sification of, 36; dairying and, 149; money crops and supply crops, 29; place and nature of, 22-40; relation to transporta- tion and world market, 23; rural dollar and city dollar, 31; science, application of, 33; un- derstanding, difficulty of, 24. Alaska, coal, 383; gold, 630-631, 633; lumber, 439-440; trade routes, 711-712; traffic from, 778, 779. See Pribylov Islands. Aluminum, 626. Animal industries, 119-200. See Cattle. Anthracite. See Coal. Apple industry, Asiatic, 218; Cana- dian, 217; European, 217; future supply, 219; South temperate zone, 219; pests, 215; refrigera- tion, effect of, 216; United States, distribution of, 211; Michigan, 212; Mississippi val- ley, 214; New York, 212; North- west, 214; Ohio, 214; Ozark Plateau, 214; Pennsylvania, 213; Rocky Mountains, 214; Virginia, 213. Arabia, 236, 289-290. Argentine Republic, 59, 63, 64, 97- 98, 122, 144; cane sugar, 275; cattle, 135-137; dairying, 160; grape, 256; lumber, 457; que- bracho, 533; sheep, 172-173; trade routes, 791-793. Asia: Central, 96, 146, 235; trade routes, 745, 749. Trade and trade routes of, 742- 758; Bagdad railway, 752; Cara- van routes, 745; China, railroads and new commerce of, 753; geo- graphic handicaps to, 742; Japan, 758; Persia, 751; rivers, importance of, 742; Southeast- ern Asia, importance of, 753; Trans-Caspian railway, 749; Trans-Siberian railway, 747. Asphalt. See Petroleum. Atlantic Ocean, Trade routes of the north, 731-741; geographic fac- tors, 731; ports, 738; traffic, 736; winds and fuel supply, 735. Australasia, trade routes of, 823-831. Australia, routes of, 823; connec- tion with rest of world, 826. New Zealand, 826. See Pacific Ocean, trade routes of the south. Australia, 15, 45, 98, 122, 341; coal, 903 904 INDEX 386; industrial development, 889; sheep, 170-171; trade routes and connections, 823- 826; wine, 254. Austria-Hungary, 65, 95, 133, 183; oil, 409. Automobiles. See Carriages. Balance of trade, 883-890. Definition of, 883. Evolution of stages, 886-890; equipment, 887; interest paying, 888; investment, 889; income receiving, 890. Factors settling trade balance, 885. Money, relationship to settlement of trade balance, 884. Payment in goods, 886. Banana, 113-116; growing, difficulty of, 116; importance in Carib- bean countries, 115; in com- merce, 115. Barbary States, 96, 108, 147, 448; cork, 448-449; dates, 236; or- ange, 242; trade routes and commerce, 804-805, 813. Bargain center. See Trade center. Barley, 67-69; character, range, and hardiness of, 67; uses of, 68; importance in arid lands, 69. Beasts of burden, dependence upon, 181. Draft animals: camel, 192; dog, 190; elephant, 193; horse: Amer- ican industry, 184; European industry, 183; types of, 182; llama, 192; mule and donkey, 185; Ox, 189; pony, 185; rein- deer, 191; yak, 191; zulebra, 193. Bee-keeping, 198-199. Belgium, 57, 65, 105-107, 642; glass, 617-618. Bermuda Islands, 109-111. Bolivia, 137. Boll-weevil. See Cotton, United States. Borneo. See East Indies. Brazil, 113, 782; cacao, 306; cotton, 479-480; coffee, 293-295; eco- nomic possibilities, 667; rubber, 543-545; tobacco, 320. Briquettes, 392. Buckwheat, place and growth of, 70. Building stone. See Mineral indus- tries. Bulgaria, 94-95, 178, 189. Butter. See Dairy products. Cacao, 303-307; Brazil, 306; climatic requirements, 304; description, 303; doldrums, importance of, 304; Ecuador, 304; Old World, 306; origin of, 303; use as food, 307. Camel. See Beasts of Burden. Canada, 44, 53, 59, 64, 66, 90, 103; apples, 217; coal, 383; dairying, 154-155; forests, 438-439; sil- ver, 637; water power, 402. Canary Islands, 114^115. Canning, 225-231; fruits and vege- tables, 225; extent, 227; foreign trade, 231; New York, New England, and Lakes, 228; over- production, possibility of Pacific coast, 229. Carpets. See Wool. Carriages, wagons, and automobiles, 560-564; automobiles: Euro- pean industry, 564; foreign trade in, 563; concentration of industry, 561; raw material for, 560; relationship to agricultural implement industry, 560; west- ward movement of industry, 561. Caspian, and the Volga, 726. Cassava, 112. Cattle, 126-138; great plains of North America, 128; tropic America, 137; arid belt of old world, 133; Asia, southeastern, 138; distribution, 126, 136; European, 133; irrigated lands, importance of, 129; migration of beef, 129; shipment of live, 130; shipping and preserving, effect of improved methods, 133; southern states, 133; south temperate zone industry, 135. Cement. See Mineral industries. Central America, 78, 93, 115, 137; 665; coffee, 290-292; gold, 636; INDEX 905 rubber, 545; trade routes, 713- 714. Cereals, 41, 101. Ceylon, 71; rice, 74; coffee, 290; tea, 300-301; cinnamon, 310; rub- ber, 549-550; coconut oil, 598; cinchona, 653-654. Chemical industry, 582-600. Explosives, manufacture of, 585 Fertilizer, 588-596; guano, 589; future of industry, 596; loca- tion of industry, 595; nitrate of soda, 593; nitrogen, 592; potash, 591; phosphates, 590. German leadership in, 582. Importance of, 582. Raw materials, 583. Chile, 144, 795; copper, 623, grape and wine, 256; nitrates, 593- 594. China, 59, 62, 71, 74, 79, 81, 96, 114, 141, 386-388, 615; commercial policy, 897-898; cotton, 476; foreign trade, 682; forests, 452; iron, 366-367; labor, 351; paper, 465-466; pulse, 204; silk, 508; tea, 298-299; trade routes, 742- 744, 753, 754-758; degree of utilization of resources, 643; wool, 505; world market and, 20. China grass. See Ramie. Chinchua islands, 589. Cities, origin of, 839; kinds of, 840; transportation, effect on com- mercial cities, 841; seaports, rise of, 843; commercial-indus- trial, 844. See Trade Center. Citrous fruits, 240-247. Grape fruit, 244. Lime, 247. Orange: Africa, 242; Asia, 242; California, 244; Florida, 243; islands, suitability for growth on, 241; Mediterranean countries, 241 ; United States, import, 243 ; West Indies, 244. Civilization; influence of climate on origin, 5; influence of frost, 7- 10; influence of natural protec- tion and beasts of burden, 10; influence of tropic abundance, 7. Climate; influence on origin of civil- ization, 5; Mediterranean type of, 45. Clothing, 526-528; a city industry, 527; development of manufac- ture of, 526; Old World manu- facturing, 528; United States, 527 Coal, 371-394. Alaska, 383. British: fields, 374; exports of, 374. Canadian, 383. China, 386. Civilization, location of, influenced by, 8. Coke, gas, and by-products, 393. Dependence on, 372. Mining, methods of, 388. Power, early use of, 372. Production, world, 383. United States: anthracite, 378; bituminous, 379; commerce in, 384;i nfluences in settlement of U. S., 377; late and rapid de- velopment of, 375; production, 376, 380. Uses (new) for, 389. Coconut, fiber, 524; oil, use of for butter, 161. Coffee, 288-296; Arabian, 289; Bra- zil, 293; Central America, 290- 292; distribution of, 288; East Indies, 290; growth and prep- aration of, 289; India and Cey- lon, 290; industry, history of, 288; Mexico, 290-292; prices: decline of industry due to low, 294-295; production, world, 293; Venezuela, Columbia, and the Andean Highland, 292; West Indies, 292. Colombia, 42, 137; coffee, 292; trade routes, 785-786, 799. Commerce: necessity for, 11; de- pendence upon transportation, 12, world, and world market, 16. Commercial policy of nations, influ- ence of geographic factors on: Chinese policy, 897; colony- acquiring, 899; economic inde- 906 INDEX pendence through control of sea, 892-893; economic inde- pendence through varied indus- try, 893; British tariff policy, 894; German tariff policy, 895; United States tariff policy, 895; Japanese policy, 899. Condiments and Tobacco, 288-322. See Individual items. Congo Basin, 114; river route and trade, 810. Copper, 620-624. Corn, 82-97; Asia, southeastern, 96; Black Sea Basin, 94; climatic requirements, 85; Mediterra- nean countries, 96; Mexico and tropical America, 93; Parana valley, 96; production, world, 97 ; usefulness in rough countries, 83. United States: corn belt, 87; cot- ton belt, 92; exports of, 92; growing, improvement and ex- tension of, 90; production, 90, 91; value to colonists, 82. Cotton, 468-497; Asiatic, 476; Bra- zilian, 479; by-products of, 482; Egyptian, 478; gin, effect on industry, 469. Manufactures of, 482-497; Brit- ish, 488; commerce in, 497; continental, 490; distribution, 486; extension of, 471; relation to density of population, 487; textile machinery and factory system, 483; United States, 491; New England, 492; South- ern, 493; water-power, influ- ence of, 492. Peruvian, 479. United States: area, possible, 472; boll weevil, 473; growing, 471; improvements in growing, prob- able, 481. Use of, 468. World supply, 480. Crop comparison of important coun- tries, 104. Cuba, orange, 244; sugar, 277-278; tobacco, 319. See West Indies. Dairy products, 145-161; areas, possible extension of, 160; Aus- tralasia and refrigeration, 159. Butter: export, world, 153; sub- stitutes for in dry, sub-tropic countries, 147. Canadian, 154; cheese, world export of, 153. Europe: intensity of dairy farm- ing, 157, northwest, 155; Intensification of agriculture and dairying, 149; location of in- dustry, 148; manufacture of, improvement in, 149; New York, 150; substitutes for, 161; trade, international, 154; uses, 145; Wisconsin, 152. Denmark, 70, 120, 155; dairy, 156- 157. Diamonds, 638. Donkey. See Beasts of Burden. Dried fruits: apricot, 235; California vs. S. Europe, 233; date in desert countries, 236; date in United States, 237; districts, natural, 238; figs, 235; location of in- dustry, 231. East Indies, 6, 73, 114, 117; coffee, 290; pepper, 309. See individ- • ual countries. Ecuador, 94, 137; cacao, 304-306; trade routes, 798. Egypt, 7, 12, 42, 78, 96, 108; cotton, 478; railway, 806. Elephant. See Beasts of Burden. England, 56, 69, 133-134, 613; sheep, 165; lumber, 441; tex- tiles, 483-485; entrepot, 855- 856; evolution of manufactur- ing, 487; cotton manufacturing, 488-490; wool manufacturing, 499-501. See Great Britain. Entrepot, 845-864; economy of, 846; trade of, 845. World, 850-866; Amsterdam, 855; Antwerp, policy and fall of, 853; capital (abundant), effect on, 864; decline of, 857; England's industrial prosperity, 855; es- tablished market, effect of, 864; grading goods, effect of, 862; ungradable goods, effect of, 862. INDEX 907 Environment: our changing, 3-21; influence of, 4-5. Eskimo, influence of environment upon, 4. Europe, trade routes of, 717-730; advantages natural, 717; fast traffic, 726; heavy traffic, 722; London, 727; Northern, 720; Paris, 727; Russia, 728; Scandi- navia, 728; sets of: Southern, 719; transportation resources, utilization of, 723; Volga and Caspian, 726. Explosives, manufacture of. See Chemical industry. Falkland islands, 169, 683. Famine, relation to world market, 20. Farming. See Agriculture. Fertilizer. See Chemical industry. Fibers, textiles, and clothing, 468- 529. See cotton, wool, silk, hair, flax, hemp, jute, coconut. Fiji Islands, 284-285. Fisheries, 323-339; Atlantic plain, United States, 335; cod, 325; commerce from, 337; culture of fish, 336. European: American waters, 327; North Europe, 327. Japan, 328; locating factor of, 324; North Atlantic, 324; open sea, 329; pearl, 335; production, world, 327; relation to sea- faring, 323; sealing, 330; shell, 333; shore and river, 331; south- ern waters, 336 ; sponge, 334. Flax, 516-519; decorticator, 519; distribution of industry, 517; distribution of linen industry, 517; growing for seed and fiber, range of, 517; preparation of, 516. Flower. See Vegetables. Food elements, two chief, 117. Food values, table of, 99. Forest industries, 419-467. Alaska, 439; area in forest, by countries, 442; Canada, 439; China, 452; cork, 448. Europe, compared to U. S., 440; exporters, 441; markets, 441; scientific forestry in, 443; tim- ber supply of, 443. Japan, 449. Lumber, industry, location of, 421 ; prices, rising, 420; supply: shift- ing nature of, 436, varieties, 437. Mediterranean, 448; naval stores, 458; Philippines, 454; Siberia, 452; tanbark, 458; tropic, 452. United States, Appalachian High- lands 427; forest policy of, 445; Great Lakes, 426. Missis- sippi Valley and Rocky Moun- tains, 430; New England and Adirondacks, 428; Pacific, 431; production, by states, 435. See Paper. Formosa, 300, 549. France, 79, 96, 155, 329, 587, 613; coal, 385; flowers, 206; forests, 443; grape, 249; horses, 183; leather, 537; silk, 510, 511-512; wine, 250-252. Gambia, 164; lumber, 455. Germany, 34, 69, 105-107, 125-126, 534; apples, 217-218; beet sugar, 262-267; chemical industry, 582-583; coal, 385; cotton man- ufacturing, 490; glass, 617-618; grape, 253-254; iron, 364; pot- ash, 590-591; pottery, 613; ships, 576; tariff development, 894. Glass. See Mineral industries. Gloves. See Leather. Goat, 179. Gold, 628-636; Africa, 633; Alaska, 633; Australia, 635; Central America, 636; obtaining, meth-. od of, 628; production: future, 637; uncertainty of, 630; world, 630. Good Hope trade route, 815-822; coal supply, 819; freight rates to Australia, 822; sailing vessel tracks, 817; traffic, 819. Goods, required by man, 3. Gradual reduction process, 49. Grape, 247-257; growing, limits of, 248; growing, hillside, 253; 908 INDEX industry, difficulty of trans- planting, 248; requirements of, 247; Spain, 252; United States, 257. Great Britain, 55, 56, 121; apple, 217; coal, 374-375, 385; linen, 517; sheep, 177; shipbuilding, 574-575; tariff development, 894; textile machinery, 565. See England, Ireland and Scot- land. Greece, 57, 147; currants, 249. Guiana, 78, 113; cane sugar, 274- 275; trade routes, 787. Guinea, Gulf of, 811-812. Hair products, minor animal, 506. Hats. See Wool. Hawaiian Islands, 660; sugar, 278- 279; traffic, 778. Hay: animal industries, relation of, 139; city dwellers, dependence upon, 140; commerce, 143; crop, distribution of, 141; Euro- pean, 144; irrigated lands, 144; maiding, methods of, 142; nat- ural, 140; other crops, relation to, 141; regions of production, 140. Hemp, 520-522; minor fibers called, 522. Henequin, 522. Holland, 57, 65, 105-107, 121, 613; dairy, 156; Amsterdam, 854-855. Horse. See Beasts of Burden. Iceland, 144. India, 19, 71, 77, 96, 114, 138, 164; coffee, 290; cotton, 476-477; cotton manufacturing, 496; jute, 521; oxen, 190; tea, 300; tobac- co, 319; trade routes, 744-745. Indian, American, 10, 42. Indc-China, 71, 73, 79; wood, 455; trade routes, 742-744 Industry and resources, expansion of, 640-671. See Resources. Iron and steel, 351-371; commerce, world, 367; distribution and uses of, 352; European (other than Germany), 365; formation of ore, 353; future of industry, 367; Germany, 364; Japan and China, 366; making, history of, 354; production, world, 357; steel making, 362. United States, location of changes in, 359; making, history of, 356; Pittsburg and upper Ohio val- ley, 358; production, by dis- tricts, 357. Ireland, 66, 105-106, 121, 133-134, 155; linen, 517. See Great Britain. Italy, 57, 79, 96, 103, 145, 147, 159, 203, 587, 613; chestnuts, 655; grape, 248-249; orange, 246; silk, 510; wine, 249; degree of utilization of resources, 633- 634. See Sicily. Jamaica, 78, 114, 116, 241, 599; pimento, 311; population, 660. See West Indies. Japan, 59, 66, 71, 74, 81, 119-120; 141, 403, 615, 898-899; coal, 386; cotton manufacturing, 496; fish, 328-329; forests, 449-451; iron, 366-367; manufacturing, 779; paper, 465-466; resources, development of, 642-643; silk, 508-509; tea, 299; trade routes, 758-759. Jute, 521. Labrador, 326. Land, cheap: checking American manufacturing by, 342; creating industrial and social problems, 341; opposing manufacturing, 342. Free, effect in United States, 342. Man's dependence upon, 3 Ultimate uses of, 663. Value, decline in old countries, 663. Leather, 530-540; European manu- facture, 536; future supply of, 540; glove manufacturing in United States, 539. Shoes: manufacture of, 537, for- eign trade in, 538, tendency of industry to spread, 539. Tanning, 531, 535; trade in, 530. INDEX 909 Legumes, 201-205; importance to poor peoples, 203. Linen. See Flax. Liner steamship traffic, 685, 691. Llama. See Beasts of burden. Lumber. See Forest Industries. Machinery, 555-560, 564-572. Agricultural, 556-559; origin of, 556; interchangeable parts of, 559; location of manufacture of, 557; service of, 557. European manufacture of, 571. Machinery, manufacturing, 564- 569; engines and motors, 568; factors locating the industry, 564; machine tools: importance of, 566, manufacture of, 567. Transportation, 569-572; railway cars, 569. See Carriages. Machinery, shipbuilding and metal industries, factors of location of, 554. Maize. See Corn. Manganese, 371. Manufacture: cheap land, effect on, 340; demands of, 349 ;"^J 3or sup- ply: China, 351, Ewgp&n, 350; land and populatMm, relation, 340; resources, new, effect on, 345; resources for manufactur- ing, new, 650. H Mauritii^ 78^ sugar, 280; vanilla, 311. . supply: relation to density of [future supply, at animals in, pplecFlands, 121. j^.siatic trade route, ffuel supply. of, 763 Meat a of po: prici sparsi Mediterrani '•. 760-772' history of, 762; 760; traffic of, 767 760 Merchant. See Tra of. Metal manufactures, smai distribution of indus; European jewelry, j supply, relation to, 579^ stand- 581; i 579; labor ardization and interchangeable parts, 580. Mexico, 42, 93, 137; coffee, 290- 292; guayule, 547; oil, 409; sil- ver, 636-637; sisal, 523-524; trade routes, 712-713. Miquelon, 683. Middleman. See Trade Center, work of. Millet, 81. Mineral industries, 601-639. Building materials, 601-611; loca- tion, effect of bulk on, 602; ce- ment: distribution of manu- facture, 608, foreign, 611, iron furnace, 611; glass, 615-618, commerce in, 618, foreign, 617, manufacturing process, 616, United States industry, 616; pottery and porcelain: distri- bution and nature of, 612, Europe, 612, United States, 613. Metals. See individual metals. Short life of, 354. Mohair, 180. Money crop. See Agriculture. Mule. See Beasts of burden. Natural gas. See Petroleum. Newfoundland, 326. New Zealand, 98; coal, 386; dairy, 159-160; sheep, 170-172; trade and trade routes, 826-827; wheat, 45. North America, trade routes of, 693- 715; central, 713; Great Lakes: eastern distributors, 701-703, influence of, 695, traffic of, 699, western assemblers of Lake traffic, 698; Hudson Bay route to Europe, 707; Isthmian canal and, 714; Mexico, 712; Pacific coast, 710; transcontinental, 708. •way, 66, 586; fish, 328; lumber, « 44 1-442; water-power, 402. Oa},s: corn belt, importance in, 66; export, effect of light weight on, 67; regions of production, 65; uses of, 66. Ocean highway, 684-692; freedom 910 INDEX of, 684; service of: tramp, 686- 692, types of, 685; terminals, free- dom of, 684. Olive oil, use of, 147. Orange. See Citrous fruits. Ostrich farming, 198. Pacific Ocean, trade routes of, North, 772-778; Alaska, 778; coal supply, 775; commercial new- ness of, 772; Hawaii, 778; prospective traffic, 779; pros- pective port changes, 779; traffic, 776; winds, 775. South, 827-831; future traffic of, 830; winds and fuel supply, 828. Panama canal, trade routes of the North Atlantic and, 714; world carriers and, 832. Paper: China and Japan, 465; com- merce in, 464; Europe, 465; effect of industry on forestry, 463; future of the industry, 466; kinds of, 462, 464. Pasteur, and silk worm disease, 50. Paraguay, 97-98, 135-137. Peach, 220-225; California, 224 Chesapeake and Allegheny belt 223; climate, effect of, 220 Europe, 225; Great Lakes, 222 New England (southern), 223 Ozark, 223; southern, 224; south temperate zone, 225. Peanut oil, 163. Perfumery. See Chemical indus- tries (minor). Petroleum, 404-418; American fields, 405; asphalt and wax, 415; foreign fields, 409; fuel, use as, 404, 411; natural gas, 413; ori- gin, 404; production, world, by countries, 410; transportation of and refining of, 414; use, 404. Peru, 78, 137; cane sugar, 275; cop- per, 623; cotton, 479; guano, 589; gold, 635; minerals, 795; rubber, 543-545; trade routes, 797-798. Persia, 236-237; pearl, 335; trade routes, 751-752. Phillippines, 6; monsoon, 71; entre- pot, 866; forests, 454; hemp, 522-523; tobacco, 319. Philloxera, 250. Pony. See Beasts of burden. Porto Rico, 116. See West Indies. Portugal, 96, 147; cork, 448-449; orange, 241. Potato, 102-110; country, qualifica- tions of, 103; distribution and use of, 102; early supply of, 108; foreign trade in, 110; regions of production, 105; United States, 107. Potato, sweet, 111-112; importance in tropics, 111. Porto Rico. See West Indies. Poultry, China, 195; United States, 194. Power, consumption in United States, 373; undeveloped sources of, 416. See Coal and Water-power. Pribylov Islands, 330-331. Principe, 307. Quebracho. See Leather, tanning of. Ramie, 525. Resources, definition of, 640; differ- ence in, causing trade, 679; effect of, limited, 4; expansion of industry and, 640-671; science-created resources, 649- 655; unused resources, tem- perate zone agricultural, 647, tree crops, see Tree crops, tropic, 664—670; utilization of resources, degree of, 641. Reunion, 78; sugar, 280; vanilla, 311. Rhea. See Ramie. Rice, 72-79: antiquity and uses of, 72; characteristics and climate, 70; growing, by Asiatic emi- grants, 78, in densely peopled lands, 74, in Europe, 79, in sparsely peopled lands, 73, in United States, 79; monsoon, and the rice regions, 71; world's export of, 77. Roumania, 94-95; oil, 409. INDEX 911 Rubber, 540-553; Africa, 546; Asia, 545; Central America, 545; cli- mate, 543; consumption, recent increase of, 542; cultivation of, 548; distribution of chief plants, 541; dry regions, 546; guayule, 547; import of india rubber, world, 542; laboratory, 552; manufactures of, 552; para re- gion, 543 ; production, world, by countries, 542; source of, 540; source of, shifting, 547; utiliza- tion of, 540. Russia, 50, 65, 70, 94-95, 105-107, 125-126, 134, 144, 155, 177, 184; coal, 385; flax, 517; hemp, 520; oil, 409; rivers, 726; trade routes, 728. Rye, compared to wheat, 64; regions of production, 65; uses, 64. St. Pierre, 683. Sao Thome, 307. Science increasing resources, 649- 655. See Resources. Scotland, 66, 230; linen, 517; jute, 521. Senegal, 164, 455. Servia, 94-95. Seychelles, 311. Sheep, 165-181; Africa (South), 173; Argentine and Uruguay, 172; British breeding, 165; distribu- tion of, 167; Europe (western), 176; future supplies of wool and mutton, 181; Mediterranean basin and Central Eurasia, 178; New Zealand, 170; refrigeration, effect on breeds, 174; South Temperate zone, importance in, 169; tropic highlands, 178; United States, eastern, 176, number in, 175, value in re- mote regions, 168; western, 174. Ship-building, 572-579; American, 575; British, 574; European (continental), 576; materials of, effect of, 572; method, 572; navigation laws, influence upon, 577. Shoe manufacturing. See leather. Siberia, 58, 61, 191; forests, 452; railroads, 747-749; unused re- sources, 647. Sicily, 242. See Italy. Silk, 506-515; artificial, 514; com- merce in, 509; manufacture of, in foreign countries, 511, rela- tion to other industries, 506, in United States, 511; oriental production of, 508; source of, 506; transportation and labor factors, 511; worms, raising of silk, 507. Silo, 91. Sierra Leone, 164-165. Silver, 636-638; future production of, 637. Sisal. See Henequin. Solar energy, 403. Song-birds, 199. Sorghum, 81. South America, trade and trade routes of, 781-801; Andean rail- way, 796; Argentine, 791; Brazil, 788-790; Colombia, 785; Ecuador, 798; foreign termini of, 785; geographic barriers to, 781; importance of minerals on, 795; Pacific, commercial iso- lation of, 793 ; Plate river valley, 791 ; rivers, apparent advantage of, 782; shortness of, 783; steam- ship lines, 795. South Sea Islands, 5, 11, 599. Spain, 57, 79, 96, 147, 167, 178, 623; cork, 448-449; grape, 249; iron, 366; orange, 241; sulphuric acid, 584; wine, 252-253. Spices, 308-312; allspice, see Pimen- to; cassia, 310; cinnamon, 310; cloves, 311; ginger, 310; mace, 310; mustard, 312; nutmegs, 310; pepper, 309; pimento, 311; source of, 309; vanilla, 311. Starch, manufactured, 116-118; dry powder, 116; future supply of, 118; sago palm, 117. Starch foods, 117-118. Steel. See Iron and Steel. Straight's settlements, 73, 550-551; importance of, 765; labor of, 550-551; pepper, 309; rubber, 550-551; tin, 625. 912 INDEX Sugar, 260-287. Beet, 261-269; climatic require- ments of, 262; competition with cane, 269; government influence on industry, 266; intensive agri- culture, relation to, 262; United States, 269. Brussels conference, 266. Cane, 269-285; by-products of manufacture of, 285; competi- tion with beet, 269; Cuba, 277; distribution of, 273; future of, 285; growing of, 272; Hawaii, 278; Java, 279; Mauritius, 280; local supply crop, 283; Reunion, 280; South America, 274; United States, 281; West Indies, 275. Source and history of, 260. Maple, 286. World export and import of, 284. Sumatra. See East Indies. Sweden, 66, 103, 144, 155, 157, 586; iron, 366; lumber, 441-442; water-power, 402. Swine, 122-124; distribution, 122; forests, 124; grain growing, re- lation to, 124. Switzerland, 133; dairying, 157-158; silk, 512. Tariff. See Commercial policy of nations. Tasmania, 219. Tea, 296, 303; British colonies, 300; Ceylon, 301; Chinese, 298; con- sumption of, 296; distribution, factors affecting, 296; export, world, 297; Formosa, 300; im- port, world, 297; Japan, 299; labor factor, 301; "Paraguay," 303; United States, 301. Textiles. See Fibers, etc. Tin, 624-626; conditions of produc- tion of, 625; supply of, 626. Tobacco, 312-322; commercial ser- vice of, 313; European, 320; intensive nature of, 316; manu- facturing, 321; markets, Euro- pean, 320; production: United States, 314, world, 314; soil, injury to American, 315; South America, 320; Sumatra and Orient, 319; use of, spread of, 313. Trade, 675-683. Causes of differences: race, 675; resources, 679; stage of indus- trial development, 676. Foreign, volume of and size of country, 682. Future course of, 681. Routes. See North America, Eu- rope, Africa, Asia, Australia, South America, Atlantic, Pacific, M editerranean- Asiati c. Trade center, and its development: bargain center; banking and industrial enterprises, relation to, 872, capital, influence of, 871, centralized bargaining, ad- vantage of, 867, distant com- modities, buying and selling of, and direct control of, 857, 874, international, 870, international in United States, 875, national, for management of foreign trade, 869. Commercial centers, cities: origin of, 839, kinds of, 840; commer- cial industrial, 844; entrepot, trade, 845, 846, economy of, 846; manufactured goods, 847; raw material ports, 847; rela- tion of trade in manufactures to great cities, 848; seaports, 843; transportation, effect on commercial cities, 841. See en- trepot and Balance of Trade. Merchants, American, in inter- national trade, 882; export, 879; kinds of, 876; 'manufactured goods, 879; money, compared with, 876; shipping and purchas- ing, 881. Tramp steamships, 686-691; freight rates of, 689; line traffic, co- operation with, 691; manage- ment of, 687; traffic of, 687. Transportation: agriculture, relation to, 23; civilized community, relation to, 13; man and animal, 12. Tree crops, 655-664; conservation by, 662; land, ultimate uses of, INDEX 913 663; productivity and profit of, 655. Trinidad, 599; cacao, 306. Tropics, economic possibilities of, 664; inhabitants of, 667; north- ern prosperity, relation to, 670. Turkey, 50, 96, 189; Bagdad railway, 752; fig, 236; unused resources, 647. United States: aluminum, 626-627; Atlantic plain, 207, 227, 335- 336; apple industry , 211-215; barley, regions of, 69; bargain centers, international, 875-876; building stone, 603-606; buck- wheat regions of, 70; California, 42, 50, 244, 258, 210, 224, 232, 345, 402, 481, 632; carriages and automobiles, 560-564. Cattle: Great Plains, 128-129, irri- gated lands, 129, migration of beef, 129, number per square mile, 127, number per 1,000 population, 127, shipment of live, 130, southern states, 130. Cement, 608-611; clothing man- ufacture, 527; coal, 375-383, 384-385, 388-389; copper, 620- 622; Columbia Basin, 48, 50, 61. Corn, exports, 92, production: by by states, 93, per acre, by states, 90, per capita, by states, 91; corn belt, 44, 87, 141, 344. _ Cotton and cotton manufacturing, 470-475, 488, 491-495; dairy products, 148; dates, 238; fer- tilizer industry, 595; figs, 238; fisheries, 324-326, 331-333, 335- 337. Forests: naval stores, 458, paper manufacturing, 462-463, policy, 445-448, regions, 422-438, tan- bark, 637. Free land, effect of, 342-345; glass, 616; gold, 629-632; gloves, 539- 540; grape, 257; Great Basin, 46, 174; Great Lakes, 223, 695, 701, see North America, trade routes of; Great Plains, 46, 126, 140, 150, 174; hemp, 520; horse, 184- 185; iron: making, 356-364, SS ore, 356, pig, 370; land, im- proved, 88; leather, 534-535, 537-538, 539-540; machine tools, manufacture of, 567-568; Machinery: agricultural, 557-559, small metal manufactures, 579- 581, transportation, manufac- ture of, 569, 570. ' Meat animals, 122; millet and sor- ghum, 81; Mississippi Valley, 44, 46, 59, 209, 214; mule, 188-189; New England, 55, 91, 143, 176, 325-326, 423, 492, 573, 658, 682; oats, 67; orange, 243-246; Ozarks, 214, 223; paper manu- facturing, 462-463; peach, 222- 225; peanuts, 164; petroleum, 405-409, 414-415; phosphates, 590; potato, 107-111; potato, sweet, 112; pottery, 613-614; poultry, 194-195; rainfall, 84; Red River Valley, 44, 53-56, 150; resources, unused, 645- 646; rice, 79; rye, 65; sheep, 175-176; shipbuilding, 572-573; shoe, 537-538; silk manufac- ture, 512-514; silver, 637; soap, 600; southern states, 346-349; 428, 493; sugar, beet and cane, 269-272, .281-283; swine, 124- 125; tariff policy of, 895-896; tea, 301; tobacco, 314, 315, 317- 318; trade routes, 639-716, see North America, trade routes; vegetables, 207-211; water- power resources, 394-402; wheat 45, 60, 62, 63 ; wool, 500, 501-503. Uruguay, 97-98, 135-137; foreign trade, 682; sheep, 172-173. Vegetables, 203-210: American trade in, 207, 210; Atlantic Plain, 207; California, 210; cli- mate, influence of, 209; com- merce in, 205; flower industry, French, 203; garden seed, 210; Mississippi valley, 210. Vegetable, fruit and wine industries, 201-259. Venezuela: asphalt, 415; coffee, 292; trade routes, 786. Volga river, 726. 914 INDEX Wagons. See Carriages. Water power, 394-404; New Eng- land, influence on, 492; resources, 394; torrid zone resources, 403; use of, 398. Wax. See Petroleum. West Indies, 113, 114, 241, 306; coffee, 292-293; oranges, 244, sugar, 275-277; tobacco, 319. See individual islands. Wheat, 41-64; American foreign trade in, 62; Asiatic growing, 58; cheap, effect on farm value of old countries, 54; countries exporting, 59; countries import- ing, 59; crop and yield: Europe and America, 56; European exporters, 57; exports, 59; freez- ing and thawing: effect on, 44; gradual reduction process of milling, effect on growing, 49; imports, 59; new countries, yield and production of, 52; production: effect of machin- ery on, 50, United States, 63, world, 63; rye, compared to, 64; varieties, introduction and breeding of new, 47; trade and production, 54. Wine, 249-256; Australia, 255; French, 250; Italian, 249; new countries, industry in, 255; South Africa, 255; South Amer- ica, 256; Spanish, 252; see Grape. Wool, 497-505; commerce in, 504; imports: United States, 500, world, 500; manufacture of: European, 499, kinds of, 499, process, 498, United States, 501, worsteds, carpets and hats, 503; qualities of, 497; scarcity of raw, 504; substitutes for, 505. See Sheep and Goat. World carriers. See Panama Canal. World market, 16-21; agriculture, relation to, 23; China and, 20-21. Worsteds. See Wool. Yak. See Beasts of burden. Zulebra. See Beasts of burden.