6 EEPORT OP THE COmilSSIONEK OV AGRICULTURE. 



demand likely to occur, at a renumerative rate eveu if the i)rice sliould 

 fall one-tliird belo\\' v.Lat it now is, and that the smallest farmer as well 

 as the largest planter can profitably engage in its production; and this in 

 no limited area of country, but in whatever place maize can be grown 

 successfully ; for there sorghum of some variety will grow, and it will 

 flourish and mature its juice and seed in much of our soil in which maize 

 is by no means a certain crop. 



Several attcmi)ts to make sugar fi"om beets in Elinois, Wisconsin, and 

 California having been abandoned as nnprofitable, and all attemi)ts to 

 make a merchantable sugar from sorghum having failed up to 1877, it 

 became a settled opinion that only from tropical cane and the sugar 

 maple could sugar be profitably made in the United States. The maple 

 groves found scattered along a narrow strip of our northern border were 

 and are fast disappearing, and the amount of sugar, at any time not very 

 large, was in the census of 1870 reported at 28,443,645 pounds, and the 

 molasses at 921,057 gallons. 



It is now less, and is an inconsiderable factor in the x)roblem. The 

 manufacture of sugar from the tropical cane was confined to a narrow 

 belt of country bordering the Gulf of ]\Iexico, which produces an amount 

 of sugar averaging for twenty years past 1,G00 pounds per acre. The 

 total production of this strip last year was about 250,00 (>,000 pounds, 

 while our imioortation from abroad was 1,741,650,000 pounds of sugar, 

 beside molasses, melado, and other forms of sucrose, and being about 

 300,000,000 pounds increase over the importation of 1877-'78 (fiscal year). 



The Department of Agriculture has done what was possible to en- 

 courage the production of sugar from the tropical cane as well as from 

 beets and other plants, and there has been a large increase in area and 

 in production of sugar from this source during the past two years j 

 but the increased demand has far outstripped the increased production. 



The consumption of sugar per capita of our people is about 40 pounds 

 per annum at present, and with cheap, pure, healthful home-grown 

 Bugars the consumption per capita would increase to 60 or SO pounds. 



Fifty millions of people would consume at 60 pounds each, which it is 

 said the English people consume, annually 3,000,000,000 pounds of sugar, 

 worth at 6 cents $180,000,000, or at 10 cents, v/hichis the price at which 

 the Crystal Lake sorghum sugars of Weidner & Co. were sold this year, 

 $300,000,000. 



In reflecting upon this sugar problem, some two years since, it ap- 

 peared, to me that many years must pass before we could hope for a full 

 supply of sugar from tropical canes grown on our own soil. The broken 

 levees of the Mississippi Eiver must be rebuilt, and the ruined planta- 

 tions restored ; the demoralized labor system of the South reconstructed 

 and the disheartened land-owTiers encouraged ; the mechanical must be, 

 in part, divorced from the agricultural interest, and a co-operation of 

 labor and capital must be estabhshed with confidence restored, before 

 any very great and permanent increased production of sugar could be 



