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has gone up. Now, why did it go up? There has been no 

 great advance in the cost of the pyrites from which the sul- 

 furic acid is made, there has been a little advance, about 

 four shillings, on the freight, but that would not amount to 

 ever twentj'-five cents on a ton of acid phosphaie, but the 

 price of sulfuric acid itself has gone from four to five dollars 

 \o twentv eight or thirty dollars, I think it was quoted at 

 the other day, merely because somebody wants it more, 

 ^he nitrate of potash has advanced perhaps fifty per cent, 

 vjiless they chance to liave contracts for a long period of de- 

 livery, when it Avould not go up at all. Therefore your 

 advance in acid phosphate, to about twenty-one dollars, is 

 due to the fact that the sulfuric acid is sold for something 

 else. So far as the foreign situation is concerned, I wish to 

 particularly impress on you that none of the German potash 

 that has been delivered since the war broke out has cost the 

 u\merican buyer over forty dollars a ton, but it is selling 

 for about four hundred and fifty dollars The reason of that 

 is that the contracts expire at the end of 1916 and if we 

 could get any potash, we would have to sell it to our con- 

 Iractors at the regulation price, wdiich is about thirty-nine 

 dollars and five cents less fifteen, and the only extra charge 

 we have been submitted to at all is the maximum of four 

 (iollars extra freight to get to Rotterdam instead of Ham- 

 burg, and Avhatever war insurance they chose to put on 

 themselves. Had the maximum ever fallen on the same lot 

 of goods, the European freight, the maximum charge ought 

 not to have been over five dollars, and that would not have 

 been as much as the discount we get, so that nobody has 

 paid over forty dollars a ton for muriate of potash and we 

 liave turned over thousands of tons that we had in our own 

 warehouses when the war broke out at the regulation price, 

 so there has been a very handsome profit but our German 

 friends have not been getting that profit, that is all in Ameri- 

 vf!. Any advance over the old price is all American the 

 Germans even have to pay the ocean freight. I think it is 

 not unfair, in view of the remarkable advance in prices, and 



