41 



conduct the business is kept as low as possibly consistent with good 

 management. The cost of building sugar-houses is reduced to a mini- 

 mum, and labor saved. There is no good reason to expect to make 

 money out of the sorghum business unless conducted on sound busi- 

 ness principles. The knowledge of the business is now advanced to 

 such a point that there is nothing to prevent accurate calculations being 

 made. The cost of the machinery, the work it can do, the labor re- 

 quired to run it, the cost of the cane, the yield and quality of the product 

 can now all be closely estimated. 



Sugar-houses built without definite ideas of the work to be done or 

 machinery added piece by piece, without plans or contracts, and such 

 machinery as clarifiers, as filter presses, and bone-black drones added, 

 with the expectation of only making white granulated sugar directly 

 from the juice, will be certain to bring financial failure and disappoint- 

 ment to its projectors, unless the capital is heavy enough to stand the 

 strain, or the parties are willing to make experimental work of their 

 plants and pay the price for doing it. Notwithstanding the closeness 

 with which all these calculations can now be made, the following should 

 be remembered. I have never known a sugar-house of any kind to be 

 made so complete and be in such fine running order that it could be 

 depended on to make a commercial success the first season. Either its 

 water arrangements will fall short of expectations, or the boilers fail to 

 be large enough, or strikes and delays will detain the machinery, or 

 castings will be broken in shipping, or some minor points will be badly 

 proportioned or too weak, foundations will prove not sufficiently secure, 

 shafts will be found out of line, etc. All this will occur, not from any 

 bad management, but because the nature of the work is such that the 

 iactory can only perform its task satisfactorily after being broken in on 

 cane. The cane alone can give the necessary adjustment. Erroneous 

 and disappointing calculations have been made by celebrated sugar 

 engineers, in making calculations for sorghum, by using well-known 

 standard rules for the evaporation of water as a basis for calculation; 

 and repeatedly has machinery proved suitable for southern cane failed 

 when applied to this work. The moral of all this is that in construct- 

 ing new works there should be only enough cane raised the first season 

 to break in and test the sugar-house thoroughly in every part, in order 

 that when the machinery is called upon the succeeding season it would 

 fulfill the work it had been calculated to do, without delay or hin- 

 drance. 



The expense of doing all this should be allowed for in the capital 

 account. 



In some sorghum-houses, calculated to work 100 tons of cane a day, 

 will be found strike vacuum pans of such large size that the cost of 

 erecting them and the pumps necessary for their use, the large pipe 

 fittings, and other paraphernalia will cost as much alone as would suffice 

 to build an economical sugar-house of good size. 



