GROWTH OF THE BEET-SUGAR INDUSTRY. 87 



acre, each, ton yielding from one hundred and fifty to two hundred 

 pounds of sugar, which gave him three times the profit that he 

 had hitherto derived from the cultivation of wheat, rye, barley, 

 and the staple crops, leaving the land better prepared to receive 

 the annual plant in its rotation with the beet, he found the value 

 of his farm increasing enormously, and his prosperity phenomenal, 

 as the swarms of peasants — men, women, and children — nocked to 

 his growing fields or followed the harvesting, while full employ- 

 ment was given to the general wage-earner and the artisan. 



New employments and collateral industries increased in the 

 same ratio ; railroads were projected and built to transport the 

 beet-root from the interior farms to the great factories scattered 

 for hundreds of miles throughout Germany, long trains of plat- 

 form-cars, often numbering fifty to sixty, piled full of white sugar- 

 beets, met the eye of the traveler during the harvesting season, 

 and speculation ran high with the fabulous profits of the sugar 

 manufacturers. 



Subsequently the attempt to manufacture beet-sugar in the 

 Southern United States met with signal failure. Later, beet-sugar 

 factories were started in the Northern States, in the latitude of 

 Germany, where the soil and meteorological conditions were equal 

 to the best of beet-growing sections on the Continent ; to which 

 was added the long Indian summer, which can not be approached 

 by any country in its advantages for maturing the plant. To 

 these factories, erected in different sections of the North, subsidies 

 were granted and bounties were given by several of the States in 

 which they were located, fostered and assisted by the Agricultural 

 Bureau and experimental stations of the Government ; yet they 

 were overcome by the same difficulties that had for fifty years 

 and more confronted their foreign pioneers, and they, one and all, 

 came to grief in their attempts to manufacture sugar from the 

 beet-root at a profit, for the metamorphosis of the plant and the 

 sugar-beet process had not yet been developed. 



But during the last decade great discoveries have been made 

 in the cultivation of the root, as well as in the methods for the 

 extraction of the solution of sugar by ingenious mechanical de- 

 vices, and the sugar-beet of to-day bears no resemblance to that 

 of the past century, either in its form or the minerals it contains ; 

 and the saccharine principle has been increased a thousand per 

 cent above the extraction of one per cent secured by the early 

 experiments of Archaud in the days of the first Napoleon. Forty 

 years afterward the chemists found their experimentation had 

 increased the product to six per cent only, and a quarter of a 

 century later the highest attainable result proved that it required 

 twelve and a half parts of beet-root to produce one part of grain 

 sugar, about one eighth per cent of the whole, which was the 



