and algebra, soap and sugar. Later
the Spaniards by an act of equally unwarranted and beneficent aggression
carried the sugar cane to the Caribbean, where it thrived amazingly. The
West Indies then became a rival of the East Indies as a treasure-house
of tropical wealth and for several centuries the Spanish, Portuguese,
Dutch, English, Danes and French fought like wildcats to gain possession
of this little nest of islands and the routes leading thereunto.

The English finally overcame all these enemies, whether they fought her
singly or combined. Great Britain became mistress of the seas and took
such Caribbean lands as she wanted. But in the end her continental foes
came out ahead, for they rendered her victory valueless. They were
defeated in geography but they won in chemistry. Canning boasted that
"the New World had been called into existence to redress the balance of
the Old." Napoleon might have boasted that he had called in the sugar
beet to balance the sugar cane. France was then, as Germany was a
century later, threatening to dominate the world. England, then as in
the Great War, shut off from the seas the shipping of the aggressive
power. France then, like Germany later, felt most keenly the lack of
tropical products, chief among which, then but not in the recent crisis,
was sugar. The cause of this vital change is that in 1747 Marggraf, a
Berlin chemist, discovered that it was possible to extract sugar from
beets. There was only a little sugar in the beet root then, some six per
cent., and what he got out was dirty and bitter. One of his pupils in
1801 set up a beet sugar factory near Breslau under the patronage of the
King of Prussia, but the industry was not a success until Napoleon took
it up and in 1810 offered a prize of a million francs for a practical
process. How the French did make fun of him for this crazy notion! In a
comic paper of that day you will find a cartoon of Napoleon in the
nursery beside the cradle of his son and heir, the King of Rome--known
to the readers of Rostand as l'Aiglon. The Emperor is squeezing the
juice of a beet into his coffee and the nurse has put a beet into the
mouth of the infant King, saying: "Suck, dear, suck. Your father says
it's sugar."

In like manner did the wits ridicule Franklin for fooling with
electricity, Rumford for trying to improve chimneys, Parmentier for
thinking potatoes were fit to eat, and Jefferson for believing that
something might be made of the