r when shipping was short, the War Department found that it could
be made better and cheaper from our home-grown corn starch. When the war
closed the United States was making 1,720,000 pounds of nitro-starch a
month for loading hand grenades. So, too, the Post Office Department
discovered that it could use mucilage made of corn dextrin as well as
that which used to be made from tapioca. This is progress in the right
direction. It would be well to divert some of the energetic efforts now
devoted to the increase of commerce to the discovery of ways of reducing
the need for commerce by the development of home products. There is no
merit in simply hauling things around the world.

In the last chapter we saw how dextrose or glucose could be converted by
fermentation into alcohol. Since corn starch, as we have seen, can be
converted into dextrose, it can serve as a source of alcohol. This was,
in fact, one of the earliest misuses to which corn was put, and before
the war put a stop to it 34,000,000 bushels went into the making of
whiskey in the United States every year, not counting the moonshiners'
output. But even though we left off drinking whiskey the distillers
could still thrive. Mars is more thirsty than Bacchus. The output of
whiskey, denatured for industrial purposes, is more than three times
what is was before the war, and the price has risen from 30 cents a
gallon to 67 cents. This may make it profitable to utilize sugars,
starches and cellulose that formerly were out of the question. According
to the calculations of the Forest Products Laboratory of Madison it
costs from 37 to 44 cents a gallon to make alcohol from corn, but it may
be made from sawdust at a cost of from 14 to 20 cents. This is not "wood
alcohol" (that is, methyl alcohol, CH_{4}O) such as is made by the
destructive distillation of wood, but genuine "grain alcohol" (ethyl
alcohol, C_{2}H_{6}O), such as is made by the fermentation of glucose or
other sugar. The first step in the process is to digest the sawdust or
chips with dilute sulfuric acid under heat and pressure. This converts
the cellulose (wood fiber) in large part into glucose ("corn sugar")
which may be extracted by hot water in a diffusion battery as in
extracting the sugar from beet chips. This glucose solution may then be
fermented by yeast and the resulting alcohol distilled off. The process
is perfectly practicable but has yet to be proved profitable. But the
sulfite liquors of the pap