ening up a new market for an unknown product as in the case of the
introduction of the Stassfurt salts into American agriculture. The
farmer in any country is apt to be set in his ways and when it comes to
inducing him to spend his hard-earned money for chemicals that he never
heard of and could not pronounce he--quite rightly--has to be shown.
Well, he was shown. It was, if I remember right, early in the nineties
that the German Kali Syndikat began operations in America and the United
States Government became its chief advertising agent. In every state
there was an agricultural experiment station and these were provided
liberally with illustrated literature on Stassfurt salts with colored
wall charts and sets of samples and free sacks of salts for field
experiments. The station men, finding that they could rely upon the
scientific accuracy of the information supplied by Kali and that the
experiments worked out well, became enthusiastic advocates of potash
fertilizers. The station bulletins--which Uncle Sam was kind enough to
carry free to all the farmers of the state--sometimes were worded so
like the Kali Company advertising that the company might have raised a
complaint of plagiarizing, but they never did. The Chilean nitrates,
which are under British control, were later introduced by similar
methods through the agency of the state agricultural experiment
stations.

As a result of all this missionary work, which cost the Kali Company
$50,000 a year, the attention of a large proportion of American farmers
was turned toward intensive farming and they began to realize the
necessity of feeding the soil that was feeding them. They grew dependent
upon these two foreign and widely separated sources of supply. In the
year before the war the United States imported a million tons of
Stassfurt salts, for which the farmers paid more than $20,000,000. Then
a declaration of American independence--the German embargo of 1915--cut
us off from Stassfurt and for five years we had to rely upon our own
resources. We have seen how Germany--shut off from Chile--solved the
nitrogen problem for her fields and munition plants. It was not so easy
for us--shut off from Germany--to solve the potash problem.

There is no more lack of potash in the rocks than there is of nitrogen
in the air, but the nitrogen is free and has only to be caught and
combined, while the potash is shut up in a granite prison from which it
is hard to get it free. It is