stuff was first thrown away until it was realized that it was much more valuable for the potash it contains than was the rock salt they were after.  Then the Germans began to purify the Stassfurt salts and market them throughout the world.  They contain from fifteen to twenty-five per cent. of magnesium chloride mixed with magnesium chloride in “carnallite,” with magnesium sulfate in “kainite” and sodium chloride in “sylvinite.”  More than thirty thousand miners and workmen are employed in the Stassfurt works.  There are some seventy distinct establishments engaged in the business, but they are in combination.  In fact they are compelled to be, for the German Government is as anxious to promote trusts as the American Government is to prevent them.  Once the Stassfurt firms had a falling out and began a cutthroat competition.  But the German Government objects to its people cutting each other’s throats.  American dealers were getting unheard of bargains when the German Government stepped in and compelled the competing corporations to recombine under threat of putting on an export duty that would eat up their profits.

The advantages of such business cooeperation are specially shown in opening 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