[Illustration: Courtesy of _Scientific American_.
Consumption of potash for agricultural purposes in different countries]
Germany had a natural monopoly of potash as Chile had a natural monopoly
of nitrates. The agriculture of Europe and America has been virtually
dependent upon these two sources of plant foods. Now when the world was
cleft in twain by the shock of August, 1914, the Allied Powers had the
nitrates and the Central Powers had the potash. If Germany had not had
up her sleeve a new process for making nitrates she could not long have
carried on a war and doubtless would not have ventured upon it. But the
outside world had no such substitute for the German potash salts and
has not yet discovered one. Consequently the price of potash in the
United States jumped from $40 to $400 and the cost of food went up with
it. Even under the stimulus of prices ten times the normal and with
chemists searching furnace crannies and bad lands the United States was
able to scrape up less than 10,000 tons of potash in 1916, and this was
barely enough to satisfy our needs for two weeks!
[Illustration: What happened to potash when the war broke out.
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