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.
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