years. We now dispose of eighty pounds of sugar annually for every soul in our population, while twenty years ago the average was little more than fifty pounds. This consumption takes no account of the large quantity of confections, especially chocolate, imported into the country in a manufactured condition. Only in Great Britain are the figures higher than with us. There they rise to one hundred pounds. Denmark comes next with seventyfive pounds, then Switzerland, with sixty. Thrifty Germany, which produces the largest beet crop in the world, and in fact controls the world's sugar market, uses very little of the commodity itself. Its per capita consumption is only forty-two pounds, being about the same as that of Holland. Italy, Rumania, Bulgaria, and Servia, each consumes less than ten pounds of sugar per head of its population, the poverty of their peoples doubtless accounting in the main for the small figures.

Sugar in some form has been used by the inhabitants of the globe from the earliest times. Until the fifteenth century before Christ, the chief source of supply was honey. It was at about that time that the value of cultivating the wild sugar cane was discovered in India,

and it is probable that the first manufacture of sugar in any manner should be credited to that country. For many centuries, only the raw juice was expressed, until about 700 B. c. the employment of fire in concentrating it came into use.

From India the art spread rapidly among the ancient nations, but did not reach Western Europe until several centuries later. Columbus carried sugar cane from the Canary Islands to the West Indies, whence it extended to the mainland, and thus, in a progress of three thousand years, encircled the earth.

The production of sugar in the New World became so great within a century after its introduction, that the importers of Europe turned to it for the supply which they had formerly received from the Orient. Spain, Italy, and Egypt, large producers of sugar at that time, could not meet the competition with the American output, and soon ceased to cultivate cane commercially. Free land and slave labor enabled the planters of the West Indies to sell sugar at lower figures, with larger profit, than could the growers of any other part of the world.

To-day sugar is produced under the most diversified conditions and in the most scattered

regions. In many countries, such as India, Malaysia, and the Philippines, cane is raised and sugar manufactured by the crudest processes, with the cheapest labor. The product is low grade and the extraction small. In other countries, such as Hawaii and Cuba, the most improved methods are employed, and skilled labor engaged at high wages.

The competition between cane-producing countries is so great that a moderate advantage gained by one will sometimes destroy the industry of another. Such was the case when our reciprocal tariff arrangement with Cuba resulted in closing the mills of Jamaica. In recent years the keenest rivalry has existed between cane and beet sugar. At first the latter had great difficulty in forcing a place for itself in the world's markets, but with government subsidies, improvement in cultivation, and economies in manufacture, it gradually became an irresistible competitor of cane. During the past fifteen years beet sugar has come to the front with great strides, and now it divides the world's consumption with the cane product.

Cuba produces considerably more than onefourth of the entire cane sugar of the world,