Denver labor bulletin., 1917-12-15


and orty thousand tons sugar from grown in
Louisiana. The balance the overwhelming big bal
of three million two hundred thousand tons
made up of sugar from beetS and cane imported
from foreign countries.
They dont know how important it is; how vital
to the well-being and the health of nations And
they don't realize that without sugar this s war n
would without high explosives rubber or gasoline.
Fight, somehow. our armies could without high
explosives without motor without aero
planes; fight they could, as they did in the days
of old But without sugar to stoke up the millions mi Of
there could be no effective fighting at all; for
sugar is the white coal' of manknd it is the Twen-
iet Century fuel with which we keep up the pace of
modern civilization
Note this extraordinary fact The United States
today consumes four times as much sugar as the
Whole World produced twenty years before the start
of the Civil War. That's astounding but it, true: It's
a statistical fact And the reason for this vastly in
creased consumption of sugar is clear when you think
about it. Civilization has made the whole world
speed up 1t makes all take the steepest hills of
thought and endeavor on high gear
To do that we need fuel carbohydrates And
sugar is richer in assimlabe carbohydrates than any
other food in the world Now, carbohydrates is por-
tenous word but its meaning in physiology is simple;
it's the stuff in all foods from which we get the ca
lories-the quality; the human fuel to feed the
fires of life. It's the coal to the steam boiler OF man
And the consumption of sugar has increased a
thousandfold in the modern world over what 1t was III
rapid transit and telephones and wireless; because
sugar is the only food on which we can can keep up the
pace 1t wasn't until about 1860 that we began to
realize sugar as 'food;'' fuel food" Before
that it had merely been luxury
But it isn't luxury any more; it necessity; and
it's necessity because it the only food OF the KIND
that meets the demands of the stress and strain of our
intensive way of living
Bread is the 'staff of life" Beef gives us Drawn
and blood But sugar is the energzing quality in our
diet, and in these days simp y cannot do without
it. Here's proof of that; proof that has been demon
straed again and again. in thousand refined tests IN
all the great experimental laboratories of the world
The fuel value of bread is eleven hundred units.
The fuel value of beef is fifteen hundred units The
fuel value of rice is sixteen hundred units But the
fuel value of sugar is eighteen hundred units; and
every last unit of it is taken up by the digestive sys-
tenn.
That's why the United States, today, uses more
sugar than all the world used twenty years before the
Civil War Sixty years ago the worlds production OF
sugar about one million tons year. And it was
all cane sugar. Some German and French chemists
had been experimenting with bees before that; they
had, indeed, been experimenting with beets since
$780, but they didn't get any further than the eX
permentaI stage, because no automatic machinery
and steam power contrvances had been invented to
expedite the processes, and beet sugar only
laboratory curiosity.
Ihen about 1910, steam power was applied to
many of the increasing functions and necessities OF
modern life and the French and German chemists saw
another of their dreams realized About 1850 some
thing like fifty thousand tons of beet sugar was pro-
duced in the newly built beet sugar factories of France
and GERMANY and the scientists that vast new