Atlanta semi-weekly journal. (Atlanta, Ga.) 1898-1920, 1918-06-18

If the Berlin Deutsche Zeitung had glimmer
of what had been going forward in industrial and
inventive America during the last three and half
years. it would net fall into such inane threats as
this:
IF the United States sells US no cotton. it
shall get no potash. which is a fertilizer al
most indispensable to impoverished agricul-
tursl land Germany has a world monopoly
OF potash. II the United States gives us no
gasoline and grain, il shall get no dyes,
glassware, optical instrumcnts--in fact.
nothing that Germany has exported TO the
United States in the past"
The Kaiser's organ is thinking with evident
anxiety of the time when German industries turn
ing to the enormous task of recovering their lost
prosperity. will find themselves in urgent need of
material and of markets. 1t is on the rather
unwarranted assumption that America will be dis
posed to continue after the war the embargo on
expectation of material to Germany that the
Deutsche Zeitung bases its idle remarks America
and her Allies purpose to whip militarist Ger
many so thoroughly in the present war and to
shatter Prussianism so completely that there will
be no need of pTolonging the issue into things
economic after peace-a Just and durable peace
that Germany should have occasion to seek to force
US to sell her basic Supplies for her factories,
what product of hers could she withhold from US
that We could not easily do without?
The Deutsche Zeitung speaks of potash. At
the beginning of the war, it is true we depended
upon Germany for most of the potash used in
making commercial fertilizers But being
thrown upon our own resources, we lost no time
in turning them richly to account We found
rufTE hin
sources of poash, one of which, interestingly
enough, was the feldspar deposits that occur so
abundantly in the Piedmont plateau of Georgia
The development of these three fertile stores has
gone lar enough to assure of independence of a
foreign supply. Germany may keep her potash
along with her kultur.
So, too, with dyestuffs which the Deutsche lei
tung proposes TO deny in the event we fall
short of the accommodations which German fac
tories may require. In the earlier stages of the
European war our industries sorely embar-
raised in consequence OF the cutting off of dye i'm
ports from Germany But how completely condi-
lions have changed is evidenced in the Govern
ments latest census of coal tar products showing
that the output of dyes in the United States last
year was practically identical with the amounts
annually imported before the war" Eighty-odd
plants for making dyes have been established. In
this as in other fields the American chemist and
fully equal to the problems committed to them
and far superior to the German in resourcefuness.
We shall need no more dyes from the land of the
Kaiser
These are but instances of the welI-nigh in
Vulnerable changes that Germany will encounter
when she takes the task OF recouping her bank
rupt industries. She will find that not only in
America but throughout the world men have made
themselves independent of German products; and
inevitably. too. she will find that men have not
forgotten her practice of bombing Red Cross hos
pitfalls and cutting of the hands of Belgian chill
dTen. The extent which German industries
have been paTaly-ed in the OF the war is
indicated by some interesting figures quoted by
the Literary Digest from the Norddeutsche ALICE
neine ZeItUlg. out OF seventeen hundred spin
ming and weaving mills we learn, ''only seventy
still running at high pressure, while in the
boot and shoe industry fourteen hundred facto-
ries have been amalgamated into three hundred.
In the oil industry, fifteen factories have been
formed out of the hundred and twenty
works previously existing This is one of the
prices the Gerr people pay for the divine
privilege of licking the Hohenzollern boots. Yet
even in the midst of their industrial bankruptcy
they harp upon the things they intend to deny
America after the if fail to do their bid