sheep and reeds that bore honey without bees. These incredible tales
turned out to be true and in the course of time Europe began to get a
little calico from Calicut and a kind of edible gravel that the Arabs
who brought it called "sukkar." But of course only kings and queens
could afford to dress in calico and have sugar prescribed for them when
they were sick.

Fortunately, however, in the course of time the Arabs invaded Spain and
forced upon the unwilling inhabitants of Europe such instrumentalities
of higher civilization as arithmetic and algebra, soap and sugar. Later
the Spaniards by an act of equally unwarranted and beneficent aggression
carried the sugar cane to the Caribbean, where it thrived amazingly. The
West Indies then became a rival of the East Indies as a treasure-house
of tropical wealth and for several centuries the Spanish, Portuguese,
Dutch, English, Danes and French fought like wildcats to gain possession
of this little nest of islands and the routes leading thereunto.

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