country was their market, for wherever textiles were made or dyed there was naturally a demand for their products. Their agents became prosperous in every part of the earth, from Shanghai and Calcutta to London and New York. (China and India use more dyes than England and the United States.) Thus Mr. Herman A. Metz, in public life a member of Congress and formerly comptroller of New York City, is in private life the American agent of a great German dye corporation. This great export trade was captured almost without a struggle, even on the part of Great Britain and the United States, though both were large consumers of dyestuffs and both are abundantly endowed by Nature with the basic materials for their manufacture. Both these countries have, indeed, built up a small industry-in each case involving the investment of about three million dollars against Germany's four hundred million dollars. But they were both great textile manufacturing countries, and their powerful manufacturers were more concerned with getting dyestuffs cheap than they were with getting dyestuffs made at home. Hence they paid little heed to the protests that their native chemists made when the German exporting cartels used the familiar weapon of underselling to starve these puny competitors out of their natural markets and even out of business. Any attempt to fight back by trying to undersell the Germans in Germany was certain. to fail, for the Kaiser's Government took a paternal interest in the German dye business and was ready instantly to use its autocratic tariff commission to clap a prohibitive tariff on foreign dyes overnight, if necessary, to protect it.

DYESTUFFS IN WAR

The German Government's solicitude for the industry was probably not wholly born of either its pride in a great and successful world business or its satisfaction with the profits of that business. Germany's aggressive military tradition had probably at least as much to do with it. The nation that controlled the dye business of the world would for a year, at least, in the event of war, control the world's supply

of high explosives. What could be more admirable, from the German Government's point of view, than an arrangement by which such a storehouse of military energy should, in time of peace, maintain itself as an extremely profitable industry?

A brief description of the coal-tar processes may make this reasoning clearer. When coal is burned to make either coke or illuminating gas (except in the American system of "water gas"), three separate products are evolved: coke, gas, and tar. From 100 parts of coal are obtained 72 parts of coke, 22 parts of gas, and 6 parts of tar. This "tar" is part liquid, part solid, and it contains 155 distinct chemical substances, which, to be of practical use, must of course be distilled or otherwise got out of it. Of these substances, 10 are used in the manufacture of dyes. Two of these, toluol and phenol, are just as useful for war as they are for peace. Toluol (and similarly phenol) combined with certain acids becomes the base of a series of dyes: toluol combined with other acids becomes trinitrotoluol, a mighty explosive; and phenol, combined with other chemicals, becomes that famous picric acid which made possible the quick destruction of the Belgian fortresses.

Military men of no other nation understood so fully as the Germans the potential use of these incredibly destructive explosives. Even after the Battle of the Marne, when the French and British in their trenches were pitting their shrapnel shells against the "H. E." German shells, General Sir John French could not persuade the War Office that "high explosive" was probably the decisive element in the struggle. Defeated in the War Office, he turned to Lord Northcliffe, who sent Colonel Repington, the military expert of his London Times, to the front to see the proof of General French's contention. The result was the series of articles in the Times that made Mr. Lloyd-George Minister of Munitions and set all the available works in Great Britain and the United States enlarging in order to increase their production of these high explosives.

By this devious route arises the hope of an American dye industry. A profitable market is thus opened for American-made

coal-tar products. The Bethlehem Steel Company, for example, took orders for enormous numbers of high explosive shells. It had the steel to make the jackets of these shells, but no picric acid to load them with. But in the Pittsburg district alone thousands of pounds of the valuable coaltar products were weekly going to waste up the chimneys of the coke ovens whose smoke darkens that region. Many companies in various parts of the country equipped themselves to capture these products. The United States Steel Corporation installed benzol recovery plants (benzol is the first of the series of distillates of which toluol and phenol are later products) in its works at Sharon, Pa., Gary, Ind., and Birmingham, Ala. The Republic Iron & Steel Company, at Youngstown, O., the Lackawanna Steel Company, at Buffalo, and several others did likewise.

Soon benzol was being produced in quantities sufficient not only to make all the needed picric acid but for use in other ways. For example, Mr. Thomas A. Edison became a large purchaser of benzol. The reason for this was that his phonograph records are made from a synthetic compound produced by the reaction of carbolic acid (phenol) on formaldehyde. Now carbolic acid, like most of the rest of coal-tar derivatives, was imported chiefly from Germany. When the British blockade and the German embargo combined to stop exports, Mr. Edison naturally sought other sources of carbolic acid. He decided to buy benzol and to make his own supply from it. Other manufacturers had already done so for explosives.

about 920 are manufactured; and practically only about 400 are widely used. Of all dyestuffs, plain blacks are by far the most widely used, then indigo blues, then the simpler browns, greens, and reds. These are the staples of a workaday world. The others are the colorings of fine dress goods, fancy silk ties and hose, etc.

Meanwhile, the old established native American dye concerns have redoubled and quadrupled their activity. They were. compared with the German giants, small and few. Only one American company has been in the business for thirty-five years, the Schoellkopf Aniline & Chemical Company, of Buffalo. One or two other concerns have entered the field in late years, but they had made relatively little progress before the war. Indeed, of the entire American output of dyestuffs, the Schoellkopf company alone manufactured practically one half.

With the outbreak of the war, the Schoellkopf company-and their action is characteristic of the others-cut down the number of varieties of colors that they manufactured and redoubled their efforts with the more staple shades. Thus, by reducing the number of colors from 132 to about 40, they were able to produce approximately four times as much dyestuffs altogether as they had produced before the war. Of this production, practically three fourths were black dyes.

In another quarter, too, American enterprise rose to meet the emergency. Most fabrics will not retain the coal-tar dyes against the effects of washing unless they have first been treated with mordants that, by some still not wholly understood action, affect the fibres so that they will permanently hold the coloring matter. These mordants are usually barium salts, and Germany supplied all these salts before the war. When the American supply was exhausted in August of last year, Toch Brothers, of New York, opened a barium mine in Tennessee and soon made its production capable of relieving the situation.

But at no time, past or present, has there been a dye manufacturing industry in this country in the sense that Germany has such an industry. The American factories have been dependent upon Germany

for their intermediates, and are largely "assembling plants," which carry out only the relatively simple chemical processes of combining these intermediates with other substances to produce the finished commercial dyes. This was one reason why, when the German dyes were no longer received in this country, even the going American concerns were helpless to remedy the situation until American benzol recovery plants could get under way.

In this interval, now safely passed, the textile manufacturers especially were hard put to it to keep their establishments going. The importers' stocks of German dyes were dwindling; the new American product was not coming into the market. They resorted to all kinds of expedients-halftime operation, the use of hair-line stripes instead of heavy stripes on materials, the substitution of conventional designs for the more elaborate patterns, even the return to the use of long-abandoned natural vegetable dyestuffs.

This last innovation has had world-wide effects. It has sent corps of woodsmen into the forests of Central America to get out the logwood from which the best of the old-time black dyes was made. It has thrown a warm current of life blood into the withered veins of the East Indian indigo trade. Madder root, from which the famous "Turkey red" was for centuries obtained, has emerged from almost complete oblivion into the markets of the world. The oak forests of the South have responded to the call for the only dyestuff native to the United States-quercitron, a yellow used on calicoes. Cochineal is again in demand for scarlets, and the gathering of the insects, from which it is made, from cactus leaves is a reviving industry in Mexico.

All these, and many more, dyestuffs had been for hundreds of years staples of the commerce of the world, but they had dropped largely out of sight after the triumph of coal-tar dyes, which were usually cheaper, of much more uniform quality, and more brilliant and lasting. Even Tyrian purple, the royal shade that none but emperors might wear, on penalty of death-Tyrian purple was long ago produced synthetically by Dr. Friedländer, of Biebrich, on the Rhine. And though

his purple was exactly the ancient purple, not merely a likeness, and though he could manufacture it to sell at a profit for 1-1000th of the price Diocletian is known to have paid for it, it was so inferior to other synthetic purples that nobody would buy it at 20 cents a pound.

Not only the organic dyestuffs, ancient and modern, but old inorganic dyes have been called back into service colors produced by the use of common minerals and acids.

But all these things are makeshiftsstop-gaps to fill in with until an American dye industry is created or the German dyes find their way back into this country. The ideal solution of the present situation is, of course, the creation of a complete American dye industry rather than the return to the use of the German dyes. Powerful American financial interests have been tempted to go into the field by the golden opportunity that is offered by the paralysis of the German companies and by the sight of a world hungering for their products. With peace prices, the German companies often earned as much as 50 per cent. a year on their investment, spending it lavishly on improvements and extensions of their plants, besides paying handsome dividends. War prices, by comparison, offered a Golconda of profit. Benzol, normally worth 20 cents a gallon, has sold as high as $1.25 a gallon for immediate shipment and is now sold on contract at about 65 cents; toluol prices have similarly jumped from 25 cents to $6, and to $4.25 on contract; indigo rose from 15 cents a pound to $1 and more; aniline oil went from 10 cents to as high as $1.75 a pound.

The shadow upon this roseate picture of profits is the shadow of the German giant. After the war he will return to the field, desperately hungry for business after the losses of the conflict, with his great factories intact, with his technical forces perhaps crippled but still immensely superior to their competitors in coördination and training, and with his selling organization ready to reopen the long familiar channels of trade-if necessary by the dynamite of low prices until upstart rivals shall be driven off.

Even this fearsome shadow, however,

does not prevent the more daring Americans from seizing the easier of the open roads to profit. Hence the benzol recovery plants, with their high margin of safety and quick amortization of investment; hence the overnight development of aniline oil; hence the extension of the plants of the existing American dye makers.

CORPORATIONS THAT MAY MAKE DYES

But none of these things, nor all of them together, give promise of a great, complete dye industry such as Germany possesses. Nevertheless, the opportunity for some of the more powerful American corporations to enter this field is too promising to be passed by without searching investigation of the possibilities. For example, if the United States Steel Corporation went into it, it would furnish a continuing market for the recovered by-products of its coke ovens that now go to waste, besides yielcing its own profit as a manufacturing enterprise. The Du Pont Powder Company is tempted by the obvious desirability of maintaining its practical monopoly of explosives by maintaining a continuous outlet for the products of peace. The General Chemical Company doubtless sees in the situation an opportunity to supplement its present supremacy in heavy chemicals with a like supremacy in chemicals derived from coal tar. The Barrett Manufacturing Company, which is king in the American realm of tar, pitch, and creosote, might well anticipate eagerly the profits to be got by the further refinements of their basic product. And the Standard Oil Company, now that the Rittman process of extracting benzol from crude petroleum gives promise of opening a vast new source of crudes" for the manufacture of dyes, might well follow its traditional policy of making all the possible varieties of products from its raw material. All these companies are financially strong enough to confront the German giant; probably one of them or a combination of several of them will develop the complete American dye industry if it is ever developed, working possibly from one, or a combination of all, of the existing American dye companies as a beginning.

But before any concern of any kind

announces its whole-hearted intention to enter the dye manufacturing field, it asks two questions: (1) What will the Government do to protect us from German pricecutting? and (2) Will the Government foster the industry by laying a protective tariff on German dyes and basic materials? As far as it is possible to guess the Administration's reply to these questions from Secretary Redfield's public statements and other. public sources, the answers have been: (1) The Government will go the limit to prevent destructive price-cutting. and (2) The Government may possibly place a very low duty on some articles of the dye trade, but nothing approaching a duty high enough to make a present of a new industry to anybody at the expense of the consuming public.

The first of these questions and answers reveals a new angle of the struggle to prevent unfair competition and monopoly and restraints of trade. Though the Sherman Law and the Clayton Law cover these practices when committed by Americans engaged in interstate or foreign trade, there appears to be good reason to doubt that the laws prevent the German dye manufacturers' doing what under German law is entirely legal, namely, meeting in Germany and agreeing to sell dyes at less than cost in the United States, though the effect (and the purpose as well) of this agreement is to kill off the American dye makers and so monopolize the dye trade in this country. Until Congress provides adequate measures against such practices as this, there is no probability that American capital will attempt to dispute the Germans, but Congress at this session will doubtless remedy a situation so detrimental to American business. Whether it will abandon the traditional tariff policy of the Democratic majority to create a dye industry artificially remains to be seen, though the likelihood that it will do so is remote. And whether, if it does not, American money, American science, and American energy will meet the challenge of the situation, will meet the biggest immediate opportunity to attack Germany's position in foreign trade-that, too, remains to be seen, and the likelihood that they will fail to do so is equally remote.

T

00 often an American merchant's horizon is limited by his experience at home; he has never bothered to seek information about foreign markets. Possibly he may have an honest intention to look into the export proposition when he has a little leisure, but he is very apt to think that export trade is something novel, something which has yet to prove its permanence. Especially is he apt to assume that the world will be particularly gratified when he offers it an opportunity to purchase his products.

Probably he would refuse to believe that certain firms in Rio Janeiro have been importers since 1800. Certainly he would deny, with great indignation, the assertion that his latest device, perfected in his own. laboratories, had been sold by an Italian firm for decades. Nor could he grasp at first the idea that an importer in Cape Town, South Africa, sold yearly more goods than he manufactured.

It is not to be wondered at, then, that merchants in other lands, who have existed quite comfortably for generations, should feel rather amused on learning that manufacturers of the United States are planning to discover them! Behind the courteously worded editorials which commented on the presence of American manufacturers on a recent trade tour in South America there was an amusement, not entirely concealed, at the expressions of surprise uttered by the visitors in finding evidences of civilization so far from the United States.

An American manufacturer, a maker of toothbrushes, wrote recently to an importer of drugs in Valparaiso explaining what a toothbrush was, its methods of use, and made clear that it was a staple of the retail drug trade in the United States.

Having simplified matters in this way he asked whether the Valparaiso importer felt that a demand could be created for his unexcelled line. He received in reply a courteous letter stating that it might be difficult to introduce his product in Chile as the market had been held for the last five or six years by French and German brands of toothbrushes, but that recently an American firm by dint of advertising in the local papers and the use of display material had gained a firm hold. However, as the drug importer was under no contract he would consider handling a new firm's product.

The toothbrush manufacturer, a wiser and sadder man for his experience, decided wisely not to compete in such a crowded market, but established a foreign trade elsewhere in a less competitive field which now pays him very well. Another example, in this connection, is that of an Ohio manufacturer, who, possessing a sense of humor even when he himself was the victim, told of an experience which points a valuable moral. "As you know," he told the delegates assembled at an export meeting, "our greatest rival is The X Corporation. Last year I felt the time had come to steal a march on them by seeking markets outside the ones in which we had contested with varying success, so I made my vacation an excuse to travel abroad.

"In Algiers, the first stop, I hastened to secure an interpreter and visited the one merchant I felt might be induced to handle such a product as ours. I was prepared to show him that there was a market for such a product, tell him how to develop it, and share expenses in educating the taste. of consumers for the product.

"To my surprise I found he had handled. the line of The X Corporation for eighteen years and that his annual sales