W

HAT is the most effective way of fighting Germany? The visitor to Washington in these days can obtain several answers to this question. The newspapers have exploited several instrumentalities-advertising each one in succession as the agency which is destined to bring an early peace. The Shipping Board informs the public that "Ships-ships-and more ships" is the one indispensable formula for the destruction of the Kaiserthum. The Aircraft Production Board pins its faith as exclusively upon airplanes. The Navy Department has stopped construction work on battle cruisers and battleships, and is concentrating upon the destroyer; this agile little vessel, we are told, is the one answer to the submarine, and, therefore, the one avenue to a victorious peace. The Army man repudiates the suggestion that anything except close man-to-man fighting will bring the Central Empires to their knees.

At the headquarters of the Food Administration they have recently brought forth another enemy of the Kaiser, more formidable than Tanks or Airplanes or Destroyers or Army Cantonments. More formidable, indeed, but less heroic. The great American hog is the factor that will most probably bring to nothing the Pan-Germanic dream of a resurrected Roman Empire. The most pressing problem before the American farmer to-day, says Mr. Hoover, is the production of hogs. "If we discontinue the export of this animal," he adds, "we shall move the German line from France to the Atlantic seaboard."

An ingenious philosophic historian, seeking cause and effect in the present cataclysm, has traced its origin entirely to pigs. The line of reasoning seems fairly direct. Serbia is chiefly a pig-raising country; it has for years depended for its economic prosperity almost entirely upon the export of this product. Unfortunately this little people could send its pigs to the outside world only by way of Austria,

which had the unpleasant habit of closing the ports whenever she desired to discipline her cantankerous neighbor. Serbia's desire for expansion, particularly her ambition for a port on the Adriatic, has been mainly for the purpose of obtaining a trade route by which her pigs could get access to the markets of the world. Hence all the troublous times in the Balkans, and hence ultimately this calamity. Whether pigs started the war, however, it seems not improbable that they will play an important part in ending it. At least that is a fact which Mr. Hoover and his associates are attempting to impress upon the American consumer and the American farmer. The emphatic message is going out to the farmer"Raise hogs!" An equally emphatic injunction is being laid upon the American housewife -economize on fat. The posters which are now liberally distributed all over the United States inform us that we should save "Wheat, meat, fat, and sugar." All these are important but the greatest of them is fat.

In order to understand the part which fat is playing in the present military situation, it is necessary to understand somewhat the chemistry of the human body. In the last few years matters of diet have largely interested the scientists as well as the reader of the popular magazines. These studies have familiarized us with the fact that the body is composed of three great chemical constituents-proteins, fats, and carbohydrates. The proteins are the molecules that manufacture the organism itself; our muscular tissue, our veins and arteries, our hearts, intestines, practically everything that composes the physical man, are made of this fundamental substance. The proteins are thus the bricks and mortar that constitute the human tenement. Man, however, cannot live on protein alone; this material gives us an inert body, but, had we nothing more, this body would not be especially valuable, for it would have little power to move itself from place to place and practically no ability to do any useful work. It would be a

steam engine without steam, a furnace without coal. The carbohydrates-sugar and starch -and the fats are the materials that furnish the motive power which gives this useless body life and action. These substances are burned in the organism and the heat thus liberated supplies the energy that not only runs the body itself but enables it to work. Thus any nation, in war or peace, must have a sufficient supply of these three fundamental foods. Beef, perhaps the commonest form of proteinwheat, corn, and the other grains, as well as potatoes and other vegetables are the everyday providers of carbohydrates; while butter, the vegetable oils, milk, cream, beans, lard, pork, and the like are mainly used for obtaining fat. In exactly what proportion we should eat these several foods is a point upon which the scientists have been quarreling for years. Certain nations, like the Chinese, eat enormous quantities of carbohydrates-mainly in the form of rice and comparatively little protein; others, like the Esquimaux, live chiefly upon a diet rich in fats-in this case blubber; others, such as Europeans and Americans, have accustomed themselves to a dietary in which fat forms a conspicuous part. The German cooks nearly everything with lard, and for the masses of the people pork for many years has served as the staple of life.

AMERICAN PEANUTS AND GERMAN PIGS

The rich classes in Germany eat beef as their basic food; but there are comparatively few rich people, and thus the great mass of the population have had to depend upon the succulent pig. Any student of statistics has long been familiar with the fact that Germany has for years produced a large number of swine. In a sense, however, these statistics, in picturing Germany as a huge pig-growing nation, have been fallacious. If we get down to fundamentals, Germany produced only a comparatively small number of pigs and cattle. She raised the physical animals, it is true, but the substances of which they were composed came, to a larger extent, from other countries, chiefly the United States. The pig is merely a machine for converting certain vegetable oils into fat; as an agency for this chemical transformation this unlovely animal has no parallel. But the flabby jowls, the amplitudinous hams and shoulders which the expert admired so greatly in the German schwein really had their origin in the United States.

They started life as peanuts and cottonseed and corn on our Southern and Western farms. In recent years the most popular fodder, both for pigs and cattle, have been the several compressed substances known as 'concentrates." After the oil is expressed from cottonseed, the pulpy mass that remainsstill containing a valuable quantity of oleaginous material-is formed into cakes, making a highly palatable and fatty food for swine and cattle. A meal made of crushed peanuts is likewise enormously popular with the same animals; a particularly joyful sight in the South is a herd of pigs turned loose into a peanut field. The great development of the peanut industry on Southern farms-that eminent statesman and tax-specialist, the Hon. Claude Kitchin, is one of the greatest peanut kings of this region-is owing largely to the usefulness of this vegetable as pig and cattle fodder. While we have been developing our peanut and cottonseed industry, we have also been driving a spike in German military efficiency. German agriculture in the last thirty years has been largely a matter of military preparedness. The General Staff has worked hand in hand with the Junkers to keep foreign agricultural products out of the Fatherland. The basic idea was to make Germany self-supporting in case of war. In particular, German statesmanship was directed against the American hog and pork products. While Germany was excluding the American porker in his proper person, however, the Empire was admitting him in another form. Our peanut meal, cottonseed and linseed cake, and potato meal were imported on an enormous scale. These materials, transformed into pigs and cows, ultimately produced the ample physical proportions of the German Michel. The perceptive German scientist had long ago pointed out this fact as the weak spot in German agriculture, and consequently in German militarism, but all his efforts to remedy the situation had had no result. This indifference was really a serious reflection upon German efficiency, for Germany had plenty of land which was adapted for growing these concentrates.