Page:(Commercial character) The Joseph Fisher lecture in commerce, delivered at the University of Adelaide (IA commercialcharac00jessrich).pdf/30

26 hailed as the chief of the new empire. An empire then of under 41 millions of people—to-day, with nearly 60 millions, adding yearly more than 800,000 to its numbers, and a constantly increasing factor in the world's policy, history, and commerce. A country poorly endowed by Nature, but developed in a business-like manner; a gigantic co-operative industrial concern; a nation that recognizes the value of virility and its dependence on rural industries for the maintenance of the standard of manhood. For strength and endurance count and strength and endurance are developed in the wholesome natural surroundings of a country existence and not in the artificalartificial [sic] life of crowded cities. While we hear so much of physical degeneration in England, where four-fifths of the population live in towns, there are no similar complaints in Germany, and the fact that the rapid increase of that country's population is not accompanied by a falling off of the national physique is attributed by German statesmen to her prosperous agriculture. Nowhere in the world does the value of science and co-operation as means to the creation of agricultural prosperity receive more recognition than in Germany. They have credit societies; societies for cooperative buying and selling; societies for developing irrigation, and many others to assist and encourage small cultivators. The yearly outlay on agricultural education in Germany is about £500,000. The part that chemists play is shown by the growth of the beet sugar industry, the production of which increased from 358,000 tons in 1876 to 1,970,000 tons in 1901, while the history of the chemical industries of Germany reads like a fairy tale. Their imports of manufactured chemical products in 1889 were valued at £5,330,000,