Sugar-Cane

a tall, heavy plant of the grass family, noted for a large yield of sweet sap. It is closely akin to the sorghum, but is larger, better flavored, and is sweeter. It requires a warm climate, a moist soil, and a long growing season. Sugar-cane produces abortive seed heads. It is planted by laying canes along in a furrow. New plants spring from buds at the joints. The plant grows from five to fifteen feet high. The canes are from one to two inches in diameter.

Louisiana leads the Union in the production of cane sugar. A low, level belt of rich soil follows the Mississippi River to New Orleans and extends westward a few miles inland, clear into Texas. It is one of the most fertile regions in the world, and is perfectly adapted to cane raising. The fields are plowed in long, narrow bands, and are provided with a system of parallel and cross ditches; for, in addition to being but a few feet above Gulf level, the cane belt has an annual rainfall of fifty inches, or over four feet of water. As stated, cane is laid in furrows about five or seven feet apart during the winter, or from September to March. The field is cultivated one way with mules and shovel plows. The cane is ready to cut in November. Complete plantations have spur tracks, or tramways laid out into the fields. Cane is stripped, topped, loaded on flat cars, and conveyed direct to the sugar house.

A complete sugar-house equipment with a Corliss engine costs $250,000. The entire plant, sidings and all, is under cover. The cane is dragged by power up an endless apron into a hopper and is fed to gigantic steel rollers that crush 1,000 tons a day. The cane is crushed and recrushed. The sap runs away in troughs to huge vats. The crushed cane or bagasse goes off on an endless carrier in another direction to feed the flames in a hissing white furnace. The sap is purified, evaporated, and refined, finally coming to barrel as white, granulated, or brown, that is to say, as firsts, seconds, thirds, open kettle sugar, and New Orleans molasses.

All products are handled through wholesale houses. A grocery in Franklin, forty yards from the largest sugar plantation and sugar house in Louisiana, cannot get a barrel of local sugar except through a New Orleans wholesaler. The last American census gave 351 factories. Planters sell their cane to larger owners. About eighteen per cent of the total weight of the mature cane is sugar, but part of the juice is left in the bagasse. As a matter of fact, a ton of cane yields 160 pounds of sugar.

Sugar-cane is a native of Southern Asia, possibly of China as well, where it has been cultivated for 3,000 years. Columbus carried it from the Canary Islands to the Carribean Sea. It was introduced in Louisiana by the Jesuit fathers in 1751. The chief foreign or outlying sugar-cane-producing regions of the world are India, China, Cuba, Java, Mauritius, Peru, and Argentina.

See Sorghum; Hawaii; Louisiana

Sulla (138-78 B. C.), a noted Roman known in history as the Dictator. He was well born and had the advantage of an education. His youth was passed in notorious and shameless debauchery. He was a brilliant soldier and officer, serving with distinction in the Jugurthine War under Marius and later in the Cimbrian and Social wars. He incurred the enmity of his old commander Marius by receiving an appointment to the command of the army designed to subdue Mithridates, a position coveted by Marius himself. Sulla was obliged to flee from the city secretly, yet, reentering at the head of an army, he drove Marius into Africa.

In 87-84 B. C. he carried on a vigorous war in Greece and Asia. He forced Mithridates to sue for peace, and loaded himself and soldiers with rich spoils. In the meantime Marius had died, having first secured the passage of a measure proscribing Sulla and confiscating his property. Sulla, being free to attend to Rome and his enemies at home, landed at Brundisium with an army of 40,000 men. He defeated the adherents of Marius in four battles and, flushed with victory, took possession of Rome. Six thousand Marian prisoners of war were executed in the public circus. Lists of citizens to be slain were posted in public. Victims were hunted like wild animals. The city ran with blood. Many a supporter of his old friend Marius fled into the provinces only to be followed by an emissary bent on murder. In 81 B. C. Sulla counseled an obsequious Senate to make him dictator, a position he appears to have resigned voluntarily a short time before his death. He took care of his old soldiers by giving them lands in various parts of Italy. Sulla's conduct was no doubt the joint product of a natural disposition and the cruel, corrupt spirit of the times in which he lived; but his enormities were such as to cause his name to live forever.