Daylight scarcely served to bring us to Magdeburg. We hurried past Wolfenbüttel, famous for its library and its relics of Luther; and as we glided into the station of the celebrated fortress-city, we could form little idea either of the fertility of the river banks on which it stands, or of the strength of the fortifications from which Magdeburg derives its place in history. Within the walls it resembles Hanover and Brunswick in the mixture of old and new, plain and picturesque, common and quaint, which its streets present. Here are the simple remarks which a day’s stroll through the city suggested recently to Madame Pfeiffer:—
“Magdeburg is a mixed pattern of houses of ancient, medieval, and modern dates. Particularly remarkable in this respect is the principal street, the “Broadway,” which runs through the whole of the town. Here we can see houses dating their origin from the most ancient times; houses that have stood proof against sieges and sackings; houses of all colours and forms; some sporting peaked gables, on which stone figures may still be seen; others covered from roof to basement with arabesques; and in one instance I could even detect the remains of frescoes. In the very midst of these relics of antiquity would appear a house built in the newest style. I do not remember ever having seen a street which produced so remarkable an impression on me. The finest building is unquestionably the venerable cathedral. In Italy I had already seen numbers of the most beautiful churches, yet I remained standing in mute admiration before this masterpiece of Gothic architecture.”[[30]]
This cathedral is worthy of all the admiration which Madame Pfeiffer expresses. The glitter of the Roman Catholic worship is now foreign to it, but the dignity of the pile remains. The city is Protestant, and fondly it ought to cherish its purer worship, for in the same quaint streets Luther sang as a poor scholar for charity, and at the doors of the rich men of the time, to enable him to prosecute his learning.
But without the walls Magdeburg is equally attractive to one who has just escaped from the sands and peaty flats of the Luneburg heath. Situated where the Elbe widens, with its citadel planted on one of the river islands, the city walls are skirted on either hand by fertile plains, rich in corn and other produce. Still flat, however, unenclosed, without hedgerows, clumps of trees, straying cattle, and the numerous rural peculiarities which give life and variety and interest to an English landscape, almost a single glance suffices to take in all they exhibit of the picturesque, and to satisfy the merely superficial tourist. But there is attraction in these flat plains, nevertheless, and an economical interest, which may induce even the railway traveller to stay and inspect them. Fitted by its free and open nature for the growth of root crops, these alluvial shores of the Elbe have become the centre of a husbandry of which little is known as yet in England. In Murray’s Handbook, the traveller is informed that “much chicory is cultivated in this district;” and this is one of the roots for the growth of which the soil is specially adapted. The culture was in former years more extensive than at present; but there are still five or six thousand acres devoted to the raising of this crop. The yield in dried chicory from this extent of land is from twenty to thirty millions of pounds. It is largely exported to England and America through Hamburg—that which we receive from this port being chiefly from the Magdeburg chicory manufactories.
But the growth of the sugar beet, and the extraction of beet-sugar, are superseding the chicory trade, and are gradually assuming the first place both in the rural and manufacturing industry of Magdeburg and its neighbourhood. The largest producer of beet-sugar in the world is France; but the German Customs’ Union is the second in this respect, and Magdeburg is the principal centre of the German production. Like eager horses, skilfully jockeyed, and running neck and neck, the Cis and Trans Rhenave sugar-extractors have for years back been struggling hard to get ahead of each other in the perfection of their methods, and the profit of their fields and manufactories; and many curious facts and difficulties have come out or been surmounted during this chemico-agricultural and chemico-manufacturing contest. For it is an interesting circumstance, that while chemistry was, on the one hand, aiding the farmer to grow large and profitable crops of roots, it was, at the same time, on the other, assisting the manufacturer more perfectly and profitably to extract the sugar from the roots when raised. But it is curious, at the same time, that in the advances thus made on either hand, the increased profits of the one party were found singularly to clash and interfere with the profits and processes of the other. Increase the size of your turnip by chemical applications, said agricultural chemistry, and you have a heavier crop to sell to the sugar-manufacturer. And the grower took the advice, and rejoiced in his augmenting profits. The practices of North British turnip-growers were introduced by British settlers, and their imitators, on the plains of Magdeburg; and root crops more like those which cover our British turnip-fields were seen, for the first time, on the banks of the Elbe.
Then up rose economical chemistry, on the other hand, and said, No, no, Mr Farmer, we don’t want, and we won’t buy, your larger roots. We cannot afford to purchase your gigantic beets, the offspring of your high manuring. The chemistry which enlarged the roots did not increase the quantity of sugar in proportion. “A ton of good big beets gives me less sugar,” says the extractor, “than a ton of your small ones; and therefore, if you will grow the big ones, I must have them at a less price in proportion. And, besides, your high manuring puts salt into the turnip, which prevents me from fully extracting all the sugar they do contain.” Thus chemistry, on the one side, was at issue with chemistry on the other, and the progress of a profitable scientific agriculture appeared to be arrested by that of a scientific and economical extraction of the sugar.
But difficulties to men of science are only things to be overcome. On the one hand, the farmer kept down the size of his roots. He sought to make up in number for the deficiency in size, while he applied his manure at such times in his rotation, and of such a quality, as to give him a slower-grown, more solid root, rather than a porous, light, rapidly forced, and less saccharine crop. And on the other hand, the chemical sugar-maker set his skill to work to devise means of more fully extracting the sugar still, and of overcoming the difficulties which the presence of salt in the juice had hitherto thrown in his way. And thus, by improving in different directions, the two interests are gradually ceasing to clash, and at the present moment a mutually advancing prosperity binds together more and more the chemical manufacturer and the chemical farmer on the alluvials of the Elbe.
We have already alluded to the importance of the beet-sugar industry to the continent of Europe. But the reader will see, from what we have just said, that it has a relative as well as a positive importance, very similar to that which the arts of brewing and distilling have in this country. It cannot flourish anywhere without causing the agriculture of the place to flourish along with it. A necessary condition to the establishment of a flourishing sugar-manufactory, is the existence of well-cultivated farms, and skilful farmers in the neighbourhood. The erection of such works, therefore, is a positive and direct means of promoting agriculture, by affording a tempting and constant market for an important part of the yearly produce. This is no doubt one of the reasons why the German governments have given so many encouragements of late years to the extension of this branch of manufacture, and why the astute government of Russia should have incited the nobles of the empire to exert themselves in its behalf in the various provinces of the Czar’s dominion. Russia, in consequence, possesses a greater number of beet-sugar works than any other country. Even as far as Odessa the culture has penetrated, and is now carried on.
Mr Oliphant, who recently visited the shores of the Black Sea, informs us that—
“Lately, in the neighbourhood of Odessa, the cultivation of beetroot, and extraction of sugar from it, was carried on to a considerable extent by the large landed proprietors of the adjoining provinces. Notwithstanding most praiseworthy exertions, these aristocratic beetroot growers were totally unable to make their speculation remunerative, and many of them must have been ruined had not the legislature stepped in and prohibited the sale of any other sugar. The consequence is, that the inhabitants are obliged to buy sugar at a hundred per cent higher than the price at which our colonial sugar could be imported into the country. It is some satisfaction to know that, notwithstanding this iniquitous regulation, combined with the system of forced labour, the beetroot growers are unable to cultivate with profit.”[[31]]