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Plato Profile Directory 20
Page 08
In considering how the German people may keep up their production of food, the authors find that various factors will work against such a result. In the first place, there is a shortage of labor, nearly all the able-bodied young and middle-aged men in the farming districts being in the war. There is also a scarcity of horses, some 500,000 head having already been requisitioned for army use, and the imports of about 140,000 head (chiefly from Russia) have almost wholly ceased. The people must therefore resort more extensively to the use of motor plows, and the State Governments must give financial assistance to insure this wherever necessary; and such plows on hand must be kept more steadily in use through company ownership or rental. It may be remarked here, again, that the Prussian Government is also assisting agricultural organizations to buy motor plows. The supply of fertilizers has also been cut down by the war. Nitrate has just been mentioned. The authors recommend that the Government solve this problem by having many of the existing electrical plants turn partly to recovering nitrogen from the atmosphere.
We saw large families of _ciancias_--beautiful birds with velvety black bodies speckled with white, and fan tails of rich brown colour, feathers of the same colour being also on the outer half of the wings. They possessed slender, most elegant necks, small brown-crested heads, and light yellow chests. Seen at a distance they were not, in shape, unlike pheasants. Twenty or thirty together at a time could be seen playing among the lower branches of the trees along the edge of the river. Then there were small birds of a beautiful metallic blue-black, with very long tails; these latter were innumerable near the water.
It is impossible to conceive how the taking of Liege prevented the English from landing and invading Belgium. That statement is hardly a compliment to the intelligence or the geographical knowledge of the American people. The fact is that Liege was taken a long time before the British troops landed at Calais, and it is still today in the hands of the Germans without in the least interfering with the arrival of British reinforcements in France and in the territory still left in the possession of Belgium. The fact is that Liege was not taken to prevent the British from entering Belgium, but because it was part of the plan of the German General Staff to invade Belgium at once, to march across her territory, to crush the army of France as soon as possible, and then to turn and attack the Russians on the east.
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