Much work has been done in clearing the rocks out of the Rhine, so that steamboats can pass up and down. These boats carry American grain and Swedish iron ore from Rotterdam and Antwerp upstream to the many manufacturing towns. In most places the valley is wide enough for towns to be built along the river. There is a rail road along each bank, and it is a very busy region. The Rhine Valley is a kind of New England to Germany, for most of her manufacturing is done here. At the city of Essen are the iron works that make this city the Pittsburgh of Germany.
342. Manufacture and trade.—The Ger mans have cultivated more of their land and used better farming methods than have the English. With all their pains, they have not been able to grow enough food for all the people. Germany is like Bel gium, England, and all the other countries of West Europe, in that some of the people must make their living by manufacturing things to send abroad. Berlin, which is the capital and largest city, is also the chief manufacturing city. Munich, in south Germany, and Leipzig and Frankfort, in central Germany, are beautiful and important manufacturing cities. The chief industry of Leipzig is making books and maps. Another manufactur ing city is Cologne, with many cotton and woolen mills. This city is famous for perfumery and its cathedral. For six hundred years different kings and emperors had men at work building this cathedral.
The chief ports of Germany are Bremen, Hamburg, and Stettin. The largest of these is Hamburg, on the Elbe River near its mouth. The Elbe is a river busy with boats, some of which go upstream to Prague, the city of the Czechs in Bohemia, now a part of the new country of Czecho slovakia. Much of Germany's trade goes
down the Rhine to Rotterdam and Ant werp, just as Canadian trade goes out through New York and Portland in the winter, and American trade from Chicago, and other Great Lake cities, goes out through Montreal in summer.
Germany has three coal fields, enough to smelt her iron and run her factories, and to make her in normal times the second country of Europe in manufacturing. Like England, Germany must import many raw materials, as well as some of her food. She needs to import wool, cotton, leather, rubber, and copper. She pays for these with beet sugar, chemicals, dyes, potash, machinery, leather goods, toys, and other manufactures. The Germans do skilful work and make many microscopes and other instruments.
During the World War, the English Navy shut off Germany's trade. Nearly everyone in Germany lost weight because food was so scarce. There was no butter, because not enough cow feed came from the United States, and as no coconuts came from the Philippines the Germans could not make coconut butter as they had done before the war. Cotton was four dollars a pound, instead of twenty cents, and people wore paper clothes and wooden shoes. Copper roofs' were taken from buildings to make electric wire; there was no rubber for automobile tires. In America fabrics faded because we had' no German dyes. The potato vines in Maine did not grow as well, for want of German potash.
Eastern Germany and Northern Ger many are farming regions. They send food and raw materials to the manufac turing region as our farming districts do.