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Modern Business Geography

quinine, and cigars are manufactured in large quantities because their
raw materials are grown extensively in the Dutch East Indies. Amsterdam
 is especially known as a place where great numbers of diamonds
 are cut.
The advantages of Belgium in manufacturing. Its position, its coal
fields, and its iron mines, with the excellent harbor of Antwerp, make
Belgium a great manufacturing country in proportion to its size.
Liége, because of its coal fields, is a great steel center like Birmingham
and Pittsburgh. Belgium leads the world in glass-making, with the
main center at Charleroi. Ghent, in the center of a flax-growing district,
 is famous for linen, Verviers in a sheep-grazing district is noted
for woolen goods, and Brussels for carpets. In no other country are
intensive manufacturing and intensive agriculture more intimately
combined.
Why Switzerland is a manufacturing country. Although Switzerland
 is an independent country, it is only three fifths the size of West
Virginia, and is far more rugged. Since coal as well as iron must be
imported from Germany or elsewhere, the streams. flowing down steep
mountain slopes have been made to do most of the work that is usually
 done by coal. Thus the industrial workers of Switzerland are as
numerous as the farmers. In spite of the disadvantages of a mountainous
 relief and no seacoast, the earnest, careful, intelligent work of
the Swiss people has made Switzerland thrive in manufacturing. It
specializes chiefly in products for which raw materials can be easily imported
 and which take up little room in proportion to their value, so
that their transportation to distant markets is cheap; for instance.
watches, jewelry, silks, and embroideries. |
Zurich, a large railroad center at the foot of the Lake of Zurich,
makes jewelry and is the trading center for watches, which it collects
from western Switzerland, the watch manufacturing district. St. Gallen
near the Lake of Constance is famous for embroideries on cotton.
The United States often imports more than $10.000.000 worth of
embroideries from Switzerland in a year.
The mountainous parts of Switzerland support so many cattle that
great quantities of milk are available for cheese, butter, condensed
milk, and milk chocolate. The United States imports several million
dollars’ worth of Swiss cheese each year, and Neufchétel cheese is a
well known food product in most parts of America.