the Government one of the associated
concerns in certain cartels, but by its railroad policy it gives an
immense impetus to dumping. Railroad rates are cheaper if the
commodity carried is to be exported. To take one out of a thousand
instances "the freight of a double wagon of German coal from Duisbourg
to Hamburg, a distance of 367 kilometers, costs 57 marks, whilst, in
the reverse direction, from the sea-board to the industrial centres in
the interior, the freight charge is 86 marks in the case of German
coal, and as high as 93 in the case of foreign coal."[4] The
Government grants an export bounty upon coal (and other commodities) in
the shape of reduced transportation rates.

We need not study in detail the vastness and complexity of that
integration of German industry, which permits it to act as a unit in
its invasion of near-lying territories. We need not recount the almost
vertiginous growth of the German banking system, with its tendency
towards a narrow concentration, its bold conduct and control of German
industry and its establishment of {121} branch organisations in the
countries to be invaded. Nor need we consider the practice of long
credits by which German manufacturers secure a foothold in new markets
or the system by which German capital, labour and intelligence migrate
to the foreign country, and as branches of a German concern, continue
the process of dumping from within. The significant fact is that the
entire process is organised and thought out. It is a concrete national
policy for securing German economic control in neighbouring industrial
countries.

Nothing could better illustrate the collective nature of this economic
invasion than the history of the German cartels. "It is evidently to
the cartels," writes Fritz-Diepenhorst, "that Germany owes in great
measure the conquest of foreign markets."[5]

The German cartel differs from the trust in that it does not represent
the absorption of weaker rivals by one powerful concern but is a
federation of business units which retain their legal independence but
surrender a part of their industrial and commercial autonomy. In the
beginning the German cartels represented an effort to regulate prices
in the home market, but after the adoption of a protective tariff and
during the period when Germany launched out upon a policy of
large-scale exportation, the cartels grew in numbers and power. Their
policy was to maintain prices at home and sell