Government nor
the dominant class would consent.

"This remarkable advance in Germany, also, was accompanied by the
establishment of a system of banking, specially directed to the
expansion of national industry and commerce, a system which was clever
enough to use French accumulations, borrowed at a low rate of
interest, through the German Jews who so largely controlled French
financial institutions, in order still further to extend their own
trade. It was an admirably organized attempt to conquer the
world-market for commodities, in which the Government, the banks, the
manufacturers and the shipowners all worked for the common cause.
Meanwhile, both French and English financiers carefully played the
game of their business opponents, and the great English banks devoted
their attention chiefly to fostering speculation on the Stock
Exchange--a policy of which the Germans took advantage, just before
the outbreak of war, to an extent not by any means as yet fully
understood.

"Thus, at the beginning of the present year, in spite of the
withdrawal, since the Agadir affair, of very large amounts of French
capital from the German market, Germany had attained to such a
position that only the United States stood on a higher plane in regard
to its future in the world of competitive commerce. And this great and
increasing economic strength was, for war purposes, at the disposal of
the Prussian militarists, if they succeeded in getting the upper hand
in politics and foreign affairs."

FOOTNOTES:

[25] Works on the Thirty Years' War are numerous. Many scholarly and
exhaustive treatises on various aspects of the subject are, as might be
expected, to be found in German. For general popular reading Schiller's
excellent piece of literary hack work (translated in Bonn's Library) may
still be consulted, but perhaps the best short general history of the
war with its entanglement of events is that by the late Professor S.R.
Gardiner, of Oxford, which forms one of the volumes of Messrs. Longman,
Green & Co.'s series entitled "Epochs of Modern History."

CHAPTER X

MODERN GERMAN CULTURE

It is important to distinguish between the meaning of the German term
"Kultur" and that commonly expressed in English by the word "culture."
The word "Kultur" in modern German is simply equivalent to our word
"civilization," whereas the word "culture" in English has a special
meaning, to wit, that of intellectual attainments. In this chapte