at a lower rate abroad.
But this policy, owing to a near-sighted individualism, injured the
German export industry itself. The coal cartel determined its policy
irrespective of the interests of the coke cartel, which in turn fixed
its prices irrespective of the interests of the iron industry. As a
result vast {122} quantities of raw materials and semi-manufactured
products were shipped abroad at prices which permitted the foreign
manufacturer of finished wares to undersell the German manufacturer.
It was a boomerang dumping, which worked to the advantage of the dumped
and to the disadvantage of the dumper.

Within the last fifteen years, however, and especially since the report
in 1903 of the German Parliamentary Commission on Cartels, this early
anarchy has been gradually abolished, and arrangements have been made
by which a cartel grants lower prices not only for its own exports but
also for such part of its home-sold product as is to be used in the
manufacture of more highly finished wares, which are in turn to be
exported. The coal used in iron manufactures that are to be shipped to
foreign countries is sold cheaper than the coal used in iron
manufactures which are not to be exported. A community of interest
among the cartels is thus created. The result is an amazing industrial
solidarity. "The individual exporter disappeared in the cartel, and
the cartel itself is absorbed in this sort of cartel of cartels, which
ends by becoming the German industry.... For an economic guerilla
warfare there is substituted a mass action, a veritable strategy."[6]
The excesses of dumping are cured and dumping becomes a national
economic policy.

But how can this organised conquest of adjacent industrial countries be
averted without some alternative method for the economic expansion of a
highly organised industry? The same forces that push Germany and
England into an imperialistic policy and into a conquest of the markets
of agricultural countries also force them into a competition to secure
the markets of industrial countries. The two processes are not quite
alike, since the trade between, {123} let us say, Brazil and Germany is
a complementary and mutually beneficial commerce, while the dumping of
German rails and girders on Italy is a competition or war between two
industrial nations. The impulse and motive in both cases is, however,
the same. It is the desire to increase buying power. Germany can
secure more of the