instructors to foreign armies, schools and schoolmasters
abroad, heads of commercial houses in the different capitals, were all
so many agencies toiling ceaselessly for the same purpose. The effect
of their manoeuvres was to extract from all those countries the
wealth needed for their subjugation. One of the most astounding
instances of the success of these hardy manipulations is afforded by
the Banca Commerciale of Italy, which was a thoroughly German concern,
holding in its hands most of the financial establishments, trades and
industries of Italy. This all-powerful institution possessed in 1914 a
capital of L6,240,000 of which 63 per cent. was subscribed by Italian
shareholders, 20 per cent. by Swiss, 14 per cent. by French, and only
2-1/2 per cent. by Germans and Austrians combined! And the astounding
exertions put forward by the Germans during the first twelvemonth of
the war are largely the product of the economic energies which this
line of action enabled them to store up during the years of peace and
preparation.

The execution of those grandiose schemes was facilitated by the easy
access which Germany had to the principal markets of the globe. One of
the main objects of her diplomacy had been to break down the tariff
barriers which would have reserved to the great trading empires the
main fruits of their own labour and enterprise. By the Treaty of
Frankfort the French had been compelled to confer on Germany the
most-favoured-nation clause, thus entitling her to enjoy all the
tariff reductions which the Republic might accord to those countries
with which it was on the most amicable terms. British free trade
opened wide the portals of the world's greatest empire to a deluge of
Teuton wares and to a kind of competition which contrasted with fair
play in a degree similar to that which now obtains between German
methods of warfare and our own. Russia, at first insensible to suasion
and rebellious to threats, endeavoured to bar the way to the economic
flood on her western frontiers, but during the stress of the Japanese
war she chose the lesser of two evils and yielded. The concessions
then made by my friend, the late Count Witte, to the German
Chancellor, drained the Tsardom of enormous sums of money and rendered
it a tributary to the Teuton. But it did much more. It supplied
Germany with a satisfactory type of commercial treaty which she easily
imposed upon other nations. Germany's road through Italy was traced by