experience offers us an instructive illustration.
The headquarters of the German commercial army in that realm were the
offices of the Banca Commerciale in Milan. This institution was
founded under the auspices of the Berlin Foreign Office, with the
co-operation of Herr Schwabach, head of the bank of Bleichroeder.
Employing the absurdly small capital of two hundred thousand pounds,
not all of which was German, it worked its way at the cost of the
Italian people into the vitals of the nation, and finally succeeded in
obtaining the supreme direction of their foreign trade, national
industries and finances, and in usurping a degree of political
influence so durable that even the war is supposed to have only numbed
it for a time.

Between the years 1895 and 1915 the capital of this institution had
augmented to the sum of L6,240,000, of which Germany and Austria
together held but 2-1/2 per cent., while controlling all the
operations of the Bank itself and of the trades and industries linked
with it.

The Germans, as a Frenchman wittily remarked, are born with the mania
of annexation. It runs in their blood. And it is not merely territory,
or political influence, or the world's markets that they seek to
appropriate. Their appetite extends to everything in the present and
future, nay, even in the past which they deem worth having. It is thus
that they claim as their own most of Italy's great men, such as Dante,
Giotto, Leonardo da Vinci, Botticelli, Galileo, and it is now asserted
by a number of Teuton writers that Christ Himself came of a Teutonic
stock.

German organisms, as well as German statesmen, display the same mania
of annexation, and the Banks in especial give it free scope. German
banks differ from French, British and Italian in the nature, extent
and audacity of their operations. It was not always thus. Down to the
war of 1870 their methods were old-fashioned, cautious and slow. From
the year 1872 onward, however, they struck out a new and bold course
of their own from which British and French experts boded speedy
disaster. Private enterprises were turned into joint stock companies,
the capital of prosperous undertakings was increased and gigantic
operations were inaugurated. Between the years 1885 and 1889 the
industrial values issued each year reached an average of 1,770 million
francs; between 1890 and 1895 the average rose to 1,880 millions, and
from 1896 to 1900 it was computed at 2,384 millions.[2]