erce is international and industry depends for its greatest
successes upon exportation, it was inevitable that the up-to-date
German banks should seek fields of activity abroad and aim at playing
a commanding part in the world's commerce. And they tried and
succeeded. For they alone instinctively divined the new spirit of the
age, which may be termed co-operative and agglutinative. It was in
virtue of this new idea that groups of States were leagued together by
Germany in view of her projected war, and it is the same principle
that impels her, before the conflict has yet been decided, to weld to
herself as many tributary peoples as she may to assist her in the
economic struggle which will be ushered in by peace. Germans first
semiconsciously felt and now deliberately hold that in all departments
of modern life, social, economic and political, our conception of
quantities must undergo a radical change. The scale must be greatly
enlarged. The unit of former times must give place to a group of
units, to syndicates and trusts in commerce and industry, to trade
unions in the labour world, to Customs-federations in international
life. That this shifting of quantities is a correlate of the progress
achieved in technical science and in means of communication, and also
of the vastness of armies and navies and of the aims of the world's
foremost peoples, is since then become a truism, realized not only by
the Germans but by all their allies.

For individual enterprise, as well as for national isolation, there is
no room in the modern world. Isolation spells weakness and
helplessness there. The lesser neutral States must of necessity become
the clients of the Great Powers and pay a high price for the
protection afforded them. Hence the maintenance of small nations on
their present basis, with enormous colonies to exploit but without
efficient means of defending them, forms no part of Germany's future
programme. And the altruistic professions of the Entente which claims
to be fighting for the rights of little States, whose idyllic
existence it would fain perpetuate, is scoffed at by the Teutons as
chimerical or hypocritical. When this war is over, whatever its
upshot, Central Europe with or without the non-German elements will
have become a single unit, against whose combined industrial,
commercial and military strivings no one European Power can
successfully compete. And the difficulties which geographical
situation has raised ag