t to the cause.
The _fiches_, as the certificates are called, are couched in
conventional terms and bear no signature. In the case of
persons whom the bank desires to ruin, these documents are
sentences of commercial death.

But besides this executive of destruction there was another and still
more important board, whose work was wholly constructive. It was
commonly known as the "service of information." Its functions were to
collect at first hand all useful data about Italian commerce and
industry, to draw up tabulated reports for the use of Germans at home
engaged in trade and industry. These lists indicated current prices,
the qualities of the goods in demand, the favourite ways of packing
and consigning these, samples of manufactures, statistics of
production, the addresses of all firms dealing with Italians--in a
word, every kind of data calculated to enable German trade and
industry to compete successfully with their rivals. The manner in
which this body of information was drawn up, sifted, classified, and
made accessible, deserves unstinted admiration. To say that commercial
espionage was practised largely in the working of this comprehensive
system is but another way of stating that it was German.

The Banca Commerciale, which was the head and centre of this
organization, was, as a matter of course, called Italian. For every
similar institution, commercial, journalistic or other, which has for
its object the realization of the Teutonic plan of internationalization,
invariably wears the mask of the nationality of the country in which
it operates. And in this case the mask was supplied by Italians, on
whom the bank bestowed all the highest _honorary_ posts, while
reserving the influential ones for Germans and Austrians. Thus the
moving spirits of this vast organization were Herrn Joel, Weil and
Toeplitz, men of uncommon business capacity, who devoted all their
time and energies to the attainment of the end in view. And their
zeal, industry and ingenuity were rewarded by substantial results,
which have left an abiding mark on Italian politics and entered for a
great deal into the attitude of the nation towards the two groups of
belligerents. In a relatively short span of time foreign competition
in Italian markets was checked, German products ousted those of their
rivals, and at last the very sources of Italy's economic life were in
the hands of the Teuton, whose continued goodwill became almost a