1921 REVIEWS OF BOOKS 607 control and to limit, the great combinations and kartels which were growing up within the protected area of imperial Germany. The con- sortium was not like an American trust — a coalition of powerful interests with one general and oppressive policy — but a neutral meeting ground for rival interests over a common but isolated purpose. The great banks which took part in these syndicates were far from making a general combination. They were rather undertaking the formation of a pool, both of their money and of the skilled talents available to each of them, in order to conduct a particular industry together without prejudice to their right to fight one another ejsewhere. This organization of consortiums in pre-war Germany carried the civilization of finance to a finer point than many of the more sensational transatlantic developments. In the hands of the great money giants of Germany they were a means of devising the maxi- mum of co-operation consistent with continued rivalry, and if the late war could have been averted or postponed for fifty years we should have seen an intensely interesting commercial struggle of Central Europe using this delicate rapier of German origin with the New World equipped with the clumsier bludgeons of Wall Street and Bethlehem. The survey of the relative agrarian progress of France and Germany is quite masterly, and here evidently lies the centre of gravity of Dr. Clapham's economic interests. Apart from transport by land and sea, the industrial development of Central Europe is to him an accepted fact rather than a matter of curiosity or wonder. He mentions in its place the transforming influence on the French and German manufacture of steel of the Thomas-Gilchrist invention (1878) for removing during manu- facture the phosphorus of the minette and similar iron ores in Lorraine and Luxemburg, without giving full weight to the ultimate effect of the miracle which it was. The design of the book, which is tessellated with dated chapters on rural, industrial, transport, and financial questions, dealing with each country separately in turn, militates against broad discussions as to policy and progress. Subject to these almost inevitable limitations, the present work covers probably with final completeness a great era of continental expansion with logically firm terminal periods at each end. In fact, 1914 for Central Europe winds up effectively so many prosperous activities that it would have been well worth while to use all pre-war data, of which there has been a large amount available for some years, to sum up conclusions which are not likely in the future to be much altered or reversed. Especially is this the case in the department of high finance, where in the first place the German banking system deserves fuller treatment, and secondly, the financial balancing mechanism of Austria, industrially quite negligible, can be shown to be the clearing- house of European commitments in the Middle East. Particularly deserving of praise are the clear and brief explanations of commercial-legal systems, such as the distinction between the societe anonyme and the societe en commandite of France with the parallel but by no means identical differences existing in Prussia between the Aktien- Gesellschaft and the Gesellschaft mit beschrankter Haftung. With reference to the vital questions of population now perturbing
