dred financiers who to-day govern Germany economically, will gradually be reduced to fifty, twenty-five, or less still. It cannot be expected that this move to concentration will be confined to banking. The close relations between certain banks involves the bringing together of the manufacturing combines whom they support. . . . One fine morning we shall wake up in surprise to see nothing but trusts before our eyes, and to find ourselves faced with the necessity of substituting State monopolies for private monopolies. However, we shall have nothing to reproach ourselves for, excepting for having allowed things to follow their own course, gently hastened by the use of stocks and shares."27
This is a very good example of the impotence of bourgeois opinion, from which bourgeois science is only distinguished by less sincerity and a tendency to obscure things.
To be "surprised" at the results of concentration; to "reproach" the German capitalist government or society ("ourselves"); to fear that the use of stocks and shares might "hasten" concentration; to fear the American trusts (as a German specialist, S. Tschierschky, does), and to "prefer" the German cartels to them on the grounds that the trusts are capable of "hastening technical progress to an excessive degree"—what other name can be applied to all this except impotence?28
Meanwhile, the facts remain facts. There are no trusts in Germany; there are only cartels—but Germany is governed by 300 magnates, and the number of these is constantly diminishing. The banks, in any case, in all capitalist countries, and whatever may be the varieties of legislation regulating them, are strengthening and hastening the
