Turkey and the Balkans. Special agreements, naturally secret, laid down the rules for the branch companies exploiting new branches of production or new countries not yet allotted. The two trusts were to exchange their discoveries and their experiences.
It is easy to understand how difficult competition is becoming against this trust, which is practically world-wide—controlling a capital of several milliard marks, provided with branches, agencies, representatives in every country in the world. But the division of the world between two powerful trusts does not do away with the possibilities of re-division if the balance of forces changes, because of unequal developments, wars, bankruptcies, etc.
The oil industry supplies us with a curious example of such a revision, or rather of a struggle for the revision of agreements.
"The world market for oil," wrote Jeidels in 1905, "is already divided between two great financial groups, the Standard Oil Co. of Rockefeller and the controllers of Russian oil, Rothschild and Nobel. The two groups are in alliance. But for many years, five enemies have been threatening their monopoly.
"(i) The exhaustion of the American wells: (ii) the competition of the firm of Mentacheff of Baku; (iii) the Austrian wells; (iv) the Roumanian wells; (v) the wells of the Dutch colonies (the extremely rich firms, Samuel and Shell, connected with English capital also). The three last groups are connected with the great German banks, principally the Deutsche Bank. These banks have systematically developed on their own the extrac-
