this cannot be converted into cheap electricity at State expense; all the same it must be handed over to 'a private monopoly controlled by the State,' because private industry has already concluded a series of contracts and secured heavy compensation. . . . So it was with the monopoly of potash, so it is with the oil monopoly, so it will be with the monopoly of electricity. It is time for our State-Socialists, who let themselves be blinded by beautiful principles, to understand once and for all that in Germany the monopolies have never had as their aim or effect the advantage of the consumer or even a share of the profits of industry for the State, but have only served to revive, at the expense of the State, private industry which was on the verge of bankruptcy."
Such are the valuable admissions which the German bourgeois economists are forced to make. We see plainly here how private monopolies and State monopolies are bound up together in the age of finance-capital, both being only differing stages in the imperialist struggle between the largest monopolists for the division of the world.
In the mercantile marine, the tremendous development of concentration has ended also in the division of the world. In Germany, two powerful companies have raised themselves to the first rank, the Hamburg-Amerika and the Nord-Deutscher-Lloyd, both with a capital of 200 million marks in stocks and shares, and possessing 185-189 million marks' worth of shipping tonnage. On the other side, in America, on January 1st, 1903, the Morgan trust—the International Company of Maritime Trade—was formed which united nine British and American navigation companies, and which
