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48 tween big and little capital is beginning on a new and infinitely higher plane.

It stands to reason that undertakings, financed by the big banks handling milliards, can hasten on technical progress also infinitely more than those of the preceding period. The banks are founding, for instance, societies of technical research, whose work, be it noted, goes to benefit only "allied" industrial concerns. To this category belong, in Germany, the Electric Railway Research Association, and the Central Bureau of Scientific and Technical Research.

The directors of the big banks themselves cannot fail to see that in this way new conditions of economic life are being created. But they are powerless before these phenomena.

"Anyone," wrote Jeidels, "who has watched, in recent years, the retirement and election of directors and managers of the big banks, cannot fail to have noticed that financial power was passing into the hands of men who consider the active intervention of the banks in the general development of production to be indispensable and of daily increasing importance. It often happens that, between these new men and the old bank directors, disagreements occur on this subject, and sometimes personal quarrels. The question arises, in reality, as to whether it is certain that the banks, as institutions of credit, will not suffer from these interventions in production, as to whether they are not sacrificing tried principles and an assured profit in a field of activity which has nothing in common with their role as intermediaries of credit; and which is leading them into a field where they depend still more than formerly on the state of