A few facts and statistics may recall this to memory.  The population of Germany has since 1870, immigrants excluded, increased from 40,000,000 to 67,000,000, round numbers.  Incomes and wages in particular have approximately doubled during the last generation; savings deposits have increased sixfold.  Although, only a generation ago, commerce and trade employed only about two-fifths of the population, now more than three-fifths are engaged in this field of work, and Germany, as a result of its agricultural economy and increased intense farming, is today the third largest agricultural country of the world.  In the coal and iron industries Germany is second only to America.  In one generation its coal production increased two and a half fold, its raw iron production almost fourfold.  During the same period of time the capital of the German banks increased fourfold and their reserve fund eightfold.  Characteristic of Germany is the fact that hand in hand with this active private initiative is a strong feeling for the great universal interests and for organic co-operation of private and State resources.  This feeling explains the perfect working of our State activities, in particular our railways, 95 per cent. of which are owned by the Government and which yield an essentially higher revenue than those in England or France; it explains further the willing assumption of the great financial burdens which general insurance imposes upon those engaged in private enterprises and which today is proving a blessing to almost the entire laboring force of Germany, to an extent which has not yet been realized by any other country.

What economic value to the world has a nation which for more than forty years has concentrated all its energy in peaceful industry?  Does any one deny that Germany’s great technical and commercial advancement has been a blessing in respect to the development of the world?  Has not the commercial advancement in Germany had the effect of awakening new productive powers in all parts of the world and of adding new territories which engage in the exchange of goods with the civilized nations of the world?  Since the founding of the new German Empire, German foreign trade has increased from 5-1/2 to approximately 20 billion marks.  Germany has become the best customer of a great number of countries.  Not only has the German consumption of provisions and luxuries increased in an unusual degree, also that of meat, tropical fruits, sugar, tobacco and colonial products, but above all else that of raw materials, such as coal, iron, copper and other metals, cotton, petroleum, wood, skins, &c.  Germany furnishes a market for articles of manufacture also, for American machinery, English wool, French luxury articles, &c.  One is absolutely wrong in the belief that the competition of German industry in the world market has been detrimental to other commercial nations.  Legitimate competition increases the business of all concerned.