German electrical trust, referred to below. In 1912, it was calculated that this company held shares in from 175 to 200 others, controlling them, of course, and giving a total capital of 1,500 million marks.48
All regulating laws, such as the necessity to publish balance sheets and to draw them up on certain models, the supervision of financial houses; these things about which professors and officials with the best intentions—that is, with the best intention of defending capitalism—discourse to the public, can have no kind of importance here. For private property is sacred, and no one can be hindered in buying, selling, exchanging or mortgaging shares, etc.
An estimate may be formed of the extent of this system of participation in the big Russian banks from the figures given by E. Agahd, who was for fifteen years an official of the Russo-Chinese bank and published in May, 1914, a book called, loosely enough, Great Banks and the World Market.49
The author divides the great Russian banks into two classes: (a) those which operate as subsidiaries; (b) independent banks (the independence of the latter being arbitrarily taken to mean independence of foreign banks). The author subdivides the first group into three sub-groups: German, British and French subsidiaries, having in view those houses in whose business the banks of the three great European countries participate. The author divides the capital of firms belonging to this group into (1) Productive capital engaged in industrial or commercial undertakings; (2) Speculative capital reserved for Stock Exchange transactions and financial operations. Holding to the
