tours in Palestine, and to "the immediate result of this journey," the construction of the Bagdad railway, that fatal "great German enterprise," which "is more responsible for 'encircling' than all our political blunders taken together." (It will be remembered that the encircling policy of Edward VII. tended to isolate Germany by surrounding her with hostile imperialist alliances). The contributor already referred to, M. Eschwege, published in 1912 an article called Plutocracy and Bureaucracy, which contains some instructive examples. A German official named Felker, who was a member of the Commission on Trusts, and conspicuous by his activities, quickly got a well-paid position on the staff of the biggest trust of all, the Steel Syndicate.
Similar cases, not in the least the result of chance, forced this bourgeois author to admit that "the economic liberty guaranteed by the German Constitution is at present, in many departments of economic life, only a meaningless phrase" and that under the rule of the plutocrats, "the widest political liberty does not alter the fact that we are not free."58
As for Russia, we will be content with one example. All the papers spoke, some years ago, of the entry of the director of the Banking Department, Davydov, into the employment of a great bank who paid him so highly that in a few years his total salary must have been more than a million roubles. The Banking Department is charged with the duty of "co-ordinating the activities of all the establishments giving credits in the State," and gives subsidies to banks in the capital of 800 to 1,000 million roubles.59
