More especially did they realise the enormous place which banks and institutions of a similar nature were bound to have in modern industrial organisation. And whatever views we may hold as to the rights of property, we are bound to recognise how these deposit banks have already become great reservoirs of capital from which credit is distributed in a thousand ways throughout the whole realm of industry. Some writers, all of them by no means of the socialist way of thinking, would reproach the banks, especially in France, with their lack of courage in regulating and stimulating industry, which, as the Saint-Simonians foresaw, is a legitimate part of their duty.[498] The important part which they saw international financiers playing in the domestic affairs of almost every European nation during the Restoration period, coupled with their personal knowledge of bankers, helped the Saint-Simonians in anticipating the all-important _rôle_ which credit was to play in modern industry. Equally remarkable was the foresight they displayed in demanding a more rigorous control of production, and in emphasising the need for some better method of adapting that production to meet the exigencies of demand than is possible under a competitive system. The State obviously has neither the ability nor the inclination to discharge such functions, but so great are the inconveniences of competition that manufacturers are forced to enter into agreements with one another in order to exercise some such control. This is nothing less than a partial application of the doctrine of Saint-Simon. In addition to the considerable personal influence which they were able to exercise over economic development, we have to recognise that in their writings we have the beginnings both of the critical and of the constructive contribution made by socialists to nineteenth-century economics. Their doctrine is, as it were, little more than an index to later socialist literature.