In Chapter II of this book it has been explained how the dyeing industry of the whole world was changed by the discovery and commercial preparation of the first aniline dyestuff, mauveine, in 1856, by the English chemist Perkin. Under his leadership the supremacy in this new industry was kept in England; but when he retired from the field the manufacture of dyestuffs was soon concentrated in Germany. For over forty years before the beginning of the Great War, the Germans had almost complete and absolute control over the whole color business, including many allied industries like the manufacture of organic chemicals, drugs, perfumes, flavoring matters and the like, derived originally from coal tar. In Germany were four or five great and splendidly equipped factories, and some ten or fifteen others of less importance, all thoroughly organized and working together most harmoniously under what would, in the United States, be called a most perfect specimen of a Trust. Opposed to them all over the world there could be found but a handful of comparatively small and unimportant firms in Switzerland, France, England and the United States—producing altogether not over about ten per cent of the output of their German competitors. Compared to other industries the output of dyestuffs needed for the whole world’s consumption is not a very large one—some sixty or seventy million dollars a year all told; and it was freely boasted, and more or less accepted by the rest of the world, that “the dyestuff industry is a one-nation industry, and that nation is Germany!” =Rise of the German Dyestuff Monopoly.=—The story of how this came about was once told the writer by Sir William Perkin, when he was in New York, in 1896, at the time of the “Coal Tar Color Jubilee,” the fiftieth anniversary of his famous discovery. He said that in the early days, when he was running his plant near Manchester, the most dangerous competitors he had to face were the French. He described them as excellent chemists and keen, but fair-fighting business men; and the Germans, in those days, were far inferior to them in every way—in ability, in originality, and, above all, in honesty.