"Thirty years ago the German people went through corporation experiences much like our own. There, as here, the corporation, as originally designed, was a mere shell. There, as here, under the shelter of that shell, the property of the country was being transferred from the German people at large, even the little they had, to the few. There, thirty years ago, as here now, great corporate scandals were exposed. And there, as here, the human nature that is everywhere behind civilization eventually began to recoil. It began there before it began here, only because conditions reached a climax there earlier than here, and because we as a people were too prosperous and too busy to look even a little way beneath the surface of things. "But when the work of reform did come there, it was a genuine reform. It did not content itself with indiscriminate denunciation, or with mere lawsuits. Nor did it die out, leaving the door still open to every character of corporation the cunning of men might conceive. Before a corporation can be organized in that country, it must prove, as in a court proceeding, its rightful title to a corporate existence. In the same way it must establish the amount and the character of the capitalization it is allowed to put out. When property is turned in, its value must be judicially ascertained. Upon officers and directors is not conferred supreme power; in the German corporation the shareholders’ meeting is the counterpart of our New England town meetings—a genuine assembly intended to do something more than pass resolutions of approval. And every violation of trust, not merely to the public, but to the shareholder as well, is quickly punished with punishment that smarts. There is in the German corporation no room for one to do, with impunity, in his capacity as a corporation officer or promoter, what if done individually would land him in the penitentiary." _Judge Peter S. Grosscup, The Corporation and the People (The Outlook, January 12, 1907)._ COMBINATIONS: The Cartels. Industrial combinations, quite as effective as the Trusts of the United States, have been created in Germany on a wholly different plan. The constituent organizations in them, of capital and industry, are simply knitted or tied together by hard and fast agreements, instead of being fused into huge corporations, as the Trusts are. For the kind of covenant which unites them a military term has been borrowed, and they are called Cartels. The difference between the Cartel and the Trust is described by a Scottish writer, D. H. Macgregor, in his work on Industrial Combinations, as follows: {114}