"This powerful concentric movement of industries has taken a strong hold upon the thoughts of people and Government alike. The public is deeply concerned at the growth of private monopolies, and many persons who had hitherto favored letting economic development take its own course now call for drastic measures of prevention and repression. Country squires of the most conservative type advocate the nationalization of all coal deposits; and it is already asserted that a majority of the Prussian Diet would vote for such a measure. This convergence of the views of extreme Conservatism and radical Socialism is certainly one of the oddest results of the movement under discussion,—and one of the most instructive. The natural trend of events is unquestionably in the direction of some form of socialism. The Social Democracy clearly perceives this, and so hails every industrial consolidation as but another milestone on the way to state collectivism." _W. C. Dreher, Recent Events in Germany (Atlantic Monthly, March, 1905)._ COMBINATIONS: International: Of Transatlantic Shipping Companies. Agreements with the British Government. Announcement was made in October, 1902, of the incorporation on the 1st of that month, under a New Jersey charter, of the International Mercantile Marine Company, with a capital of $120,000,000, and an issue of 4½ per cent. bonds to the amount of $75,000,000. The combination included the American, the Red Star, the White, the Atlantic Transport, the Leyland and the Dominion lines. Both American and British capitalists were represented in the board of directors, the former in the majority. Several partners in the firm of J. Pierpont Morgan & Company were included, and Mr. Morgan was understood to be the architect of the combination; but he did not appear personally in its organization. The first step towards such a shipping combination had been taken sixteen years before, when the British Inman steamship line was taken over by the International Navigation Company, made up of Americans, at the head of whom was Mr. Clement A. Griscom, of Philadelphia. "The British Government promptly withdrew the liberal subsidy which it had been paying to the Inman liners; but Mr. Griscom and his comrades brought the _New York_ and _Paris_ beneath the Stars and Stripes, built the St. Louis and _St. Paul_, secured a subsidy from the United States and gave the first-class British lines a most formidable competitor. Indeed, commercial rivalry in high grade ships on the North Atlantic soon became too keen to permit of reasonable dividends and Mr. Griscom found British ship-owners in a responsive mood when he broached anew the great idea of an international combination.