Back of the German miners and traders and railway builders are the great German banks, which, when all is said and done, are the real exploiters of Germany's interests oversea. So completely are the foreign interests of the nation in their hands that there is no reason to doubt the story that the Emperor, when warned by the great bankers whom he had summoned to a conference over the ominous Moroccan situation that war with France would endanger, if not destroy, Germany's oversea ambitions, turned to his ministers with the remark, “Then, gentlemen, we must find a peaceable solution.” We of the West have not yet awakened to a realisation of the magnitude of Germany's foreign interests or to the almost sovereign powers which the banks behind them exercise in certain quarters of the world—particularly in that Latin America which we have complacently regarded as securely within our own commercial sphere. In Asia Minor the Deutsche Bank not only controls the great Anatolian Railway system but it is building the Bagdad Railway—probably the most important of Germany's foreign undertakings—these two German-owned systems providing a route by which German goods can be carried over German rails to India more cheaply than England can transport her own goods to her possessions in her own bottoms. In one hand the Disconto Bank Gesellschaft holds the railway and mining concessions of the Chinese province of Shantung, while with the other it reaches out across the world to grasp the railway system of Venezuela, it being to enforce certain claims of this bank that the German gun-boat _Panther_—the same that occupied Agadir—bombarded La Guayra in 1902 and as a consequence brought the relations of the United States and Germany uncomfortably close to the breaking-point. Seven German banks—the German-Asiatic Bank, the German-Brazilian Bank, the German-Orient Bank, the German-Palestine Bank, the Bank of Chile and Germany, the Bank of Central America, and the German Overseas Bank—devote themselves exclusively to the exploitation of foreign concessions, either owning or dominating enterprises of every conceivable character in the regions denoted by their titles or lending financial assistance to German subjects engaged in such undertakings. A few years ago, when Germany was starting in the race for naval supremacy, the Imperial Admiralty issued a review of Germany's oversea interests for the purpose of impressing the Reichstag with the necessity for dreadnoughts and then more dreadnoughts. Here are some of the figures, taken from the list at random, and the more impressive because they are from official sources and because, since they were published, they have materially increased: