The _Shell_ could scarcely cope with the task of supplying the British Army. But for the help of the _Royal Dutch_ and the _Standard Oil_, "we should have had to cease hostilities to our disadvantage, in the fifth month of the War."[43] After the Cartel of Ten was obliged to confess its impotence in the midst of a crisis which nearly lost the War, its work was limited to putting into good condition the products bought and stored by the State. Its rôle had become singularly unimportant when the Minister of Commerce transformed it into a consortium. The petroleum consortium was born of the necessities of war, like the consortium of cotton and the consortium of oils. In the midst of these great conflicts, powerful economic associations, controlled by the State, can alone save national manufactures and commerce from perishing for want of materials, and can supply the enormous requirements created by the war. When, through fear of other countries, the French Republic took the form of an absolute monarchy, it inaugurated, under the guise of a protective State socialism, a system of intense exploitation of the nation's economic forces and of its products, which were monopolized, seized, or requisitioned. The Government was, in fact, reduced to a society of consortiums, which, each in its own domain, were the sole buyers and distributors of wealth. There was the _Comité des forges_ to deal with metallurgy; there was another for oil. Because of the difficulties of importation, manual labour, raw materials, freightage, and exchange, the simple liberty of the merchant or the isolated manufacturer is no more than an empty word, perhaps even a dangerous illusion. The system of the consortium was urged by the United State Government. Having created centralized organizations for its exports, it desired that these organizations should come into contact, not with scattered merchants, but with the Allied States themselves. The important inter-allied agreements made in Paris and London, in November 1916 and December 1917, on the initiative of M. Clémentel, confirmed the principle of these industrial and commercial syndicates, financially responsible to the State, which becomes a direct buyer. Besides, the French State was not anxious to see the incredible profits which were going to result from the doubling of oil imports--imports of a value of a thousand million francs yearly--fall into the hands of the Cartel of Ten. It therefore imposed upon it, on March 29, 1918, after three months of inquiries and hesitations, a curious contract.