The economic development of Germany is not so much behind that of Great Britain and America as to seem uninviting to the unhasting but unresting American. Some years ago enterprising German importers invested a large amount of capital in tank-steamers, because they thought these solved the problem of the transportation of petroleum. When the Americans refused to supply them any longer with oil for their steamers to carry, they saw that there was more in this problem than they had guessed. Importers who had no steamers found one day that American enterprise had secured practically all of them, and had very decided notions as to whom cargoes should be taken. The heads of two or three of the largest houses boarded a steamer for New York, and came back stockholders in a German-American company which controls most of the German business, as the Anglo-American company controls that of Great Britain. "If the great company with unlimited capital cares to lose money, it can drive us from the field," was the explanation of the head of one of the largest German concerns, as quoted in the Weser _Zeitung_. At the beginning of the next year some Holland firms were invited into the same shelter, and became the "fittest"; and then followed the Belgian and the Scandinavian countries. The Berlin _Vossische Zeitung_ of June 18, 1891, described the line of march: "One group of business men after another is thus made superfluous and pushed aside. First the wells, pumps, and refineries in America, then the American export trade, then the private freight vessels adapted for transportation of petroleum, then the European import trade, then the export trade from European ports, and, finally, this over-powerful company threatens to seize the entire retail trade in petroleum. It is a world monopoly." Hundreds of boatmen engaged in a flourishing river trade in Germany were driven out by tank-boats. If they had changed to tanks, they would have been dependent on their opponent for the oil to fill them. Importers in barrels were cut off by a change which the German government made in the tariff on barrels. The Americans were also helped by an increase in the German tariff on Russian oil of 50 per cent., which made it so much the more difficult for it to compete with American oil. As one way to kill competition where it still existed, all statistics were suddenly withheld by the German-American member of the trust. Neither exports nor imports were known except to the ruling company; all others were kept in the dark. This success in Germany has not been due to favoritism on the highways. The extraordinary discrimination on railroads in America would be impossible in Germany. With hardly an exception the railroads are under the supervision of the State, and are very carefully controlled. Even the private roads would not dare to give any but the open rates. In Austria-Hungary, formerly, secret rates were in full swing, but the system is now said to be destroyed.