ABSTRACT
This chapter shows that Germany's prosperity in recent years was chiefly due to the unexpected discovery of immense coal-mines within it territory; but this was not the sole cause, for there were several others, some of them real and the rest imaginary. Germany's enormous output of coal has produce effects upon it economic and international life that it is undoubtedly one of the greatest factors in Germany recent development. Germany's industrial and commercial system has been assisted by its bankers, who first drained the savings of their own country and then those of France, and subsequently invested the proceeds in various industrial undertakings. The Professor Bellesort attributes Germany's success to it activity in flooding the country with newspapers, reviews, and agents of all sorts, but he also censures the serious mistakes of the fanatic democrats who were then governing France.
