"Very well, then, you support my reasoning, and you say that the bond values are maintained artificially alone. How can you say, then, that they may be augmented at will by new issues?"
"I say that, because the buyers are an amorphous mass that crystallizes just as little as a combination of producers is met by a combination of consumers. The masses may be frightened for a while, but in the long run they are irresistibly led to spoliation by the great combinations of capital, and the act of creating current opinion is well known in high financial circles."
"You forget the independent press."
The banker made a very peculiar grimace. Then he said: "That is not nice of you. I am speaking to you as if to a member of the profession—like one augur to another. And when we come to speak of your own profession, you turn out to be a simpleton. How can you speak of an independent press, when under the pressure of the high finance of the Russian and German governments?"
"You will pardon me. I honor your uprightness equally with that of the greatest of my profession. But I must stop at that. Newspapers are still guided by morality. And I am willing to bet anything that among our German papers only a vanishing fraction is susceptible to the arguments of Witte and his associates."
"And what becomes, then, of the millions that our ministry of finance is spending to secure good will in the papers towards our finances?"
"I do not want to suspect any one; but the German papers that I know well are incorruptible."
"Well, let us say that the radical or socialistic press is inaccessible, and cannot be bought either by our ministry of finance or by the German bank combinations. There still remains the influence of the German government, that has its reasons for not allowing the weakening of Russia to too great an extent. For this is still the keystone of the conservative system in Europe, and this influence suffices to keep the unfriendly critics of our financial conditions from all the leading German papers. That is not even an official favor. I consider it quite logical for serious papers not to play mean tricks on their foreign office. But as to the other, the extremely radical writings, they have no significance for the financial world; and you will not doubt, at this day, that Germany is doing her best to keep us in good humor."
"Yes, I see with shame and resentment how the German government has been transformed into something akin to a Russian police ally, with the blessing of Count Bülow."