28 BRITONS V. GERMANS IN CHINA
kept their books with meticulous care, others were a disgrace, but with the excep- tion of a few small and almost retail es- tablishments, all pointed to the fact that business had been secured regardless of any other object than to sell cheaper than the other man.
Some offices were economi-
cally run, but the majority were conducted in anextravagant manner. This, however, would have had but small bearing on the profits, if they had not been so imbued with the mania for selling, selling, selling, regardless of loss.
The foregoing poor results were ob tained in spite of (or perhaps as a fitting reward for) the dishonest method which it was discovered was used by nearly all the German firms to obtain capital for trading purposes. From the German standpoint it would appear trading is only another name for overtrading, and it is not surprising
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that through their anxiety and fetish to keep everyone out of business, they had resort to their favourite trick of treating written promises as "scraps of paper." The bulk of their business was actually done on capital borrowed on false pretences from London finance houses. It is true that many of these London bankers upon whom they chose to inflict their breaches of trust. were of German extraction, and possibly to a considerable extent under German in- fluence; but bankers have their own interests to consider the world over, irrespective of nationality, and it seems impossible that they could have had any inkling of the way they were being exploited, and the risks they were running. The dishonest method of acquiring capital was as follows and is described as simply as possible.
Let us take for example the case of a Manchester merchant dealing with a Ger-
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