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state. To cap it all he emphasized the necessity of the state includingwithin its walls such territories as it might need to render it self;-sufficient. Dr. Butler, summing up Fichte's system as set out in hisThe Closed Commercial State, says that Fichte argued for a plannedeconomy, total national autarchy, quota systems, artificial productionsubstitutes, intensive armaments, living space, forcible unresistedoccupation of territory, complete co-ordination of such territories,transfer of populations, and cultivation of nationalism.This materialistic social organism he supplied with a spiritual stimulant,the spirit of the German Volk, on the principle that the Germansalone preserved in their purity among all the Teuton peoplesthe original German blood and language. Long before Fichte, ofcourse, the Cameralists, as the Prussian mercantilists were called,had insisted on the idea of the enclosed state. But it was from differentmotives and theories than those which moved Fichte, nordid they go so far in an all-out regimentation as he. However, Fichtewas merely taking another step in a direction in which German, aswell as French, thought had been moving. Thus the root conceptsof the modern state that we have seen flower in Germany and Italyand other continental countries were kicking around in the Germanmind for nearly two centuries.For years employers in pre-Hitler Germany fretted in the harrowingillusion that they produced too much, that they competedtoo savagely, that they cut one another's throats, and that overproductionwrecked them all. They devised various ways of combiningto eliminate these evils as well as to present a united frontagainst their rapacious workmen. In Germany, as in Italy, combinationswere regulated and legalized. The cartel, which originated inGermany, was nothing more than a trade agreement between businessrivals to control prices, production, sales policies, quotas, territorialrights. Dr. Gustav Stolper quotes Professor Kleinwächter,an Austrian economist, as saying that the cartel was the "pioneerfoundation of a state-controlled economy." The cartel was an attemptby producers to plan the economy as it affected their product.It could be but a step to substituting the state-organized and supervisedcartel for the private one.The German banks did their bit. The German bank was not pre-109