Abstract
THERE appears to be solid ground for accepting as an accomplished fact the arrangement which was first rumoured in this country about a year ago. In its annual report, the Compagnie Nationale des Matieres Colorantes, the French equivalent of the British Dyestuffs Corporation, declares that “all who understand the complexity of the manufacture of organic colouring matters will realise why we have been compelled to acquire the patents, the processes, and the technical aid of our principal foreign competitors for exclusive use in France.” This passage has been taken by the French press as the official description of an agreement between the Compagnie Nationale and the Interessen Gemeinschaft, by which detailed technical assistance and full information regarding processes of manufacture shall be supplied to the French factories by their German rivals, such technical assistance taking the form of German chemists to supervise operation of processes in the French dye-works. In return for these advantages, the consumption of French dyes would be limited to France and her colonies, whilst the profits arising therefrom would be shared by the Interessen Gemeinschaft. Although a superficial view of this plan may not be flattering to national amour propre, the arrangement is an eminently practical one. The plain English of it is that a fifty years' start cannot be overtaken in fifty months. The Allies are agreed in declining to trust Germany with a virtual monopoly in dyestuffs manufacture such as she enjoyed before the war, in the first place owing to its military potentialities, and secondly, though not less forcefully, because a flourishing dyestuffs industry offers the most powerful stimulus to encouragement of national talent in the field of organic chemistry—a branch of science which civilised countries cannot afford to neglect. Consequently, it has appeared to the French better to enlist the assistance of Germans in building up a domestic industry than to incur the terrible risks of not having any dyestuffs factories at all. The course which they have chosen may perhaps, in a somewhat modified form, suggest an avenue of escape from British embarrassments in the same industrial domain.
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Current Topics and Events. Nature 110, 226–227 (1922). https://doi.org/10.1038/110226a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/110226a0