Nearly a century ago, this declaration appeared, in defense of the German universal banks, in the well-known treatise of Jakob Riesser – himself a director of a Berlin great bank. By the last quarter of the nineteenth century, after industrialization had progressed through textiles, steam power, and railroads, populist voices – stemming mostly from agrarian or socialist quarters – criticized the banks for wielding excessive power over industry. Riesser argued, on the contrary, that the banks played a facilitating or sustaining role in the economy. In constructing his argument, he laid out the details of the German universal banking system, as he saw them and as he garnered from the writers and scholars of the time.