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My Four Years in Germany by James W. Gerard
page 45 of 340 (13%)
of this monopoly bill the refinery was rendered useless to the
American controlled company which owned it.

In the course of this investigation it came to light that the
Prussian state railways were used as a means of discriminating
against the American oil. American oil came to Germany through
the port of Hamburg, and the Galician and Roumanian oil through
the frontier town of Oderberg. Taking a delivery point equally
distant between Oderberg and Hamburg, the rate charged on oil
from Hamburg to this point was twice as great as that charged
for a similar quantity of oil from Oderberg.

I took up this fight on the line that the company must be compensated
for all of its property, that used in retail as well as in wholesale
business, and, second, that it must be compensated for the good-will
of its business, which it had built up through a number of years
by the expenditure of very large sums of money. Of course where
a company has been in operation for years and is continually
advertising its business, its good-will often is its greatest
asset and has often been built up by the greatest expenditure
of money. For instance, in buying a successful newspaper, the
value does not lie in the real-estate, presses, etc., but in
the good-will of the newspaper, the result of years of work and
expensive advertising.

I made no objection that the German government did not have a
perfect right to create this monopoly and to put the American
controlled company entirely out of the field, but insisted upon
a fair compensation for all their property and good-will. Even a
fair compensation for the property and good-will would have started
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