The French illusions of easy success in the Ruhr that can be reaped at first go have been shattered.

Right from the start, the move of the coal syndicate thwarted the plans of the invaders.

He forced them to negotiate with the individual collieries, and when they finally agreed to continue making reparations if the Reich Coal Commissioner agreed and if advances were granted for 80 percent of the deliveries, it didn't help the French much: the coal commissioner laid his veto.

Everything that has since been undertaken to make the Ruhr economy serve the needs of France has not worked very well.

The defense front is complete and the passive resistance of the railway workers has proven to be particularly effective, so that according to an official notification from the last few days since January 15th, only a maximum of 7000 tons of coal have reached France and Belgium.

For the time being, however, the use of the waterway is made impossible for the French by the strike in the navigation of the Rhine.

The confiscated tow trains lie motionless in the river and no one knows when they will start moving again.

In the meantime, considerable quantities of fuel from the Ruhr could still be brought to unoccupied Germany by rail;

just as one cannot generally speak of any noticeable disturbances in the relations between the Ruhr area and the rest of Germany.

However, one must be clear about the fact that no hasty conclusions should be drawn from the failure of the beginning of the French action.

And one must also be clear about the fact that despite this failure, the German economy as a whole is already feeling the consequences of the occupation of the Ruhr in a deeply drastic way.

Towards the end of the week, the dollar came close to a level of 27,000 marks, with panic-like phenomena going beyond the region of the previous peak rates.

The feeling of business insecurity increases, the awareness of not being able to make reliable arrangements and calculations even from one day to the next, let alone a week in advance, has a highly paralyzing effect.

The flight from the market continues, both on the stock exchanges, which were characterized again this week by an accelerated upward trend in prices, and in various areas of goods.

In the case of rolling iron, a price increase of no less than 42 percent was deemed necessary at Tuesday's meeting.

And the fact that a kilo of cotton in Bremen has risen from 4,750 to 16,260 marks since the beginning of the year is clear evidence of the far-reaching influence that the foreign exchange boom has had on textile production.

A new, sensitive increase in the price of coal has also occurred, as a result of which the difference in price compared to the world market price has narrowed considerably.

Of course, this has recently also gained considerable strength.

English coal quotations are rising rapidly, because over there, apart from considerable American demand caused by fears of strikes, there is not only increased demand from Germany, but also from France, which is lacking in tribute coal.

Apparently there was an actual surplus of coal in France only at times and only in places.

But the French iron industry was all the more dependent on German supplies of coke the more progress had been made in overcoming the post-war crisis.

French policy of violence

Above all, it is the large smelters built by German industry on the Minette as an ore base in the recovered Lorraine, for which, according to their technical nature, Ruhr coke is a vital necessity.

They will be among the first to suffer from the Franco-German economic struggle, since they, like the Luxembourg plants - which, according to our wire reports, have already had to start shutting down blast furnaces - have consistently weak coke reserves and they are from non-German countries (France itself might produce hardly a fifth of his coke requirements) can hardly be supplemented in the right quality.