This official commission speaking turn records Lederer’s request for clarification of Dr. Silverberg’s account of concentration in coal mining. Its argument takes the form of a question: how would consolidation into several large concerns overcome the organizational difficulties attributed to a single comprehensive trust?
Lederer first establishes the geographical scope of Silverberg’s claim that, without particular obstacles, development would have produced about six large concerns. Silverberg’s interjections specify the Ruhr and allow that the number might instead be seven or eight. The exact number matters less to Lederer than the proposed industrial arrangement. He then tests the consistency of distinguishing several concerns from one overall trust:
In welcher Weise würden Sie nun bei diesen Konzernen die Schwierigkeiten, welche Sie vorhin für einen Gesamttrust annahmen, nämlich die Schwierigkeiten der Verknüpfung mit den Hütten- und Eisenwerken, lösen?
English translation: How would you now, in the case of these concerns, resolve the difficulties that you previously assumed for an overall trust, namely the difficulties of linking them with the smelting and iron works?
The conceptual move is to distinguish concentration within coal mining from integration with metallurgical production. Dividing ownership among several large groups does not, by itself, explain how their relations with smelting and iron works would function. Lederer makes that unresolved issue concrete by asking which enterprises would absorb which assets:
Würde es vorzustellen sein, daß die großen gemischten Werke diese Kohlengruben an sich attrahieren, oder in welcher Weise wäre dann die Konstruktion zu denken?
English translation: Could one envisage the large integrated works drawing these coal mines into themselves, or how else should the arrangement then be conceived?
The contribution’s relevance lies in this demand for an organizational account rather than a numerical forecast of concentration. It supplies neither Silverberg’s substantive answer nor Lederer’s preferred settlement; its distinctive intervention is to expose the integration problem that the proposed plurality of concerns still leaves open.
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