In all the Empire's greater cities the revolutionaries, putting into disastrous effect their muddled theories of the "brotherhood of man," had opened the jails and prisons and flooded the country with criminals. What this meant is dimly indicated by the occurrences in Berlin ten days later, when Spartacans raided Police Headquarters and liberated the prisoners confined there. Among the forty-nine persons thus set free were twenty-eight thieves and burglars and five blackmailers and deserters; most of the others were old offenders with long criminal records. This was but the grist from one jail in a sporadic raid and the first ten days of November had resulted in wholesale prison-releases of the same kind. The situation thus created would have been threatening enough in any event, but the new masters of the German cities, many of whom had good personal reasons for hating all guardians of law and order, disarmed the police and further crippled their efficiency by placing them under the control of "class-conscious" soldiers who, at a time when every able-bodied fighting man was needed on the west front, filled the streets of the greater cities and especially of Berlin. The result was what might have been expected. Many of the new guardians of law and order were themselves members of the criminal classes, and those who were not had neither any acquaintance with criminals and their ways nor with methods of preventing or detecting crime. The police, deprived of their weapons and--more fatal still--of their authority, were helpless. And this occurred in the face of a steadily increasing epidemic of criminality, and especially juvenile criminality, which had been observed in all belligerent countries as one of the concomitants of war and attained greater proportions in Germany than anywhere else. Nor was this the only encouragement of crime officially offered. In ante-bellum days, when German cities were orderly and efficient police and _gendarmerie_ carefully watched the comings and goings of every inhabitant or visitor in the land, every person coming into Germany or changing his residence was compelled to register at the police-station in his district. But now, when the retention and enforcement of this requirement would have been of inestimable value to the government, it was generally abolished. The writer, reaching Berlin a week after the revolution, went directly to the nearest police-station to report his arrival. "You are no longer required to report to the police," said the _Beamter_ in charge. And thus the bars were thrown down for criminals and--what was worse--for the propagandists and agents of the Russian Soviet Republic. _Die neue Freiheit_ (the new freedom) was interpreted in a manner justifying Goethe's famous dictum of a hundred years earlier that "equality and freedom can be enjoyed only in the delirium of insanity" (_Gleichheit und Freiheit koennen nur im Taumel des Wahnsinns genossen werden_).