Indirectly, too, the Germans were subjected to Allied propaganda throughout the war. In one matter the German Government's attitude was more democratic and ethically defensible than the attitude of its enemies. It is discouraging to the abstract moralist to find that this worked out to the detriment of those adopting the more admirable course. Of all belligerent countries, Germany was the only one that permitted the free circulation and sale within its borders of the enemy press. Leading French and English editors were able with much difficulty to secure copies of some German papers, and occasionally the large press associations and some of the leading newspapers in America were permitted to see a few ancient copies, but nowhere could they be had by the private citizen, nor even read with safety in public places by those entitled to have them. There was never a time in Berlin, from the first declaration of war to the armistice, when the leading American, French, English, Italian and Russian papers could not be bought openly at a dozen newsstands or hotels, and the same was true generally throughout Germany. The well-disciplined Germans at first rejected as lies all reports in these papers differing from the official German versions of the same happenings. Many kept this attitude to the last, but even these began after a while, in common with the less sturdy believers, to be morally shaken by the cumulative evidence of the worldwide unpopularity of the Germans and to be dismayed by the tone of the enemy toward everything that they had heretofore held holy. The average German stoically endured for a long time to be called "Hun," but, in homely phrase, it got on his nerves after a while. The wild atrocity stories also played their part. All intelligent readers of history know that tremendous exaggerations of such reports have always accompanied all wars. Before the present war the Associated Press, the world's greatest newsgathering agency, barred war-atrocity stories from its reports because experience had demonstrated that these were often--perhaps generally--untrue and almost always exaggerated. When the enemy press converted the German army's _Kadaververwertungs-Anstalt_ (Carcass Utilization Factory) into a Corpse Utilization Factory (_Leichenverwertungs-Anstalt_) and declared that bodies of fallen German soldiers were being rendered out for the fat, the Germans were at first indignant and angry. This feeling changed to one of consternation and eventual depression when they learned from the enemy newspapers that the story was universally believed. In the course of the long war, the constant repetition of atrocity reports, both true and false, had a cumulative depressive effect which seriously shook the morale of all but the sturdiest of the people and was one of the factors inducing the general feeling of hopelessness that made the final _debacle_ so complete. That everybody knew some of the reports to be