The Poles, or indeed, the British, or the Americans, for we are all tarred by the same brush, might take a lesson from the Czecho-Slovaks, who have at Vienna a bureau which will get your passport visa and your railway ticket for you, and reserve you a room in a hotel in Prague without any fee. The enlightened Government of this new republic understands that that is the best propaganda for their country which can be done. Not that Czecho-Slovakia does not charge for a visa and charge for permission to go out of the country. At Cheb I nearly missed my train whilst an official was weighing up in his mind how much he should charge for allowing me to go through without a visa. Another aspect of the passport trouble in Europe is local nationalism which at Budapest takes the form of insisting on asking you questions in Hungarian and refusing to understand any other tongue. As you have to spend hours with the police in the Magyar capital before you obtain permission to stay there and again before you obtain permission to go away, this is peculiarly distressing. Under such circumstances is it surprising that there is stagnation of peoples in Europe? This stagnation is great, and it is noticeable in almost every great city of the continent. It is a rich time for the hotel-keepers. There is scarcely a capital in Europe where you can reckon on finding a room without trouble. The following experiences are symptomatic enough: at Rome I visited about twenty hotels; shut out for the night, got into a "strange place" about three a.m.; Stuttgart, out all night; Sofia, visited all hotels, all full, slept in guard-room of town-patrol; Sofia, second time, shared a room with an officer; Vienna, toured city in a cab and found nothing; Warsaw, spent nine hours going from hotel to hotel, got a room for a thousand-mark tip. In Constantinople you can find cases of three families in one apartment. Wherever you go you are going to have adventures in finding a room, unless you are an officer or a member of an Allied Commission, or belong to the Red Cross or Starving Children's Fund, or some organization that has facilities for looking out for itself. Poor old Europe! She was more of a unity in the days when we were "an armed camp." We have broken the power of militarism. There has been a revolution in Russia. A British statesman in the House of Commons, in 1917, said it was bliss to be alive, and to be young was very heaven. Some millions of young men died before Armistice Day, 1918. Since then there has been great work clearing away barbed-wire entanglements along the old front. But it seems to be a nightmare task: entanglements multiply upon us faster than we can clear the old ones away. You cannot get across Europe because of the obstructions: you cannot circulate. LETTERS OF TRAVEL II. FROM CONSTANTINOPLE (I)