Not that Berlin has broken down in any way. It is the same great hive of industrialism. Everyone is employed. More are employed than before. The leisured class is smaller. All the workshops and factories and offices are full. The shops display as many wares. There is evidence of an enormous overflowing productivity. Cheap lines of goods are run out in hawkers' barrows and auctioned on the pavement, measures of cloth for suits, overcoats, soaps, stationery. Trams, 'buses, railways all are used to the last seat and standing-room. And the working people are thinking about their work and their wages and their homes and their beer--and not about the peace treaty and the latest move of France for their destruction. It is sad to see the broken-down old fellows as porters at the railway-stations, panting with heavy trunks, and the same type among gangs of navvies repairing the roads. They ought to be seated at home with pipe and newspaper and easy slippers instead of earning a living still as a drudge. It is a convention to give your bag to a porter at a station, and in Germany you usually give it to a man much older and weaker than yourself, and you are moved to help him to carry it as in his infirmity he struggles along. What a contrast to the stalwart porters of Prague, or Rome, or Brussels. Poor wights! It is they who are paying for the war. Sightless soldiers led by little children come selling you sticking-plaster in the restaurants. Germany is too poor to care for them. It is they who are paying for the war. The drab, many-headed middle class of Berlin with its poverty-stricken breakfast-table, the old black bread of the war and no sugar and paper table-cloths; the women going about the streets with great bundles on their backs; the people making their 1918 clothes still do--they are paying somewhat. You see Hugo Stinnes and his like with a suite of rooms at the "Adlon," or driving luxuriously along the Unter den Linden, the Kaiser way, without the dignity of a Kaiser. They are not paying very much. Most active-thinking people are to-day working for the reconciliation of Europe, and the greatest obstacle to reconstruction lies in a resentful, half-crushed, and continually harassed Germany. Berlin has been made a heart of ill-will, and the heart must somehow be changed. Some will no doubt say it is Paris that has the ill-will towards the peace of Europe--change the heart of Paris and all will go well. But even if France embarked on a policy of friendly tolerance towards Germany it would be long ere Berlin was converted. However that may be, it was naturally with a hope of sharing in the long task of reconciliation that the present writer visited Germany. Many Englishmen have a soft spot in their hearts for the Germans; perhaps it is the instinct of race, or it may be merely good sportsmanship: I am not one of those Who will not shake Fritz hand Now that the war is done. as a soldier-poet has expressed it.