After the Irish interlude I was ready to go on to Germany to carry out the most important objective of my journey abroad. It had become obvious that progress depended on finding a means of contraception, cheap, harmless, easily applied. Way back in 1914 Havelock had seen in some of the last medical journals to come out of Germany an advertisement of a chemical contraceptive. He had mentioned it to me, and ever since I had been eager to track it down. In pre-War Germany every advertised product had been required to live up to the claims made for it; the public must not be misled. Thus I was convinced that if the notice had stated it was to prevent conception, the assertion was true. No news of it had come since the War, and I wished to ascertain whether it was still being manufactured. Perhaps this formula would be the solution to our problem. I had a secondary reason also for going to Germany—to investigate the decline in the birth rate. It was said half the married women had become barren during the blockade for lack of proper food. I was always looking for evidence to support and strengthen our arguments, and, consequently, wanted to discover what had been learned of the relation between vitamins and fertility. Berlin was cold and dark when Rose Witcop and I, about eleven at night, arrived at Neuköln, a special proletarian section of the city. The train was late, an unusual state of things in efficient Germany, but this was the period of her greatest disorganization. The telegram which had been sent to Rose’s sister and brother-in-law, Milly and Rudolph Rocker, had apparently not been delivered; nobody met us. There were no taxis, no carriages, no lamps, no lights in the windows to relieve the pitch blackness. A sleepy, disgruntled porter led us across the street to an insignificant hotel. He knocked at the door; a head popped out of a window above. “Two ladies want to stay overnight.” The proprietress said she could give us nothing to eat, but that we could have a room. We accepted gladly, climbed up a ladder into the same bed, piled high with feathered mattresses above and below us, and settled ourselves to comforting sleep after the long and tiresome journey. In the morning, refreshed, we took a tram to the Rockers’ small apartment. Rudolph was a syndicalist, a friend of Portet, and had been interned in a concentration camp near London during the War. Both Milly and Rudolph had suffered great privations after their return. But, although food was very scarce, they were more than prodigal and kind in sharing with us.