same time abolish all their internal debts. People who had invested all their savings in war loans found that their income had withered away. Industrial companies who had borrowed real capital could pay it back in false notes. And private individuals who were ruined by this means could at least recoup themselves a little at the expense of the foreigner by selling German paper for pounds, dollars, or francs, and gambling on the exchange. It was a great game, which absorbed the interest of large numbers of the German people. Waiters in hotels, clerks in offices, vendors of newspapers, middle-class housewives, did their little bit of daily speculation, and secreted foreign money for rainy days. The great industrialists and professional financiers speculated on a large scale and made enormous profits, while the game lasted. But it was a game bound to fail in the long run. It was bound to fail when no other country would buy German marks at any rate of exchange, and when those who possessed real things, such as potatoes, meat, milk, or manufactured articles, refused to part with them for any number of German notes. That time came during the occupation of the Ruhr, when, to subsidise the passive resistance of the workers, the German Government poured out a vast tide of paper money, and when the German nation was cut off from its chief source of real wealth in that great industrial region. I saw from time to time the progress along the road to ruin. Although it enabled a minority to get rich quick, it caused intense suffering among the mass of the German people. The wages of the workers never kept pace with the fall in the purchasing power of their wages, although they were raised week by week on an ascending scale. What five marks would buy in 1913 a million marks would not buy in 1923. It made trade impossible, because no sooner were prices adjusted to the new note issues than a fresh burst of inflation made them less than the cost price of the goods a week before. It was futile to save when thrift was mocked by this depreciation and disappearance of money values. German people had to spend quickly in food or drink or foolish things, because what they had to-day would be worthless to-morrow. The German housewife despaired. She could not keep pace with these rising prices. Some of them went crazy over millions of marks that had no meaning. Germany, apart from its profiteers, stinted, scraped, and toiled, without decent reward for its labour, and with certain ruin ahead.