The establishment of a Räte Republik at Munich got more attention than the Brunswick attempt but was really less interesting because less indigenous. The relative importance of the two was more accurately assessed at Berlin. Berlin has always had a difficulty in taking Munich politics seriously. It has had to recognise its superiority in Art and Literature, but compensates itself in matters political by an amused arrogance not unlike the attitude of London to Dublin. But Munich is not Bavaria. If it were, the Prussians and Wurtembergers would never have ventured to interfere; for the Bavarian is far too fierce a fighter and too jealous of his freedom for all the rest of Germany to coerce him as a nation. However, it soon became evident that Munich Communism represented only a section of the Munich workmen and was resented by Bavaria as a whole, with the exception of the proletariat in the large industrial towns. Even so, the Berlin Government acted cautiously. It was indeed in a difficult position; for the policy that Scheidemann's socialism stood for was one of compromise with political clericalism and provincial particularism. His minister, Preuss, then framing the constitution, had been reluctantly compelled to reject the conception of the more radical reformers who had hoped to found a wholly uniform and wholly united centralised German Socialist State. The Government had been forced to use the political jealousies of the German States and the clerical prejudices of the Centrum as weapons against the social revolution. It would not be too much to say of this period of German politics that only the revolutionary adherents of the Council movement were Germans; while the upper and middle classes had again become Prussians, Saxons or Bavarians. And now it had become necessary to coerce the capital of Bavaria, the centre of Roman Catholicism and the most sensitive and important of the minor kingdoms. And this, too, at the very time when everything was being done to induce German-Austria, Bavaria's neighbour, to accept the same sort of position in the Realm as that held by Bavaria. It was a most awkward predicament and the German Government showed less than its usual tactlessness in dealing with it. It arranged with the Bavarian bourgeois Government, when matters came to a crisis at Munich, that it should take refuge at Bamberg, where it could be protected by the Government's troops centred at Weimar. Then it arranged with Würtemberg and Baden to supply troops to restore this Bamberg _ancien régime_, supporting them with Saxons and, at first, keeping the Prussian corps in the background. Operations were then begun, first against the Franconian towns of North Bavaria, where Bavarian sentiment was weak. Any attempt against Munich was delayed until a raging Press propaganda against the rule of the Munich Bolshevists in the Wittelsbach Palais, and the crushing of the movement everywhere else, had excited the class feeling of the