The mistake we are all making about Germany over here, and a very natural one, is that we can't realise what Germany to-day is like. While we are rapidly getting back to the material and mental conditions of pre-war days, Germany is daily getting farther and farther away from us. It is difficult to express the difference. We all know the curious psychological change that comes over our lives when the doctor tells us we must "give up"; how then in a moment, as we sink into bed, we are changed from responsible personalities, ruling our own and others' lives, to helpless encumbrances ruled by doctors and nurses; and how we only recover our rights through a long convalescence. Germany has given up. It carried on until it collapsed, and now lies semi-comatose; and we, still absorbed in our quarrel, keep pestering it with solicitors and foreclosures instead of patching it up with doctors and food. Descriptions of economic conditions in Germany must therefore be read with the realisation that they are morbid symptoms. Germany may be, no doubt is, working its way through revolution to a saner, sounder condition, but at present is as abnormal and helpless as a snake changing its skin. Meantime, we, using the complete control over Europe that the war has put into our hands, have so interfered with this process as to risk making out of Germany as great a danger to the existing order in Europe as we made out of Russia. Nor is the danger one of to-day only. In ten years' time when the Blockade will be no more than a memory, but when the surviving childhood of Germany, bodily wasted and mentally warped, comes to maturity, Europe will suffer for it. The fathers will have eaten their sour grapes by then, but the children's teeth will still be set on edge. "I do not complain of your blockade, it ended the war," said to me a former Minister and a leader of political thought. "Yes, I've lost four stone since I left the trenches"--he was indeed only the framework of a once big and burly man with the low voice and languid bearing of the underfed. "I'm all right on what I get, it's the children--I could give you statistics, but you wouldn't believe them; I never do. Go and see them yourself."