Children have always meant much to the Germans, and in those days of growing disgust with the past and of growing despair as to the future they meant so much that nothing else seemed ever to matter to the women at any rate. I heard a woman prominent in politics say she was glad to hear that the Allies were going to occupy Essen, Düsseldorf and the industrial district, because then they must see what was happening to the children there, owing to the blockade and to the barring off of the milk supply from across the Rhine. I soon saw enough to be satisfied that though food could still be got at a price in the eating houses of Berlin, private households of the whole working class and lower middle class were so straitened for food that some members of each family were being starved; either because they were too sickly to digest such food as could be got or because they were giving it to the children. The same conclusion was come to by the numerous Commissions sent out to report, even though these were generally composed of young officers; instead, as they should have been, of experienced medical men and food experts. These Commissions were given every facility for estimating how far under-nourishment had deteriorated the working power of the poor and was deterring them from work. Also how far the low development and high death-rate of the children was due to this. And their reports show what a terrible responsibility we assumed when we maintained the blockade after the armistice, as a means of political pressure and a method of penal procedure. These reports are easily accessible to English readers, so I will only give here, for what they are worth, the conclusions come to by one representative neutral and one native authority. A Copenhagen association for studying the economic results of the war, estimated that the German population, which at the beginning of the war was about 67.8 millions, would, but for the war, have risen by now to about 70 millions and had sunk to about 65 millions. Of this decrease 3.5 millions was due to diminished birth-rate and 2.1 millions to increased mortality. In the last years of war the birth-rate fell to one-half. Of the increased deaths, 700,000 were ascribable to insufficient nourishment, mainly in the last two years of war. In 1918 the death-rate for both sexes over 60 increased by half and doubled for children between 4 and 14. My observations also suggest that it was children of this age that suffered most from the blockade. The loss of about two millions of men in the prime of life, the decreased vitality of the women and children who suffered especially from the blockade, and the general economic conditions of the country, make any early re-establishment of previous productivity impossible. Again, in the _Deutsche Medizinische Wochenschrift_ one, Geheimrat Rübner, compares losses by war and blockade as follows:--