Yet for all these threats Borchardt’s and similar establishments went serenely on, often feeding, in all probability, the very men who issued these notices. Of ordinary thievery Germany also had her full share. Every better-class hotel within the Empire displayed the following placard in a prominent position in all rooms: The honorable guests are warned, on account of the constantly increasing thefts of clothing and footwear, not to leave these articles outside the room, as was formerly the custom, for cleaning, but to hand them over personally for that purpose directly to the employees charged with that service, since otherwise the hotel declines any responsibility for the loss of such articles. VEREIN OF HOTEL OWNERS. As to foodstuffs, thefts were constant and attended with every species of trickery, some of them typically German in their complications. Thieves and smugglers on the large scale were particularly fond of using the waterways about the capital. One night the boat-watch on the Spree detected a vessel loaded with fifty hundredweight of sugar slipping along in the shadow of the shore. The two brothers on board, a waiter and a druggist, announced that they had bought their cargo from a ship, and had paid five thousand marks for it, but they were unable to explain how the ship had reached Berlin. They planned to dispose of the sugar privately, “because it would cause fewer complications.” A few days later the papers announced: The police of Berlin report that not only native foodstuffs, but our foreign imports, are being stolen. American flour disappears in startling quantities. Many arrests of drivers and their helpers show where much of it goes. It is stolen, and later most of it comes into _Schleichhandel_. The drivers who take the flour from the boats to the bakers are too seldom given a guardsman, and even when they are they find friends to act as such and help them in the stealing. Even in the finest weather the driver puts a tarpaulin over the load, and his accomplice hides himself under it. There he fills an empty bag he has brought along by pawing a few handfuls out of each sack of flour and sewing them up again. Then he slips into some tavern along the way. The number of sacks remains the same, and as our bakers are not familiar with the fullness of American flour sacks, hundreds of hundredweight of flour are lost this way daily. In spite of many arrests the stealing continues.