“Militarism,” said a mason who had one crippled leg left, yet who chatted with me in an equally friendly manner both before and after he had learned my nationality, “was our national sport, as football is in England, and whatever you play most is in America. Now we have discovered that it is not a very pleasant sport. We have a nose full of it! Yet we cannot sign this peace. If a man has a thousand marks left and a footpad says to him: ‘I am going to take this away from you. Kindly sign this statement to the effect that you are giving it to me freely. I shall take it, anyway, but we will both be better off if I have your consent,’ what would you expect the man to do? Let the Allies come to Berlin! We cannot go to war again, but—the people must stand behind the government!” Just what he meant by the last assertion was not entirely clear; but at least the first half of the assertion was frequently borne out by little hints that all but escaped the eye. Thus, a large bookstore in Berlin bore the meaningful placard, “War Literature at Half Price!” “From this date” (May 8th), gasped an important Berlin daily, “we drop to a fourth-rate power, along with Spain.” (There were, to be sure, some Spanish suggestions in the uncleanliness, the apathy, the run-down condition of buildings that had suffered five years of disrepair, in the emaciated beggars one occasionally saw in the Germany of 1919.) “With this ‘peace’ we are down and out; we can never get on our feet again. There is not wealth enough in all Germany to pay this indemnity and still save ourselves. We can never recover because we can never buy the raw materials we must have to do so. There is nothing left in the country with which to pay for these raw stuffs except our labor, and we cannot set to work because we have no raw stuffs to work with. We are caught in the whirlpool! It is a fallacy to think that we shall save money on our army. The army we have to-day costs us far more than the one we had when the armistice was signed. If we are required to have an army of volunteers only and pay them as good wages as they now require ... to-day one soldier costs us more than thirty did under the old system! And what soldiers! We shall not be able to compete with the world, first of all because the exchange on the mark will make our raw materials cost us three times what they do our rivals, and then we have these new eight-hour laws and all the rest of the advance socialistic program, which they do not have in other countries. The Allies should have hunted out the guilty individuals, not punish us all as a nation, as an incompetent captain punishes his entire company because he is too lazy or too stupid to catch the actual wrong-doers. In twenty years Germany will have been completely destroyed. All the best men will have emigrated. If we try to spend anything for _Kultur_—that excellent heritage of the old régime which our enemies so falsified and