As a matter of fact I had already “consorted” with no small number of German residents, chiefly of the small-merchant class. Those I had found somewhat mixed in their minds. A few still prophesied a “peasants’ war” in the territory allotted to Poland; a number of them shivered with apprehension of a “general Bolshevist uprising.” But fully as many pooh-poohed both those cheerful bogies. One thing only was certain—that without exception they were doing business as usual and would continue to do so as long as the Poles permitted it. The feeling for the “Fatherland” did not seem strong enough among the overwhelming majority of them to stand the strain of personal sacrifice. When I returned at eleven the _Volksrat_ had been convoked in unofficial special session. A half-dozen of the men who had formerly held high places in the Municipal Council rose ostentatiously to their feet as I was ushered into the chief sanctum, and did not sit down again until I had been comfortably seated. The chief spokesman had long been something corresponding to chairman of the Board of Aldermen. His close-cropped head glistened in the sunshine that entered through the window at his elbow, and his little ferret-like eyes alternately sought to bore their way into my mental processes and to light up with a winsome naïveté which he did not really possess. Most of the words I set down here are his, though some of them were now and then thrown in by his subservient but approving companions. “With us Germans,” he began, “it has become a case of ‘_Vogel friss oder starb_’—eat crow or die. We are forced, for the time at least, to accept what the Poles see fit to allow us. The German residents of Posen are not exactly oppressed, but our lives are hemmed in by a thousand petty annoyances, some of them highly discouraging. Take, for instance, this matter of the street names. Granted that the Poles had the right to put them up in their own language. It was certainly a sign of fanaticism to tear down the German names. More than a fourth of the residents of Posen cannot read the new street placards. There is not a Polish map of the city in existence. When the province of Posen came back to us the Polish street names were allowed to remain until 1879—for more than a hundred years. It is a sign of childishness, of retarded mentality, to daub with red paint all the German signs they cannot remove! It isn’t much more than that to have forbidden the use of our tongue in governmental affairs. We Germans used both languages officially clear up to 1876. We even had the old Prussian laws translated into Polish. It is only during the last ten years that nothing but German was permitted in the public schools; and there have always been plenty of Polish private schools. I am still technically a member of the Municipal Council, but I cannot understand a word of the proceedings, because they are in Polish. Our lawyers cannot practise unless they use that language, although the