It was a warm evening, and the great hall of the Gürzenich, the old banqueting-room of mediaeval Cologne, was only half full. The audience--about equal numbers of men and women--were well-dressed, entirely decorous folk. The long hair and red ties of orthodox Socialism were absent. German meetings are detestably unpunctual. Advertised generally for 8 P.M., they seldom start till twenty minutes later, and the audience meekly accepts conditions of delay which would rouse an English meeting to fury. The principal speaker of the evening was Fräulein S., of Hamburg, a member of the National Assembly. At 8.20 a procession of earnest-looking women slowly mounted the platform. They wore coloured blouses and dark skirts, and their hair was scratched back tightly off their heads--a true hall-mark of feminine virtue in all climes and among all nations. The chairwoman had fortified herself with a large dinner-bell, and rang a peal, apparently to give herself courage, on opening the proceedings. Restoration of order was unnecessary, for the audience sat in stolid silence on the appearance of the speakers, not even extending to them the perfunctory greeting with which an English audience heartens the platform victims before the sacrifice. No encouraging cheers greeted the advent of a pleasant-looking lady who, armed with a folio of MS., made her way to the reading-desk. Fräulein S. spoke, or rather read, for an hour in a clear, cultivated voice. She outlined the constructive policy of the Social Democrats or Majority Socialists, whose platform approximates to what was known as the Liberal-Labour position in English politics. The party is, however, definitely pledged to nationalisation. The speaker led off with the blockade, which is the King Charles’s Head of every political meeting in Germany. Their enemies, she declared, accused the Social Democrats of bringing Germany into her present desperate straits. Not the revolution, however, but the dire consequences of the blockade were responsible for the troubles of the people. Fräulein S.’s chief interests lay obviously in the field of social reform. She outlined a programme which was strangely familiar in many respects. The unmarried mother and the question of religious education in the schools were in the forefront of the battle. The temper of the meeting, it must be owned, was very tepid, but the depressing silence was broken by a few cheers when these subjects were handled. Another old friend appeared with Fräulein S.’s emphatic assertion that no school teacher should be compelled to resign her appointment on marriage. The lady then dealt at some length with finance and the incidence of taxation. A thoughtful, well-expressed speech--withal a trifle dull.