The Professor’s speech was in its own way first-rate. From premises which personally I detested he developed his theme with extraordinary ability, piling argument upon argument with a cumulative force which swept everything before it. Personally I was very thankful it did not fall to my lot to answer some of the points scored. The Gürzenich Hall was crowded on this occasion, and the fashionable ladies who sat on the platform belonged to a different world from that of the Social Democratic women of an earlier meeting. As regards the masculine supporters of the Volkspartei, I was reminded of Mr. Keynes’s famous description of the present House of Commons, “a lot of hard-faced men who looked as though they had done very well out of the war.” This was particularly the case with the chairman, who had “schwer Industrie” written all over him. The Professor’s personality was more attractive than that of many of his supporters--a grey-haired, grey-bearded man, with a fine head and full strong voice. He spoke without a note of any kind, never once hesitating for a word. He dealt skilfully with occasional interruptions, for the meeting was not composed of unanimous supporters. The speech began characteristically with a eulogy of Bismarck. Bismarck had been reproached for a policy of blood and iron and force. But blood and iron and force, not the pratings of the democratic visionaries of the National Assembly at Frankfurt in 1848, had created and sustained modern Germany. It was the absence of blood and iron which was responsible for their present downfall. Not that the armies in the field were ever defeated; Germany’s downfall sprang from the blockade and the fanatical hatred of England. Yet not from the blockade alone: all might have been saved but for the revolution which had brought about their final undoing. It was the traitors from within, not the enemies from without, who had finally wrecked and destroyed Bismarck’s work. Social Democracy had been the ruin of the country. It had delivered the nation tied and bound into the hands of their enemies. Democracy, what was democracy? The firstfruits of German democracy had been the Treaty of Versailles with its intolerable burdens. Belief in democratic principles; trust in the professions of democratic leaders? The speaker laughed bitterly. Had not President Wilson proclaimed that America was fighting German militarism, not the German people? Had not Lloyd George said the same thing, and that no yard of German soil was desired by the Alliance? The Social Democrats might believe these fables, on the strength of which they sold the pass to the bitter enemies of the Fatherland. The result was the Treaty of Versailles. The Socialists talked of a peace of reconciliation, of international relations, of stretching out hands to the democracies in other countries. What folly to trust to such shifting sands, which had resulted in the German people being swallowed up in misery. The