A remark current in England, and sometimes heard even on the Rhine, is to the effect that the Germans do not know they are beaten. Do not know they are beaten? Should we know we were beaten if great districts of our country were occupied by enemy armies; if we had German officers and their wives and families quartered in our houses; if our officials had to take their orders from occupying Prussians; if all our barracks and public buildings and places of amusement were taken over; if the opera and theatre had to conform to German rules; if the tennis courts, the golf club, the polo ground, the racecourse were all monopolised by Germans, and we obtained by an act of grace on the part of our conquerors such privileges as they might think well to bestow on us? If that were our fate, should we labour under much doubt as to the hard facts of the situation? Superficially it is true that life seems to flow in very normal channels in Cologne. But, in fact, the country is beaten flat and cannot at the moment stand alone. However bitter the cup of humiliation, better the presence of a conqueror who has kept order, provided food, administered even-handed justice, and dealt fairly between man and man, than the horrors of hunger and revolution. As for the French, it cannot be expected that France with the memories of 1870 and 1914 burnt deep into her very marrow, France dragged twice through the fire, can approach the tasks of occupation in the same spirit as the more detached Britons who have less to forget. Set an Englishman to administer the country of his worst enemy, and that country at once becomes an administrative problem, to be run on the best possible lines. The Watch on the Rhine yet again has proved the half-unconscious genius of our race for government, which is at one and the same time just, firm, and sensible.