Old men and war-cripples as porters at the station, dirty streets encumbered by hawkers and their wares, strings of pitiful beggars shaking their hands and exposing mortified limbs—can this be Berlin, Berlin the prim, the orderly, the clean? Something has happened here in seven years, some sort of psychological change has been wrought in the mind of a people. Here, as in some Slav countries, there are laws and they are not kept, regulations and they are not observed. Unshaven men and ill-washed women on the streets, and dowdy, hatless girls with dirty hair crowding into cheap cinema theatres! A city that had no slums and no poor in 1914 now becoming a slum en bloc. And the litter on the roadways! You will not find its like in Warsaw. You must seek comparisons in the Bowery of New York or that part of the City of Westminster called Soho. The horse has come back to Berlin to make up for loss of motors, and needs more scavengers to follow him than the modern municipality can afford.

Not that Berlin has broken down in any way. It is the same great hive of industrialism. Everyone is employed. More are employed than before. The leisured class is smaller. All the workshops and factories and offices are full. The shops display as many wares. There is evidence of an enormous overflowing productivity. Cheap lines of goods are run out in hawkers' barrows and auctioned on the pavement, measures of cloth for suits, overcoats, soaps, stationery. Trams, 'buses, railways all are used to the last seat and standing-room. And the working people are thinking about their work and their wages and their homes and their beer—and not about the peace treaty and the latest move of France for their destruction.

It is sad to see the broken-down old fellows as porters at the railway-stations, panting with heavy trunks, and the same type among gangs of navvies repairing the roads. They ought to be seated at home with pipe and newspaper and easy slippers instead of earning a living still as a drudge. It is a convention to give your bag to a porter at a station, and in Germany you usually give it to a man much older and weaker than yourself, and you are moved to help him to carry it as in his infirmity he struggles along. What a contrast to the stalwart porters of Prague, or Rome, or Brussels. Poor wights! It is they who are paying for the war. Sightless soldiers led by little children come selling you sticking-plaster in the restaurants. Germany is too poor to care for them. It is they who are paying for the war. The drab, many-headed middle class of Berlin with its poverty-stricken breakfast-table, the old black bread of the war and no sugar and paper table-cloths; the women going about the streets with great bundles on their backs; the people making their 1918 clothes still do—they are paying somewhat. You see Hugo Stinnes and his like with a suite of rooms at the "Adlon," or driving luxuriously along the Unter den Linden, the Kaiser way, without the dignity of a Kaiser. They are not paying very much.

Most active-thinking people are to-day working for the reconciliation of Europe, and the greatest obstacle to reconstruction lies in a resentful, half-crushed, and continually harassed Germany. Berlin has been made a heart of ill-will, and the heart must somehow be changed. Some will no doubt say it is Paris that has the ill-will towards the peace of Europe—change the heart of Paris and all will go well. But even if France embarked on a policy of friendly tolerance towards Germany it would be long ere Berlin was converted. However that may be, it was naturally with a hope of sharing in the long task of reconciliation that the present writer visited Germany. Many Englishmen have a soft spot in their hearts for the Germans; perhaps it is the instinct of race, or it may be merely good sportsmanship:

I am not one of those
Who will not shake Fritz hand
Now that the war is done.

as a soldier-poet has expressed it.

I was told of a young German who set in front of himself the goal of a reconciled Europe. I would work to the same end in London. It only remained to find a similar devoted type in Paris to work from the French end, and we should have a triumvirate that might achieve the impossible. God can use the foolish of this world to confound the wise—the wise being mostly engaged in stirring up new quarrels. Somehow the desirable Frenchman ready to devote his life to that cause was not forthcoming—and that deficiency I suppose was symptomatic of the disease. For my part, I have made my journey of Europe and taken a good look at that which it is proposed to reconcile. At the end I came to Berlin and Paris, the two main centres of the modern world. In Germany naturally I sought the German who was ready to work unstintedly from the German side for the same cause.

I had never met him, but I pictured an idealist, one who had suffered in the war and felt the folly of it all, who deplored the egoism of nations, and had found a way to devote himself to humanity as a whole. I was mistaken! It is our weakness as a nation to think of a foreigner merely as a sort of Englishman who does not speak our tongue or know our conventions. So was it with me, and I soon found myself up against a real live German, a man of a type you would not find either in London or Paris. It was a disillusion. Here was a man unsuited by his national nature for the part for which he was cast. One could not see in him the potentiality of a helper of Europe. The German as a German is in a troubled mental state. Small wonder! Because of the psychology of my friend in —— I quickly began to surmise that the German at present has not got the spirit to save Europe. Perhaps he has not the ability to save himself.

My German helper was a tall, handsome young man with an open countenance and an engaging smile. He had done war-service for the Fatherland on several fronts in several capacities. Among other things he had been Commandant of a prisoners-of-war camp where British officers were really kindly treated and a most pleasant relationship existed between the command on the one hand and the prisoners on the other. He showed me photographs of himself with British officers, and he mentioned it as a matter of pride that these fellows asked for "Deutschland uber alles" to be sung one night, and they stood reverently to attention through the performance. This was followed by "God save the King," which the Germans honoured in the same way. It was explained to me that "Deutschland uber alles" does not mean "Germany over everybody else," but "Germany first of all!" as one says "My country, right or wrong." The prisoners must, if they were genuine Englishmen, have felt rather low-spirited. W——, however, saw in it evidence of what a happy family party Germans and English could be, if they liked. He was undoubtedly pro-English, had been to Oxford, had perhaps a quiver of an Oxford accent in his English; he had studied England, as Germans do, and made considerable research among us. His wife was openly and unreservedly friendly. He, however, was cautious, and corrected his wife when she said too much or went too far. It had been a great blow to them when England came in to the war, a personal and a national blow. They could not have believed it possible. And they imagined throughout the war that their friends in England did not share in the wild anti-German feeling and must at least passively be pro-German. Of course, it was not so. They deplored the extraordinary lapse in tone in the "Morning Post" and "The Times." "'The Times' actually refers to us as 'Huns.' At least, it can be said of our Press, high or low, it never nicknamed its enemies. French were always French, English—English, Russians—Russians. It was beneath the dignity of the war to call our enemies names." He was amazed at the ignorance concerning the Germans, and the credulity of such as those who believed they boiled their dead to make lard. I told him of the German Ambassador's reception in London, Dr. Sthamer, how he was received by certain people in Society and many were well disposed towards him, though at first he had difficulty in getting things done for him by the British working class.

"And you, you'll go anywhere in Germany, and every one will be only too ready to help you, to do your washing and clean our boots and the rest," said W—— reproachfully. "We are so good-natured."

He had forgotten that the Germans failed to ingratiate themselves with the London working class by dropping so many bombs in the East-end and terrorizing whole districts. He forgot the children who had been killed. He did not know the air-raids had had much effect.

"They had an unfortunate psychological effect."

"Well, you don't forgive us."

"On the contrary, the generality of Englishmen forgive Germany now she is down."

My friend perceptibly winced at the word "down." I had used the wrong word. But it is true enough.

"We know the Quakers are our friends, and the pacifists," said he. "We are thankful for their friendship, but we need to win over the other people. Make the business people feel that the Versailles Peace is bad business, and the Imperialists that it is bad for Empire."

"They know that already, that it is not good for business and not very good for the Empire. What we have to get over is something psychological—the belief in 'the dirty Hun,' the belief in German trickery and spite."

He had never heard of that sentence which is a motto in Carmelite Street, "They'll cheat you yet, those Junkers," or "Once a German always a German."

There is a genuine belief among the English masses that the Germans are cheating us, that they are pretending to demobilize and keeping a large army in secret readiness, pretending to be unable to pay "reparations," not taxing themselves, faking their figures.

W—— and several others whom I met in Germany put it in the foreground of the work to be done for re-establishing Germany in the comity of nations, that it should be proved that Germany was not responsible for the beginning of the war. It is still the theme of innumerable articles in the Press. The German mind has not grasped the fact that no intelligent European blames Germany exclusively. Now that the hot mood of war is past we are all ready to recognize that we were all in part to blame. We all founded our security on armies and navies, the nation that produced the "Dreadnought" most of all. We were all living and picnicking and unfortunately quarrelling in the great cordite warehouse of European militarism, and one day it blew up. If we had not been so well prepared it could not have happened so. If the Kaiser pronounced the dreadful atheism of "Let the guns speak," he really did so after the event.

In debating this matter the German mentality disclosed itself in the Germans with whom I conversed in Berlin. I had a suspicion that one of them might have said England began it, if I had been other than an Englishman. Edward the Seventh who arranged the entente cordiale had evidently something to do with it. As I am a known warm friend of Russia he could not say Russia began it. His mind turned to a more obscure nation.

"To think that Europe should thus have been ruined and all those millions of lives lost," said he. "Just for stupid little Serbia."

I am afraid I could not agree to that. The devil began it. What does it matter now? Nobody cares. The present and the future hold the potentialities of happiness rather than the past. To discuss the past you'd have to raise the dead on both sides.

England is not interested in history, but she is interested in actuality.

Mr. Lloyd George has said that the German is not being taxed by his Government in the proportion that the British are taxed by theirs—far from it. Figures have been given in the Press. And they have not been refuted by Germans. The Germans hold that they are being taxed so heavily that a maximum has been reached. W——, who was well-off before the war, has lost his income now, has taken a staff-post at the Ministry of Trade and gets 20,000 marks a year. He ought to pay a heavy income-tax on that. Yes, but it is only eighty pounds a year in English money, and he has a wife and two children to keep on it. There are tens of thousands of professional men in the same plight. Some of the very rich arrange matters to avoid some of the heavy dues. And as regards the working-class, it is notoriously hard to raise money from them by direct taxation.

"Then it is said that you are running your railway and postal services at a loss. And that is obviously true. England has raised her rates and made her public pay. She thinks Germany should also."

To this it is replied that Germany does not believe in obstructing the ready movement of people and of intelligence in her country. She thinks it bad policy to charge highly for railway fares and letter postage. What is gained by extra charges is more than lost through business being hampered.

"These are points which you educated Germans should elucidate through the British Press," said I. "The idea that Germany escapes taxation is a very unfavourable one in England. It is much more important than the rights or wrongs of the old war."

W——, who receives the "Nation" regularly, nevertheless did not think any English paper would print what he might write on the theme.

I visited, among others, Herr Baumfelder, the editor of the "European Press," once dropped from aeroplanes among our lines under the title of the "European Times," but now under entirely new management, though still a propagandist sheet. It is nothing like so strong a propagandist for Germany as the "Continental Daily Mail" is for France. But it has the potentiality of a counterblast. It makes one blush to see English newspapers on German book-stalls with "HUNS' LATEST WHINE" in large letters staring at the Germans as they pass. Strangely enough, the Germans don't seem to mind these headlines; they don't tear the papers off the stalls and burn them in indignation. They've been drilled not to do such things. One would think, however, there would be considerable scope for a good German daily, printed in the English language, expounding European events from another point of view. The European Press has that possibility.

Here, however, you find little that is helpful yet. I am all for truth. It is the best type of propaganda—the only type that is not loathsome. And surely there is enough in the domain of the simple truth about Europe and Germany to touch men's hearts, whilst

There groans a world in anguish
Just to teach us sympathy.

I hoped Herr Baumfelder would make his paper into a living journal which all would be glad to buy in order to know the facts of the hour in Germany. No use to continue working the familiar lines of German propaganda such as the "Menace to German Women of the Black Troops on the Rhine," now so much exploited in press and cinema in Germany—or the "Who was responsible for the war?" theme, alluded to above. It is sad to read the verbal violence of some president of "League of German Patriots" who does not believe the editor of the "Spectator" when he says "We for our part, can honestly say that ever since the Armistice we have wanted to create an atmosphere helpful to Germany."

"You the murderers of hundreds of thousands of innocent German children dare to publish such a deliberate falsehood," says "The president." "You are practically sodden with falsehood and hypocrisy."

No doubt the president of the L.G.P. has lost money in the war, and has an especial grudge against England, but that sort of writing makes potential friends into persistent enemies. And English readers of the paper will say, "After all, what fools the Germans are."

There is a cynical disbelief in England's idealism. Perhaps that cannot be wondered at. We have been, or seem to have been, very false to our idealism at times. We are judged by our public acts. But because of our professed idealism we are hailed as hypocrites, appalling hypocrites. And yet those public acts and that idealism are distinct. Both are authentic, and neither contradicts the other. We fastened on Germany a shameful treaty at Versailles. But the idealists never agreed to it, and do not do so now. Our idealism is genuine enough and it is, indeed, the germ of Europe's hope. But for that the outlook would be blacker still.

All that has been done to ease the application of the treaty has been done at England's instance. We stand as wardens against the infringement of the treaty, as for instance in the Silesian attack. Indeed, the general tendency of England's policy is to save the integrity of Germany and give her a chance to rehabilitate herself among the nations.

The sophisticated educated class in Germany smiles in superior knowledge, ascribing to us selfish motives of one kind or another. The contempt for Englishmen passing through the country is somewhat brutally expressed in the phrase valuta-Englander, the currency Englishman, who is probably a nobody at home but swaggers here on the difference of the exchange of the mark and the pound sterling. The new educated class has always found difficulty in being tolerant and in recognizing who were its potential enemies or friends. But I noticed that the working class had less pre-judgment and was more open-hearted. The working class grasped the truth of the situation. It was not merely a desire to flatter and curry favour that prompted their attitude.

"France is our real enemy—not England," was the frequent greeting of the ex-soldier working man who grinned and asked if I'd been a soldier, too, and on what front. Rank and file on both sides conceived a respect for one another in the war, which the educated class somehow missed. Perhaps the educated class in Germany would be more indulgent if they were not so hard hit financially. The working man still has money, has, indeed, a flattering number of marks in his pocket. When he has not so much money he is as morose as his educated brother.

In Saxony, where an industrial depression not half so deep as that of England is being felt, you have a strong Communist movement. The devitalized masses of Leipzig are not so brotherly as the Berliners. The signs of street-fighting are visible in the many cracked and broken windows of shops, and the helplessness of police seems to be expressed in gatherings under the auspices of the red flag, where internationalism is bawled across the square by unshaven, collarless young men, and it is "Hoch die Weltrevolution!"

"If we lose our export trade then the enfeebled industrial population of places like Leipzig must die off, and Germany return to the land," said a Leipzig editor to me. "But before they die off they'll make red war in Germany."

Not an unedifying place for the trial of war-criminals! There is little at Leipzig to give English witnesses an idea of a flourishing or promising Germany. A true study of the after-the-war Germany would naturally take in Leipzig and the other great centres of industry and trade. Berlin is admittedly deceptive, with its profiteers and its rich foreigners. Bremen and Hamburg would be vital points to reconsider. I visited the former—a beautiful quiet Hanse town, very quiet now, once the port of sailing of the Nord-deutscher Lloyd boats, and a port of many ships. There is an impoverished and diminished population, and grass is growing in streets where it never could have grown before. The German mercantile marine has dropped from six-and-a-half million tons to one-half million of tonnage of little vessels. You feel that fact at Bremen. The great ships, mishandled and in many cases disabled, now swell the numerical tonnage of other countries without adding so very much to their shipping power. The Hamburg-America line and Nord-deutscher Lloyd and others, shorn of their real glory, still continue a pettifogging existence booking tickets for passengers on the ships of foreign lines. What a curious Germany! She has made a strange backward progress since the days of the Agadir incident, and the plea which eminent British and American journalists defended then, that she should be accorded "a place in the sun."