ut 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 insti