ting on asking you questions
in Hungarian and refusing to understand any other tongue. As you have
to spend hours with the police in the Magyar capital before you obtain
permission to stay there and again before you obtain permission to go
away, this is peculiarly distressing.

Under such circumstances is it surprising that there is stagnation of
peoples in Europe? This stagnation is great, and it is noticeable in
almost every great city of the continent. It is a rich time for the
hotel-keepers. There is scarcely a capital in Europe where you can
reckon on finding a room without trouble. The following experiences
are symptomatic enough: at Rome I visited about twenty hotels; shut out
for the night, got into a "strange place" about three a.m.; Stuttgart,
out all night; Sofia, visited all hotels, all full, slept in guard-room
of town-patrol; Sofia, second time, shared a room with an officer;
Vienna, toured city in a cab and found nothing; Warsaw, spent nine
hours going from hotel to hotel, got a room for a thousand-mark tip.
In Constantinople you can find cases of three families in one
apartment. Wherever you go you are going to have adventures in finding
a room, unless you are an officer or a member of an Allied Commission,
or belong to the Red Cross or Starving Children's Fund, or some
organization that has facilities for looking out for itself.

Poor old Europe! She was more of a unity in the days when we were "an
armed camp." We have broken the power of militarism. There has been a
revolution in Russia. A British statesman in the House of Commons, in
1917, said it was bliss to be alive, and to be young was very heaven.
Some millions of young men died before Armistice Day, 1918. Since then
there has been great work clearing away barbed-wire entanglements along
the old front. But it seems to be a nightmare task: entanglements
multiply upon us faster than we can clear the old ones away. You
cannot get across Europe because of the obstructions: you cannot
circulate.

LETTERS OF TRAVEL

II. FROM CONSTANTINOPLE (I)

It has been a bleak early spring with snow on the uplands of Thrace.
For those who travel from Paris to Constantinople on that Western
moving shuttle, the Orient Express, there would be nothing to trouble
the mind unpleasantly--except in that the more comfortable we are, the
more we demand and the more we grumble. But if you travel by the
ordinary unheated train, where even the first-cl