's
_cafes_ are attended by spies. In my researches in the Berlin
East-end I often visited these places and shared my adulterated
beer and war bread with the working folk--all of them over or under
military age.

One evening a shabby old man said rather more loudly than was
necessary to a number of those round him:--"I am tired of reading
in the newspapers how nice the war is. Even the _Vorwaerts_ (then
a Socialist paper) lies to us. I am tired of walking home night
after night and finding restaurants turned into hospitals for the
wounded."

He was referring in particular to the great _Schultheiss_
working-men's restaurants in Hasenheide. His remarks were received
with obvious sympathy.

A couple of nights later I went into this same place and took my
seat, but it was obvious that my visit was unwelcome. I was looked
at suspiciously. I did not think very much of the incident, but
ten days later in passing I called again, when a lusty young fellow
of eighteen, to whom I had spoken on my first visit, came forward
and said to me, almost threateningly, "You are a stranger here.
May I ask what you are doing?"

I said: "I am an American newspaper correspondent, and am trying to
find out what I can about the ways of German working folk."

He could tell by my accent that I was a foreigner, and said: "We
thought that you had told the Government about that little free
speaking we had here a few days ago. You know that the little old
man who was complaining about the restaurants being turned into
hospitals has been arrested?"

This form of arrest, by which hundreds of people are mysteriously
disappearing, is one of the burning grievances of Germany to-day.
In its application it resembles what we used to read about Russian
police. It has created a condition beneath the surface in Germany
resembling the terrorism of the French Revolution. In the absence
of a Habeas Corpus Act, the victim lies in gaol indefinitely, while
the police are, nominally, collecting the evidence against him.
One cannot move about very long without coming across instances of
this growing form of tyranny, but I will merely give one other.

A German family, resident in Sweden, were in correspondence with a
woman resident in Prussia. In one of her letters she incautiously
remarked, "What a pity that the two Emperors cannot be taught what
war really means to the German peoples." She had lost two sons,
and her expression of bitterness was just