necessary until they drop--make no mistake of that.

But the authorities also learned a lesson. "People think most of
revolution when they are hungry," was what one leader said to me.
On this Saturday of which I write not a potato was to be bought in
the West-end of Berlin, where the better classes live. Berlin had
been without potatoes for nearly a week. To-day they had arrived,
and the first to come were sent to the East-end. In the West-end
the people are filled with more unquestioning praise of everything
the Government does; they applaud when their Kaiser confers an
Order upon their Crown Prince for something, not quite clear, which
he is supposed to have accomplished at Verdun. Therefore they can
wait for potatoes until the more critical East-end is supplied.

I went farther eastward through the Kottbuser district to the
Kottbuser Ufer on the canal, along which, a couple of hundred
people waited in an orderly column without any guardian--another
evidence of the success of the drastic measures of July and early
August, when the demonstrations against the war were nipped in the
bud. These people were waiting for the free advertisement sheets
from the gaudily painted yellow Ullstein newspaper building across
the square. They had to stand by the side of the canal because a
_queue_ of several hundred people waiting for potatoes wound slowly
before Ullstein's to the underground potato-shop next door.

I had not heard a laugh or seen anybody smile all day, and when
darkness fell on the weary city I went to a cheap little beer-room
where several "bad," but really harmless Social Democrats used to
gather. Among them was the inevitable one who had been to America,
and I had become acquainted with them through him. They talked in
the new strain of their type, that they might as well be under the
British or French, as under their own Government.

Their voices were low--a rare event where Germans gather at table.
They did not plot, they merely grumbled incessantly. The end of
the war had definitely sunk below their horizon, and peace, not
merely steps to peace, was what they longed for. There was the
customary cursing of the Agrarians and the expressions of resolve
to have a new order of freedom after the war, expressions which I
believe will not be realised unless Germany is compelled to accept
peace by superior forces from without.

I left the dreary room for the dreary streets, and turned towards
the cent