T

HE German people look back to the time a year ago-when they were in the whirlpool of money inflation, as a wild nightmare in which they nearly, and perhaps quite, lost their sense of reason and moral balance. Certainly at that time, as I saw, the whole German nation was hysterical and on the edge of nervous breakdown. Is it any wonder, when they saw their whole financial structure slipping and toppling toward a precipice below which lay a bottomless pit of ruin?

It was not only the bankers and the politicians who realized the enormous hazard of their state. It was brought home with a sense of terror to the middle class citizen or working man, whose weekly wage-though counted in millions, and then billions, of marks-withered away in value before he could rush to the nearest shop and turn it into something real. Thrift was abolished among the most thrifty people in the world because those who saved money lost it. People living on the interest of inherited capital or invested wealth were made penniless, while the Government printing machines throbbed in larger revolutions to the output of paper money which at last had no purchasing value at all inside or outside the country.

That point was reached when passive resistance broke down in the Ruhr because the stubborn workmen there who refused to labor under French command found they must return to work or starve; and when the financial brains who had organized, or submitted to, this colossal

swindle of "inflation," this ruthless robbery of their own folk, this wild gamble with national credit, saw that the limit had been reached and the game was up.

The secret forces, or the political madness, behind that machinery of inflation have not yet been told or discovered. The story does not matter very much, except in historical interest, for that period is past, and I refer to it only because the present psychology of the German people, and their new social conditions, cannot be understood unless one remembers that time of paper madness when their nerves were like harp strings to every gust of passion and emotion, and when the most powerful people in Europe found themselves sinking into a bog of despair, humiliation, and bankruptcy.

A RETURN TO NORMALCY

OW that the mark has been stabil

NOW

ized, at first by a sort of miracleor, as other people would say, by an act of faith in German credit by German folk— and then by international loans following the Dawes Report, the social conditions in Germany have also become settled. Trade is reviving steadily because traders know what prices they can quote and what they can pay in real money which does not fluctuate like a fever chart. The pulse of German life itself is steadying to a more normal beat, because there is no longer fear of revolution from the Right or Left now that panic, rage, and despair have given way to a reasonable hope of good business, based on the possibility of peace and industry. After the

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release of the French strangle grip on the Ruhr, which is the industrial heart of Germany, trade relations are good with France and Great Britain, and even the question of reparations and the burden of impossible payments have been postponed by the mechanism of the Dawes plan.

The extreme Nationalists who shouted for resistance and revenge no longer get the same hearing. The Communists who screamed for bloody revolution as the only means of liberating the German workers from an intolerable serfdom have been silenced for a time, because despair has lifted from the wage-earning world. At least, it is not so acute. The tide of passion is on the ebb. German public opinion, in the mass, as revealed by the elections in December

last, is for moderate

in the mind of Germany also, if one penetrates below the surface-which is as far as most foreigners see-there are equal contrasts of opinion, philosophy, passion, idealism, prejudice, old ideas in conflict with new ideas, and mental unrest.

Here is a picture of one extreme in the social scale. It is the one observed by the passing foreigner who, seeing it, thinks that the German plea of poverty is a fraud and that they are rich enough to pay all the reparations from which they have defaulted.

men and moderate measures. Violence is, for the moment, out of favor.

All that is good for Germany and the world. But social life among the German people has been greatly changed by that experience in the time of paper money, and by the present readjustment to stable conditions. New classes have come up-those who made rapid profits out of wild gambles in the foreign exchange. Old classes have gone down, or been hard hit. Behind the façade of German social life-rather splendid and rich as it seems to the passing foreigner -there are glaring contrasts.

Extremes of wealth, extremes of poverty, may be seen in Berlin and all the great cities of Germany. Beneath the surface of everyday life, quite comfortable as it seems, with money enough now for good food, life's little comforts, some luxuries, there is a great deal of stinting and scraping to make both ends meet. And

It is a scene in the Adlon Hotel, of Berlin, as I saw it recently, and as it goes on day by day.

The great lounge with its marble pillars inlaid with gold mosaic, lighted warmly by shaded lamps, is crowded with the profiteers or Schieber of Berlin. A bust of the onetime German Emperor, with upturned moustache

and a winged helmet, mocks at this republican tea party. Revolution and republicanism did nothing to injure these people. Even "inflation" did not damage them. Somehow they learned the secret of converting worthless paper into real wealth.

The women are expensively dressed. They must cost a lot of money to the men who bow over their hands, and order rich cakes for them. These men are, for the most part, middle-aged, with closeshaven heads, hard features, and vulturelike eyes. Earlier in the day they have been sitting around here in the Adlon, or other hotels, with black dispatch cases, talking money, money, money. One overhears arithmetical discussions in thousands, and millions, of marks. Some of them, many of them perhaps, are not German by race. They have an Oriental cast of features, or a Slav look. One man wears some of his wealth on his

fingers. He is a powerful, handsome man leaning over a little painted lady who whispers to him and gazes at his left hand like a bird fascinated by a serpent's eyes. The man's fingers glitter with points of light. There are seven rings on three fingers, with large lustrous diamonds.

Down the winding passage between the crowded tea-tables comes a line of mannequins, each girl moving in a rhythmic way, with extended arms. They are wearing furs, marvelous and magnificent furs, brought from Russia, I suppose, and worth something like their weight in gold. In a little room beyond the tea lounge, up a flight of stairs, good business is being done. "You must buy me a coat like that," says the little painted lady to the man with the diamond rings. He fingers one of the fur coats, smiling at the girl inside it. "How much?" In American money it is five hundred dollars.

four thousand men, women, and some children. They go in at five o'clock and after getting a bowl of soup are locked up in the dormitories until six next morning, when they are turned into the streets again to find work if they can-which they can't. I stood at the door of these dormitories,

with the director of the Nacht Asyl, who was a man with a good brain and a big heart. Each of those long bare rooms was lined with rows of iron bedsteads without mattresses or blankets. No need of blankets because of central heating. The rooms were overwarm-suffocating. The smell of human bodies and of damp, steaming clothes, made an atmosphere which struck me in the face and turned me sick. Not a window open to let out the foul vapors. The men lay on their beds, or sat talking in groups. As I stood in the doorways they stared at me, wondering what I wanted. Many of them were young men -boys-with good faces and thoughtful eyes; just the type of lad I had seen in thousands in Flanders and the Somme country in time of war. Others were bearded men, emaciated, haggard, hollow-eyed.

In the Adlon Hotel life is very costly, and it is crowded by people who are not frightened by its cost. Here are wealth, luxury, beauty, splendor. The English do not stay at the Adlon now. The prices have scared them away.

WHERE MISERY STALKS

Berlin.

"Who are they?" I asked the director. "From what class do they come?"

He told me outside the door, which he

Here another. is at

end of the city, in the poor quarters, where there is an immense block of buildings of solid stone, with many windows, like a hospital. It is called the Nacht Asyl or Night Asylum, supported by the City of Berlin for homeless and workless people. I went there at six o'clock one evening and the building had already been filled for an hour by a population of nearly

class-university students, old professors, doctors, lawyers, clerks, mechanics, laborers, poets, artists, thieves, and aristocrats. Aristocrats? Yes, now and then. Some time ago they had had a "Freiherr," whom we should call a nobleman. He was also a thief, and beyond help. Others were honest-caught between the wheels of life. Out of work through no fault of

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their own. Just unlucky in a cruel world. The young lads were most to be pitied. The director did his best to help them, kept them separate, as far as possible, from the bad crowd.

I went to room after room, each with two or three hundred bed-fellows, each stifling in that dank, foul warmth, each crowded with misery, disease, despair. In one long room were family groups, men, women, and children sleeping together. They were Poles who in summer time work in the fields. In other rooms were the women-poor old hags, combing their hair, young girls derelict in a great city. Then rooms full of babies born into tragic life, out of tragedy.

I did not see the worst rooms of all, where disease-stricken girls taken off the streets weep and tear their clothes and cry out in hysteria. I would not go there. It is well organized, this Nacht Asyl. The kitchens are splendid, and I tasted the soup which is given as an evening meal to all who come. Like gruel, and quite good, but not very satisfying to hungry stomachs, without bread. There are baths for those who wish to wash, and furnaces for verminous clothes-as most of them are and to a terrible and shocking degree.

Into this shelter for homeless folk comes every night a population of poor wretches who have nothing between them and death but a bowl of soup and this house of pity. It is the other end from the Adlon Hotel.

AMONG THE WORKERS

BETWEEN these two extremes is the

average of German life, through many grades of hard-working poverty, decent respectability, comfortable home life, fair prosperity, without much margin for luxury, often without quite enough. for proper nourishment. The working classes in Berlin and other great cities are enormously better off now than in the time of inflation. At least they are paid real money which does not lose its value before they turn it into food and clothes. But they are not high wages. I reckon they are a little more than half the wage

value paid to English laborers of the same class. An unskilled laborer gets about five marks a day. So did the elevator boy in my hotel. My midday meal in a second class restaurant cost me 6.50 marks-for soup, meat, cheese, and coffee. On five marks a day I should have starved to death in Germany. Somehow the German laborer lives on it, but it is his secret, and he doesn't get fat.

In Berlin and other big cities rent is a heavy item for working families. They crowd into cellars, damp and without light. You can look into them through the gratings below Fruchtstrasse and Blumenstrasse, on the east side of Berlin. It's not good for the children, who get tuberculosis like many little sufferers I saw in an open air school, where even in winter time they learn their lessons with the cold mist about them, and get dosed with ultra-violet rays between their classes.

The out-of-work dole in Germany is not generous and it lasts only for twentysix weeks of the year. I met two young brothers whose father had been killed in the War and whose mother had died. The older brother was still wearing his old green tunic of war-time-six years after the Armistice. He had been out of work for five months, and was getting 6.90 marks a week. He looked like it. The younger brother was getting 6 marks a week as an orphan. Their faces had a putty look and there were red rims round their eyes. They were "Orphans of the Storm" of Germany to-day.

The German workmen, especially in the factories, complain bitterly of the long hours they have to work for wages not sufficient to maintain their physical strength. In the Ruhr many of them are working eleven or twelve hours and some as long as fourteen hours a day. In Dortmund the furnace workers are employed for twelve hours in exhausting conditions. I heard of one case in Berlin where a man had to work nine hours a day for a wage of 15 marks a week and, going to the only lodging he could find, had to spend two hours in a tramcar in order to get to his job. Then two hours back again.

There is a rapid increase of child employment in the factories and mines, in order to supplement the wages of the parents. The whole of German industry is based on sweated labor, and yet, owing to the present scarcity of capital and bad conditions of trade, prices, both of food and manufactured articles, remain very high.

Ο

BERLIN BEHIND PARIS

NE need not be astonished that the birth rate in Germany is not as high as it used to be. The French will be glad of that. Berlin, always lower than the rest of Germany, has dropped from 20 per thousand to 9. It has the lowest birth rate of any capital in Europe, not excepting Paris. I went around some of the schools with a lady doctor who, at my request, asked many of the children how many brothers and sisters they had. The answer came from each child, smartly, with a look of amusement, as much as to say: What queer questions grown-up people ask!

"Two!" "One!"

"None!"

The average seemed to be one, and I was surprised. It reveals a good deal about the cost of life in Berlin. Big Big families are going out of fashion among the working folk.

But the German hausfrau, even in the working classes, keeps her children neat and clean. Last year I went with a boatload of German children to a little island in the Wannsee. It was a school treat in the working quarters. They were like fairy-tale children, with their flaxen hair and blue eyes, and one would not have guessed the poverty of their homes. In the English slums there are rags and tatters. Nor did I see any sign of starvation or misery, when I went around the schools of Berlin a few weeks ago. The children stripped for a medical examination. Some of them were undersized for their age, but on the whole they looked healthy. Somehow, on the miserable wages of their parents they get enough to eat now.

The middle classes of Germany are making both ends meet. The revival of trade is helping them. trade is helping them. But they were hardest hit by the period of bad money, and the professional classes especially have not yet recovered from that robbery of their savings and investments. The Civil Service is miserably underpaid. Here is a family budget I obtained from an average family. It reveals, more than many words, the actual state of affairs in thousands, perhaps millions, of German households. It is the budget of a small government official with his wife, two boys, and a mother-in-law who lost all her savings in the inflation period. The monthly salary of the head of the family is 348 marks. This is how his expenses work out:

It will be seen that there is a deficit of 57 marks. This must be made up by odd jobs from the various members of the family, such as needlework by the two women and occasional errands by the boys.

It is from the sons of this class of small official, civil service clerk, doctor, lawyer, and literary man, that the universities, and especially Berlin University, receive most of their students. After the family budget I have given as a typical example, it will be easily seen that in Germany today many students-the majority-do not