war-time.

PRISONER WORKERS.

How far hatred is due to want of knowledge the record of prisoner farm
workers on this side proves:

As to the German prisoners, it took both the farmers and the
townspeople in the places where they are quartered, and from
which they are often motored to the farms, some little time to
overcome the widespread prejudice against their employment. But,
after a little acquaintance with them, this prejudice appears to
be dying down.

"They are one of our mainstays on the farms in West Sussex," Mr.
Herbert Padwick, chairman of the West Sussex War Agricultural
Committee, and vice-president of the Farmers' Union, told me.
"Some of them," he said, "are themselves farmers, and the sons
of farmers. Their work looks slow, but in the end, as a rule, we
find it very thorough. They used to say, perhaps chaffingly,
they wanted to produce the best crop we have ever had in
England, because they were sure the Germans would take it. No
doubt they really thought it at one time, but they are not, I
think, under this illusion any longer."

_Daily News_, Aug. 20, 1918.

Most of us have heard favourable comments from farmers and others as to
the work of their German helpers. "I think they've done jolly well, and
they deserve some encouragement," said one man to me. The idea that all
Germans are "Huns" vanishes on personal acquaintance. On the other side
prejudices similarly vanish, and I remember seeing an account of how a
German farmer took his prisoner helpers for a picnic. Evidently he was
allowed considerable freedom with them. There were German Press protests
against the picnic.

From the _Daily News_ of September 28, 1918, I take the following:

Here is a "gleaning" worth setting beside those which "Kuklos"
gave us yesterday. A West-country farmer of my acquaintance has
a brother who is a prisoner in the hands of the Germans at a
place not far from Stettin. Recently a number of German
prisoners were sent to work on his farm, and among them was a
German farmer from that very place. The German told him that he
had English prisoners on his own fields in the Fatherland, so
that quite possibly this curious exchange may be complete.

It may be mentioned, incidentally, that the English prisoner
speaks well of his treatment in Germany. The German, for his
part, assur