as it were injury
on the top of insult.

It was partly explained to me in Munich by the British Consul-General.
At Munich there is a Polish Consul and Vice-Consul, but there has been
nothing to do, Poland having remarkably little business in Bavaria.
The post languished. The Vice-Consul was recalled; the clerk was
dismissed. One surmised the Consul himself might go and hand over his
minute business to some other consulate which, no doubt, would have
done it cheaply. But no. One day a solution occurred to the Consul.
All Polish subjects in Bavaria ought to have Polish passports from the
Polish Consul. Police orders to that effect were therefore issued.
All who claimed to be Polish, or to have been born in those parts of
Germany or Austria now Polish territory, were to put in an appearance.
They would receive passports and would be duly charged.

But, having registered the whole Polish population, what then?

"Oh, I only give them visas for three months," says the Consul. "Every
quarter they must come again."

So he converted his consulate into a revenue-paying establishment.
What does it matter about the public? It is only asked to give one day
in ninety to these formalities and has the other eighty-nine to itself.

The Polish passport office in Berlin fully confirms this point of view.
Here are inordinate crowds whom politics have separated from kith and
kin, trying to get passes to go home, to live, to exist. The
door-keeper smokes a cigar; the first clerk makes eyes at the women
applicants, the girl clerks suck sweets, the Consulate clock runs on,
and you pay hundreds of German marks each for the upkeep of the
business.

The Poles, or indeed, the British, or the Americans, for we are all
tarred by the same brush, might take a lesson from the Czecho-Slovaks,
who have at Vienna a bureau which will get your passport visa and your
railway ticket for you, and reserve you a room in a hotel in Prague
without any fee. The enlightened Government of this new republic
understands that that is the best propaganda for their country which
can be done. Not that Czecho-Slovakia does not charge for a visa and
charge for permission to go out of the country. At Cheb I nearly
missed my train whilst an official was weighing up in his mind how much
he should charge for allowing me to go through without a visa.

Another aspect of the passport trouble in Europe is local nationalism
which at Budapest takes the form of insis