gly handing over treasures that had come
down probably for two or three generations--treasures that had
never been worn except on high days and festivals, weddings, and
perhaps on the day of the local fair. Particularly sad is this
self-sacrifice in view of the gigantic profits of the food usurers
and war profiteers. The matter is no secret in Germany or Austria.
It is denounced by the small Socialist minority in the Reichstag,
to whose impotence I have often referred. It is stoutly defended
in good Prussian fashion by those openly making the profits.

There has arisen a one-sided Socialism which no one but Bismarck's
famous "nation of lackeys" would tolerate. At the top is a narrow
circle of agrarian and industrial profiteers, often belonging to
the aristocratic classes. At the other end of the scale is, for
example, the small farmer, who has now absolutely nothing to say
concerning either the planting, the marketing, or the selling of
his crops. Regulations are laid down as to what he should sow,
where he should sell, and the price at which he should sell.
Unlike the Junker, he has not a long purse. He _must sell_.

What state of mind does this produce among the people? I know that
outside Germany there is an idea that every German is working at
top speed with the spirit of the Fatherland flaming him on. That
was the spirit I witnessed in the early days of the war, when
Germany was winning and food was plentiful.

In certain rural districts as well as in centres of population
there is an intense longing for peace--not merely for a German
peace--but any peace, and a peace not merely for military reasons,
but arising out of utter weariness of the rule of the profiteers
and the casualties not revealed by the doctored lists--ingeniously
issued lists, which, for example, have never revealed the loss of a
submarine crew, though intelligent Hamburg shipping people, who are
in close touch with German naval people, estimate the loss of
German submarines as at least one hundred. I have heard the figure
put higher, and also lower.

This kind of one-sided Socialism makes the people so apathetic that
in some parts of Germany it has been very difficult to induce them
to harvest their own crops, and in German Poland they have been
forced to garner the fields at the point of the bayonet.

When a man has no interest in the planting, marketing, and selling
price of his produce; when he knows that what he grows may be sw