'It is terrible. From day to day one never knows if one's children are going to be able to eat. One pays as much for an egg as one used to pay for a fowl, and a suit of clothes costs a thousand marks. Are you getting something to eat at your hotel?'

'Yes, but not enough to satisfy our hunger. Evidently there is much distress, but the theatres are full

'Yes, but we love art.'

"The circuses and music halls, too, are full.'

'We want to bewilder ourselves, we want to forget.'

We returned to political matters: the thing which is leading the Allies to continue their policy of rigor is the fact that they do not yet see in Germany the manifestation of a new spirit. They perceive the old nationalist aspirations, officers of the old régime are busying themselves with affairs, flowers have been placed upon the statue of Bismarck, and the absent Emperor has been acclaimed with a cheer.

'All this has no particular signification. In a nation of 70,000,000 souls all kinds of little matters of this sort may take place and will take place.'

M. Fulda does not believe in reaction; he fears Bolshevism, and sees the only remedy for it in a prompt and just peace. He loves Europe, and his voice, when he speaks, takes on an accent of emotion which it is not easy to forget.

'Monsieur, I have only one great hope left to me, the hope of reconciliation. If it is in vain, there is nothing left to look forward to.'

He begs pardon for speaking our tongue with the tiniest trace of difficulty after five years of interruption, and adds that he has just finished a comedy which will be played the

animation that it is not inspired by the realities of the day. Then as I rise to go he says, 'Take the path to the right which leads through the wood, you will find it very lovely.'

Le Journal de Genève

LLOYD GEORGE VERSUS LORD

NORTHCLIFFE

Now that the Prime Minister has broken with Lord Northcliffe, it will be interesting to see what substitute he will find for his Press Party. If he will act with calmness and temperateness instead of restlessness and 'slapdashery' he need never be in anxiety. We should all be prepared to allow to Lord Northcliffe's criticisms the weight they deserved to carry if it were possible to feel that those criticisms had been caused by some lapse on Mr. Lloyd George's part from his former policy. Most observers will agree, however, that there has been very little change in Mr. Lloyd George, though there has been a great deal of change in Lord Northcliffe. In fine, Lord Northcliffe tries to annihilate Mr. Lloyd George because of a personal quarrel.

Mr. Lloyd George naturally made great play by contrasting the peace terms which Lord Northcliffe pubIlished last November with what the Northcliffe papers are demanding now. In November, Lord Northcliffe proposed that the high criminals in Germany should be tried by German Tribunals and not by the Allies. In November his peace terms did not contain any mention of an indemnity. But now the Northcliffe Press will be satisfied with nothing less than the whole cost of the war. These are only two examples of ridiculous inconsistency taken from Mr. Lloyd George's list. Rightly did Mr. Lloyd George

say: 'I would as soon rely on a grasshopper!' If Lord Northcliffe had been a wise monitor to Mr. Lloyd George in the past, one might feel in sympathy with him now. But look at his record. He caused his newspapers to walk very delicately throughout the Marconi scandal, which tainted the whole morality of our public life. In the underground attack upon Mr. Asquith it was certainly underground, whatever we may think of Mr. Asquith as a statesman; in the operation of securing the political support of the Labor Party for Mr. Lloyd George; when Mr. Lloyd George's Paris speech with its gross attempt to upset the whole of the Western strategy which was destined ultimately to win the war was delivered; when Sir William Robertson and Sir Douglas Haig were persecuted because they were fighting manfully against wild-cat schemes and the promotion of military side-shows into operations of major importance on all those occasions Lord Northcliffe was the henchman and servant of Mr. Lloyd George. We protested at the time, but Lord Northcliffe only became the more blindly active in his cooperation with Mr. Lloyd George. Mr. Lloyd George, for his part, has changed very little, if at all. What small change we see has been a distinct improvement—for instance, in the House of Commons the other day. The change is almost entirely in Lord Northcliffe himself, although he may not have enough perception to be aware of it. The Prime Minister may be dangerous because he is much too volatile, but he is consistency itself compared with Lord Northcliffe. Both men have been guilty of tergiversations, but Lord Northcliffe's have been much more frequent and there has been less excuse for them. If Mr. Lloyd George is an egotist, Lord Northcliffe s much more so. If Mr. Lloyd George

is often irresponsible, Lord Northcliffe is almost always irresponsible. When Mr. Lloyd George falls from power, it must be because in the judgment of the nation he has shown himself to be incapable of carrying on his work; it must emphatically not be because Lord Northcliffe has announced, for no special reason except a hidden personal one, that the time has come for a new Ministry.

If Lord Northcliffe tries seriously to carry on his feud with the Prime Minister, the nation will have to choose between the authority of Mr. Lloyd George with all his faults and the advice of Lord Northcliffe. We shall be in no doubt ourselves which to choose. By far the lesser power for evil, even in his very worst moments, is Mr. Lloyd George. We have often urged Members of Parliament not to be afraid of Lord Northcliffe's newspapers; but even though members occasionally professed to be unaffected by the intimidating voice, they have too often shown by their actions that they really were afraid. And yet what nonsense it is, and always has been, to talk of Lord Northcliffe's tremendous power and of his success in destroying any politician whom he dislikes! His failures in prescience and annihilation, though commonly forgotten, are really more notable than his successes. He violently attacked Mr. Balfour and announced that he must leave the Lloyd George Ministry. Yet Mr. Balfour survives, and is no doubt less troubled by his thoughts at this moment than Lord Northcliffe himself. Lord Northcliffe, again, marked down Mr. Austen Chamberlain and Mr. Long for destruction. They were denounced as reactionary Tories -the very phrase marking another change in Lord Northcliffe - and as hopeless members of the 'Old Gang'; but Mr. Chamberlain and Mr. Long

on untainted that great tradition of British public life which sometimes seems to be direfully threatened by the individual offenses of other public men. Sir Edward Carson, to take another case, publicly attacked Lord Northcliffe; and if ever Lord Northcliffe I would have been specially glad to be rid of an enemy, Sir Edward Carson was that enemy. But Lord Northcliffe once more was helpless; his defiance fell flat; and probably nine people out of ten have forgotten that our Elijah Pogram of the press ever uttered it.

The duel with Mr. Lloyd George has left Lord Northcliffe in rather a weak position, because whatever he may do in future to vilify Mr. Lloyd George will undoubtedly, rightly or wrongly, be put down to wounded vanity. If we wanted to give Lord Northcliffe a little friendly advice, we should tell him that the best line is to say hardly anything at present, but to convey the impression that Mr. Lloyd George may safely be left alone, as he is sure to cut his own throat in the long run. When a term came to Mr. Lloyd George's power, Lord Northcliffe would then be able to say that he had foreseen it and had prophesied it. As a matter of fact, both the duelists have been too angry lately to think very carefully over their thrusts and parries. How much more telling and potent Mr. Lloyd George's attack upon Lord Northcliffe might have been, for example, if it had been less seemingly aggressive and had contained a little more of the delicacy of insinuation. Surely from the point of view of discrediting Lord Northcliffe to the greatest possible extent we crave

pardon for indulging ourselves in this
cynical essay in debating points - Mr.
Lloyd George ought to have been
very careful to distinguish Lord North-
cliffe's influence from the potential
influence of the Times. By badly
attacking the Times-that 'three-
penny edition of the Daily Mail' - he
wantonly ranged against him the staff
of the Times and many of its contribu-
tors and admirers. Among these men
there must be a considerable number
who heartily mistrust Lord North-
cliffe, yet now they have been thrown
into Lord Northcliffe's camp. Mr.
Lloyd George might have drawn a
moving picture of able and innocent
men, supremely anxious to serve their
country wisely, quietly, and patiently,
and to be fair and just to the nation's
servants, being hurried along by an
eccentric master being made to
jump even as the grasshopper jumps.
'What a pity,' Mr. Lloyd George
might have exclaimed if he had not
been too angry to be cunning, 'that
this great national institution, a news-
paper once so great and so famous, and
still on many sides of its activities so
efficient, so influential, and so interest-
ing, should have fallen into the hands
of a wayward and irresponsible ego-
tist! It is a Rolls-Royce engine of the
most exquisite kind being driven by
an ignoramus at the wheel - and
worse than that, by an ignoramus who
is persuaded, partly by himself and
partly by his claque of parasites, that
he is the man to save the nation and
make himself our prime ruler!'
The Spectator

WEIMAR DURING THE
SESSION

IT is misting. The gutters are dripping, the pavements steaming. Men pick their way. I put on my rubbers and slip through the streets to

meet an appointment with one of my colleagues. The caressing spring evening embraces me. One feels like raising his hands to heaven and breathing deeply. Ye gods, but it is beautiful! A presentiment of regeneration thrills the dark and, I must admit, decidedly dirty little city. Yes, it is very dark. In spite of every precaution one runs into little splashes of water. Here and there is a dimly glowing street lamp. For five steps the pavement will be brilliant and then the black fog envelops everything. At last we reach our destination. It is an old building of the picturesque ochre yellow of the ancient city. The brown beams protrude through the masonry. There is a motto in old style letters. In front is the silent market place. But this is not really the old dreamy Weimar, the city of recollections and the Court of the Muses. The spirit of a new and a very different age has seized the city with revolutionary force. Politics rule and journalists. Weimar is just now the El Dorado of reporters. Rumors fly about unceasingly. Who can seize them and run them down? Every minute someone is being killed by the government. Every day Spartacans start something with machine guns and heavy artillery. Cabinet crises follow each other in quick succession. Unexampled defalcations are discovered but these events are only in the public imagination. People no longer greet each other with 'Good morning,' but with 'What is the news?' At every corner you run into a man with a memorandum book. At every table in the coffee houses a guest sits busily writing. There is an item of interest in every bottle of wine. There is a tremendous rumor in every glass of beer. Our German colleagues are very prudent. They know how abundant is the growth of lies, and have a keen sense for what is true or at least what is

plausible, on the one hand, and what is incredible nonsense on the other. But the reporters from abroad, poor devils, who cannot stammer more than a few German phrases, or understand a third of what is told them, seize avidly on every rumor and are ready to believe most incredible things. They persuaded one unfortunate little Frenchman, who is constantly in a fever of excitement, running about with a phrase book in his hands and asking every man he meets what is the news, that Prince Max of Baden was positively known to be about to divorce his wife in order to marry Mrs. Zietz. I got hold of him just in time to prevent his telegraphing this sensation to Paris. A Swede, who, strange to say, does not speak German or understand it, and has a very poor knowledge of English, has been going about under the impression that the President of Germany is also the presiding officer of the national assembly, and has expressed his astonishment everywhere that the pictures in the illustrated papers are so remarkably poor. A dapper little Italian has a mania for interviews. If a person mentions any well-known German to him, although the gentleman may have died a long time ago, he darts off with a countenance glowing with enthusiasm to see if he cannot find the man and get him interviewed. I really believe that if someone should start him off to Goethe's garden house, he would hurry away to find its great occupant, sharpening his pencil along the road. There is an Englishman here who is quite a different sort of a fellow. He speaks German excellently, has his eyes open everywhere, and is constantly smoking a little stubby pipe. He knows what is going on and telegraphs everything. At the same time he is composing his own dispatches, he amuses himself with con

veying the most remarkable misinformation to his colleagues. With the most serious face in the world he informed them that the Kaiser had set up a factory for manufacturing noodles in Holland and was investigating carefully the propagation of the particular kind of weevils that are employed in the industry. He spins his yarns with a stolid countenance and has only one permanent complaint, that is, that you can get no whiskey in Weimar. There is none, indeed, but you can get almost everything else you want.

The Hamburger Nachrichten

THE COMING OF THE WAR

TOURIST

BEFORE long the first boat-loads of tourists will be making for the war zone. At the moment G.H.Q. does n't want them, and keeps them at bay with a white form marked by a blue Maltese cross. But in course of time sympathetic Americans and the other tribes will be searching the ruins of burned-out passions and agonies, armed with the rewritten Badaeker or its Allied equivalent. I was not, strictly speaking, a tourist in the wandering through Belgium and French Flanders from which I have just returned, but I saw a sample of the sights every tourist will want to see soon. Perhaps. a few notes on how I blazed the trail may be acceptable, although conditions of travel are certain to be more normal in a few months' time.

The first genuine tourists making for Namur will not, for instance, go by the Cologne express. This lordly title suggested visions of a beautiful corridor train with sleepers, obsequious attendants, and everything delightful. The Cologne express is for soldiers only. It is an old ambulance train 'converted' from a goods train. On the night

journey from Boulogne to Mons I did not sleep because I thought of the load of suffering that rough berth had borne all these years. The real tourist will not be so haunted by association, nor will he be the only civilian on the train. At daylight I saw the great word 'Mons' on the wall of a dingy station, and through the window loomed one of those monstrous black slag-heaps the war correspondents used to spend their powers on in 1914. It is curious how little reading and imagination prepares one for what the eyes see. The slag-heaps are more monstrous than I expected, and everything was different. I thought to find a village and I saw a big town, and instead of wreckage all the signs of prosperity. This last might be a delusive appearance, but apart from a few ruined houses there was nothing all the way to Charleroi but neat streets, often newly whitewashed, with German patterns on the slates sometimes. In Mons later on I paid four francs for an excellent lunch. It was surprising, too, that the fields seemed to be thoroughly well cultivated, although some of the land looked as if it had been turned over for the first time since the war. But superficially there was neatness and peace.

The tourist, too, will hardly find, as I did, dejected German soldiers sweeping the roadway outside Charleroi station under the stern eyes of a British corporal. I was to find German P.O.W. all over Belgium and France, always working, if not hard, yet continuously, and always very silent. They look well cared for, but unutterably bored (so for that matter are our Tommies who are scattered in little groups all over the war country. They stroll in the village streets, hands in pockets, with 'fed-upness' in every line of their honest faces). Charleroi has changed a German for a British