Clubs are illegal in Germany, and the humblest working-men’s cafes are attended by spies.  In my researches in the Berlin East-end I often visited these places and shared my adulterated beer and war bread with the working folk—­all of them over or under military age.

One evening a shabby old man said rather more loudly than was necessary to a number of those round him:—­“I am tired of reading in the newspapers how nice the war is.  Even the Vorwaerts (then a Socialist paper) lies to us.  I am tired of walking home night after night and finding restaurants turned into hospitals for the wounded.”

He was referring in particular to the great Schultheiss working-men’s restaurants in Hasenheide.  His remarks were received with obvious sympathy.

A couple of nights later I went into this same place and took my seat, but it was obvious that my visit was unwelcome.  I was looked at suspiciously.  I did not think very much of the incident, but ten days later in passing I called again, when a lusty young fellow of eighteen, to whom I had spoken on my first visit, came forward and said to me, almost threateningly, “You are a stranger here.  May I ask what you are doing?”

I said:  “I am an American newspaper correspondent, and am trying to find out what I can about the ways of German working folk.”

He could tell by my accent that I was a foreigner, and said:  “We thought that you had told the Government about that little free speaking we had here a few days ago.  You know that the little old man who was complaining about the restaurants being turned into hospitals has been arrested?”

This form of arrest, by which hundreds of people are mysteriously disappearing, is one of the burning grievances of Germany to-day.  In its application it resembles what we used to read about Russian police.  It has created a condition beneath the surface in Germany resembling the terrorism of the French Revolution.  In the absence of a Habeas Corpus Act, the victim lies in gaol indefinitely, while the police are, nominally, collecting the evidence against him.  One cannot move about very long without coming across instances of this growing form of tyranny, but I will merely give one other.

A German family, resident in Sweden, were in correspondence with a woman resident in Prussia.  In one of her letters she incautiously remarked, “What a pity that the two Emperors cannot be taught what war really means to the German peoples.”  She had lost two sons, and her expression of bitterness was just a feminine outburst, which in any other country, would have been passed by.  She was placed under preventive arrest and is still in gaol.

The police are armed with the censorship of the internal postal correspondence, telegrams and telephones.  One of the complaints of the Social Democrat members of the Reichstag is that every movement is spied upon, and their communications tampered with by what they call the “Black Chamber.”