A few months ago, after one of my secretaries had been called to the army; I employed another.  He had been earning only $7 a week and had to support his wife.  On this money they ate at the middle class cafes.  In six months he had lost twenty pounds.

Because the food is so scarce and because it lacks real nourishment people eat all the time.  It used to be said before the war that the Germans were the biggest eaters in Europe—­that they ate seven meals a day.  The blockade has not made them less eaters, for they eat every few hours all day long now, but because the food lacks fats and sugars, they need more food.

Restaurants are doing big business because after one has eaten a “meal” at any leading Berlin hotel at 1 o’clock in the afternoon one is hungry by 3 o’clock and ready for another “meal.”

Last winter the Socialists of Munich, who saw that the rich were having plenty of food and that the poor were existing as best they could in food kitchens, wrote Chancellor von Bethmann-Hollweg and demanded the immediate confiscation of all food in Germany, even that in private residences.

The Socialists’ demand was, as are most others, thrown into the waste basket because men like the Chancellor, President Batocki, of the Food Department, wealthy bankers, statesmen and army generals have country estates where they have stored food for an indefinite period.  They know that no matter how hard the blockade pinches the people it won’t starve them.

When the Chancellor invites people to his palace he has real coffee, white bread, plenty of potatoes, cake and meat.  Being a government official he can get what he wants from the food department.  So can other officials.  Therefore, they were willing to disregard the demand of the Bavarian Socialists.

But the Socialists, although they don’t get publicity when they start something, don’t give up until they accomplish what they set out to do.  First, they enlisted the Berlin Socialists, and the report went around to people that the rich were going to Copenhagen and bringing back food while the poor starved.  So the Government had to prohibit all food from coming into Germany by way of Denmark unless it was imported by the Government.

That was the first success of the Bavarian Socialists.  Now they have had another.  Batocki is reported as having announced that all food supplies will be confiscated.  The Socialists are responsible.

Excepting the very wealthy and those who have stored quantities of food for the “siege,” every German is undernourished.  A great many people are starving.  The head physician of the Kaiserin Augusta Victoria Hospital, in Berlin, stated that 80,000 children died in Berlin in 1916 from lack of food.  The Lokal-Anzeiger printed the item and the Foreign Office censor prohibited me from sending it to New York.