(undernourishment), producing rickety children, consumptive girls, and men out of whom vitality had gone. They stinted and scraped on miserable substitutes, and never had enough to eat. Yet they were the people who for two years at least had denounced the war, had sent up petitions for peace, and had written to their men in the trenches about the Great Swindle and the Gilded Ones. They were powerless, as some of them told me, because of the secret police and martial law. What could they do against the government, with all their men away at the front? They were treated like pigs, like dirt. They could only suffer and pray. They had a little hope that in the future, if France and England were not too hard, they might pay back for the guilt of their war lords and see a new Germany arise out of its ruin, freed from militarism and with greater liberties. So humble people talked to us when I went among them with a friend who spoke good German, better than my elementary knowledge. I believed in their sincerity, which had come through suffering, though I believed that newspaper editors, many people in the official classes, and the old military caste were still implacable in hatred and unrepentant.