popular Government, and it did a fatal injury to Germany by helping to split the Socialist party. Thirdly German Liberals failed because their leaders were men grown middle-aged and muddle-headed in hopeless opposition. They had consequently neither the energy nor the experience for popular leadership. And fourthly they failed because the peculiar combination of nationalism and internationalism that constitutes Liberalism was deprived of all prestige with the German people by the policy followed at Paris. This policy made it almost impossible for a German to hold any middle position between extreme nationalism and extreme internationalism. Weimar lost its best chance of acceptance when the German parliamentary State was excluded from the League of Nations.

And yet Weimar and German Liberalism had everything in its favour in the autumn of 1918. The reactionary factors that had so little difficulty in stultifying the Liberalism of Bethmann-Hollweg, von Kühlmann, and their predecessors were cancelled for the time being. Parliamentary government on the party system, the form of government developed by Liberalism on the English model, never having had a trial in Germany was accepted by nearly all political minds as the panacea. The minority of extremists who already advocated Council Government on the Russian model as the only political system that could realise the revolution had not as yet converted any large body of workmen. The Trades Unions held the workmen to the parliamentary system, and only some of the soldiers and most of the sailors were really revolutionary. The idea that the Soldiers' and Workmen's Councils could be anything more than a mere improvisation for destruction and could have any constructive, still more constitutional, function never entered the heads of any political thinker. Even Liebknecht joined the Coalition Provisional Government and only withdrew on second thoughts that were probably those of the much more far-sighted Rosa Luxemburg. The surrender of their authority by the Peoples' Commissaries to the Constituent Assembly in December was received without criticism, and the subsequent similar surrender by the Central Council passed almost without comment. Germany was to have the most liberal of constitutions and that was to be enough for the realisation of the German revolution and for the reconciliation of the enemies of Germany. It was only as the weeks and months passed and it became evident that German Liberalism, whether expressed in the diplomatic ideals or the democratic institutions of Weimar, was doing nothing either for the revolution or the reconciliation, that the German workmen began to pass over to the revolutionaries. Then, before very long, this political process expressed itself in local strikes and street fighting. The centre of political disturbance and development moved away from the theatre at Weimar to the streets of Berlin and of the industrial towns.

No doubt it was good policy in one way to transfer the Constituent Assembly to Weimar. An Assembly whose vitality is that of an elderly politician after a contested election and whose voice is that of a tired lawyer talking in his sleep, could not make itself heard, still less felt, against the violence, and volleyings of modern Berlin. Whether its work will be worth much must depend on how slow things move. They could easily move too fast for the pace of the Assembly. But at least as Dr. Preuss said to me of his Constitution—"it will not get in the way of anything better." One thing was certain, that the Assembly rested for its sanction, even for its survival, on the Government, not the Government on the Assembly.

And listening to a deputy in the Tribune reading a treatise on Constitutional niceties as to federation and free-state-rights, I think of the previous afternoon, when I was listening to a street orator in Halle shouting very nasty and unconstitutional tirades about food and freedom to an armed party of soldiers and workmen about to attack the Government troops. And then, again, I think of an afternoon in the Weimar Theatre a quarter of a century ago. A prominent member of the stock company of these days was an old horse blind of one eye—who was always led on with his blind side to the footlights. On this occasion he got turned round, and realised for the first time what a fool they'd made of him for years—and the rest was chaos and the curtain.

The Constituent Assembly has determined the Constitutional future of Germany, but the fate of Germany has not been decided there. The struggle between revolution and repression has not been fought out between the stalls and the stage of the Weimar Theatre, but in Berlin and the other big towns where the Government speaks with minenwerfer and machine-guns, and the Opposition obstruct with barricades. While the pressure of general strikes and local street fighting has won a constitutional recognition for socialising property and for sanctioning the council system never contemplated by the most revolutionary Parliamentarians, on the other hand class war has given reaction the support of the whole country against the working class.

The stagnant stodgy atmosphere of Weimar was very different from the starved and struggling air of Berlin. Though at first sight Berlin did not seem any more alive than Weimar. For Berlin to-day is a town of deserted temples and of dethroned gods. All along Unter den Linden—from the Temples of Mammon—the great hotels, to the Temple of Moloch—the imperial palace—everywhere is decay and dilapidation, an abomination of desolation in every façade and on every face. Mammon has indeed come off better than Moloch; for the palace and public buildings are shattered with shell and starred with shots and the balcony where the War-Lord appeared to his worshippers has a hole in the middle. Whereas the shrines of Mammon are full of worshippers from all quarters of the world. The hotel lobbies are crowded with vulture-like profiles brooding over the carcase of German economic enterprise.

Yet Berlin, though dirty and dilapidated, is by no means dead but the centre of the conflict between two faiths—two religions. For the revolution has ended the foreign war only to begin a civil war between nationalists and internationalists. On the one side, the Old Believers in the Orthodox Faith of nationalism, founded on wars of liberation, fomented by generations of political propaganda and excited to fanaticism by a war against the world. On the other side the new Dissenters of the revolution preaching internationalism and a Commune of Heaven in which only the poor shall have a place. In December internationalism was dominant in Berlin; nationalism was developing under pressures from Paris; while imperialism was dormant. For at this time in Paris the internationalism of Wilsonian principles was still counterbalancing imperialist and nationalist policies of the Allies. It was curious to note as the issues at Paris were decided one by one against internationalism how nationalism ousted internationalism from control of policy in Germany. By the time the Treaty of Versailles was published the old orthodox factor was again firmly established and the dissenters—the revolutionary internationalists—had been driven into the wilderness.

Any Sunday morning in Berlin during the sessions of the Paris Conference would probably have given more than one opportunity of observing the revival of the only real religion existing in modern capital cities—nationalism. On one Sunday I have in mind there were several protest meetings against the proposals reported from Paris for partitioning off German populations in the Saar district, West Prussia, Danzig, German Bohemia, and the Tyrol, and for preventing