of the revolution had been wasted; and the country, so far as its government was concerned, was back where it was when the revolution broke out, materially much the worse for its three months' excursion into revolution. In a word, the spirit of the new German Government was diplomatic not democratic. The revolution had come full circle and the Scheidemann Government of April might have been the Government of Max von Baden of six months before.

Morally, however, it was not the old Germany that had bowed before the "forty-seven Princes hats." It had brought back with it from the perilous peaks and bottomless abysses of revolution a wider outlook and a deeper insight. And if it returned from its adventure only more weary and wasted it had at least learned to lift up its eyes to the hills.

CHAPTER IIToC

THE REACTION

Just a quarter of a century ago I arrived in Weimar fresh from Eton, and as a budding diplomatist was invited to dinner by the Grand Duke. The ceremony was a credit to the Court of Pumpernickel. Exactly a week before there came caracoling to the door what might have been one of Napoleon's marshals, and was one of the Weimar army. For Weimar had then an army whose business it was to deliver invitations about a foot square.

Then on the evening itself and just half an hour before dinner, appeared a Court carriage and pair, in which you drove through the ancient Barbican of the Castle to a flourish of trumpets. Next came presentation to Serenissimus, a very big, very grand old gentleman, who was always urbanely inane except when he was inanely urbane. After that came presentation to the Grand Duchess, a very little, very grand old lady, who sat in a glass case. This was said to be on account of draughts, but she looked so fragile and precious that no maid could ever have been trusted with dusting her. The only time I ever saw her taken out of it was for a presentation of Orders of Merit to deserving domestics—an institution of her own which Royalty might adopt with advantage in these days when K.C.M.G.'s are commoner than kitchen maids.

And now arriving in Germany fresh from the Army, I was again invited to an evening party at the Schloss. But times have changed and the Schloss has been promoted from the seat of a Grand Duke of a mediatised and mediæval principality to the seat of government of a modern and middle-class German Republic.

The guard in the old Barbican no longer proclaimed my arrival on a trumpet, but presented a very business-like looking bayonet. Inside the Castle the State apartments were severely bare, as befits democratic simplicity. And instead of bland and blethering Serenissimus I was received by Scheidemann blandly, blandishingly serene. Instead of gold-laced grandees dining off gold plates I find a job lot of journalists bolting "belegte Brödchen"; and if there were fewer good things to be eaten there were many more to be heard. Everything struck me first as completely different and then as curiously the same as ever. Only the Dresden china Grand Duchess had no republican reincarnation.

And perhaps some day I shall find a still newer Weimar, the centre of a twentieth century Germany that will rise from the ashes of the nineteenth century and the dust of the eighteenth. Not the picturesque, poetic Weimar of the past, nor the practical, prosaic Weimar of the present, but a Weimar of wide vistas and broad views, in which Young Germany will learn to plan the future.

And as I dreamed of this new Weimar, walking back through the moonlit streets of the picturesque old town I was roused by the rumbling of field-guns on the march against the revolution. The drivers and gunners, hidden under their helmets and heavy cloaks, hunched on their saddles or huddled on the guns, were borne by slowly, silently, shapeless shifting shadows, passing out from the town where a few lights still shone, into the dark. The New Germany is not yet.

In the old days, when Weimar was only the German Stratford-on-Avon, the theatre was the centre of local society. The first thing you did on arrival was to present yourself and a box of cigars to the old gentleman in the box-office and get a seat for the season from which you could survey from a respectful distance the social lights on the stage and the serene luminaries in the Grand Ducal box.

But nowadays, when the stage of the Weimar Theatre has become the seat of Government, it is as hard to get a ticket for a session of the Assembly as it used to be for the Selamlik of Abdul Hamid. Incidentally, Germany is to-day much more like Turkey than its old, well-fed-up, well-fitted-out self. Dingy soldiers everywhere, dirt, decay and deprivation everywhere, listlessness and laissez-faire on the surface, with unrest and upheaval below.

But once inside the theatre things are not so different from the old days. The young ladies from the pensions can still "schwärmen" for the debonnaire premier Scheidemann or the distingué Brockdorff-Rantzau, or "schauern" at handsome Koenen, the saturnine Tribune of Halle, or at Merges, the hunchback tailor of Brunswick. But personally I find a Weimar "Full Session" about as entertaining and enlightening as was Weimar Grand Opera. A stout elderly gentleman advances to the centre of the stage and reads steadily and stolidly through a pile of typewritten recitative. The Independents, who go in for bravura and even gag a little, are now nearly always away on tour in the provinces. So the Assembly can continue daily from three to six digesting a pleasantly conservative Constitution and a pleasingly liberal lunch. For Weimar is an oasis of peace and plenty in a land swept by famine and fighting. Yet even the sleepy backwater of Thuringia has become a whirlpool of revolution, and Weimar was then ringed in by a region of revolutionary strikes that threatened it from three sides. One day a scouting party of Spartacists would be arrested at the station, on another the line to Berlin would be cut by a strike in some northern town.

The first week of the National Assembly was nominally occupied with such formal matters as appointing a President, voting the provisional constitution, pronouncements on foreign policy, and programmes of legislation. But naturally what most concerned everyone was the novel and fascinating business of Cabinet-making. The game was played with great spirit up to the finish, and the night before the final announcement had to be made the Cabinet was once more reconstructed.

It was hard on Germany that its first-born Cabinet should have been triplets, a trinity of the three co-eternal and co-equal parties—radical, neutral, and reactionary. But if the present political system was to be maintained and given a majority its Social-Democratic supporters had to be reinforced from the two parties next to the right, the Democrats and the Centre. For the Independent Socialists to the left were intransigent and in voting power insignificant.

So, after a long haggle between the party leaders as to the number and nature of the posts each party was to have, there followed another hard fight as to the persons each party should nominate for their posts.

It would have required a strong Government to reconstitute the German polity, reconstruct society, restore solvency, and revive economic vitality, especially after so much of the momentum of the revolution had been