in the only place where he could study social health and social disease—hospitals, work-shops, babies' crèches, slum tenements. He was scornful of English officers and correspondents who summed up the social state of Germany after a stroll down the Hohestrasse, a gorge of ersatz pastry ("filth!" he said) in the tea-shops, and a dinner of four courses in a big hotel on smuggled food at fantastic prices.
"You might as well judge Germany by the guzzling swine in this place as England by a party of profiteers at Brighton. The poor middle-classes and the labourers stay indoors after their day's job, and do not exhibit their misery in the public ways."
"Real misery?" I asked. "Hunger?"
Dr. Small glowered at me through his goggles.
"Come and see. Come and see the mothers who have no milk for their babes, and the babes who are bulbous-headed, with rickets. Come and see the tenement lodgings where working-families sit round cabbage-soup, as their chief meal, with bread that ties their entrails into knots but gives 'em a sense of fulness , not enjoyed by those who have no bread. Man, it's awful. It tears at one's heart. But you needn't go into the slums to find hunger—four years of under-nourishment which has weakened growing girls so that they swoon at their work, or fall asleep through weakness in the tram-cars. In many of the big houses where life looks so comfortable, from which women come out in furs, looking so rich, these German people have not enough to eat, and what they eat is manufactured in the chemist's shop and the ersatz factories. I found that out from that girl, Elsa von Kreuzenach."
"How?" I asked.
"She is a nurse in a babies' crèche, poor child. Showed me round with a mother-look in her eyes, while all the
