now, with coupons entitling him to so many grams a day--about four
pounds a week--which the waiter or baker tears off when the customer
gets his bread. Without these cards not so much as a crumb can be had
for love or money. Yet with all this stiff and not unamusing red tape
your morning coffee and bread and butter costs from thirty pfennigs
(seven and one-half cents) in one of the Berlin "automats" to one mark
fifty pfennigs (thirty-seven cents) in the quiet of the best hotels.

Meat is plentiful and cheap, particularly beef, and in any of the big,
popular "beer restaurants," so common in Berlin, an ordinary steak for
one person costs from thirty-five to fifty cents. Pork, the mainstay of
the poorer people, is comparatively expensive, because hogs have been
made into durable hard sausages for the army, and potatoes, also
expensive, have been bought up in large quantities by the government, to
be sold in the public markets to the poor, a few pounds to each person,
at a moderate price. There are said to be eight hundred thousand
prisoners now in Germany, and the not entirely frivolous suggestion has
been made that the hordes of hungry Russians captured in the east are
more dangerous now than they were with guns in their hands. Yet there
are no visible signs of such poverty as one will see in certain parts of
London or Chicago in times of peace, and a woman in charge of one of the
soup-kitchens where people pinched by the war get one substantial meal a
day at ten pfennigs told me there was no reason for any one in Berlin
going hungry. Meanwhile, the scarcity of flour only adds fuel to the
people's patriotism, and they are told everywhere on red placards that
England never can starve them out if every German does his economical
duty. Where so much thinking is done for the people, and done so
efficiently, it is difficult not to feel that everything is somehow
"arranged," and one finds it difficult to become acutely anxious while
the hundreds of crowded cafes are running full blast until one o'clock