of lockers. Again I came to other barracks where the men were not yet
asleep but were straggling in and sitting about on the lowest bunks of
these sterile makeshift homes.

I then came into a district of mess halls where a meal was being served.
Here again was absolute economy and perfect system. The men dined at
endless tables and their food like the material for their labours, was
served to the workers by the highly efficient device of an endless
moving belt that rolled up out of a slot in the floor at the end of the
table after the manner of the chained steps of an escalator.

From the moving belts the men took their portions, and, as they finished
eating, they cleared away by setting the empty dishes back upon the
moving belt. The sight fascinated me, because of the adaptation of this
mechanical principle to so strange a use, for the principle is old and,
as every engineer knows, was instrumental in founding the house of
Detroit Vehicle Kings that once dominated the industrial world. The
founder of that illustrious line gave the poorest citizen a motor car
and disrupted the wage system of his day by paying his men double the
standard wage, yet he failed to realize the full possibilities of
efficiency for he permitted his men to eat at round tables and be served
by women! Truly we of the free world very narrowly escaped the fetish of
efficiency which finally completely enslaved the Germans.

Each of the long tables of this Berlin dining hall, the ends of which
faced me, was fenced off from its neighbours. At the entrance gates were
signs which read "2600 Calories," "2800 Calories," "3000 Calories"--I
followed down the line to the sign which read "Maximum Diet, 4000
Calories." The next one read, "Minimum Diet 2000 Calories," and thence
the series was repeated. Farther on I saw that men were assembling