It seems strange to think that I, an Australian, born in 1865, in Hobart, Tasmania, with a father an Irish seacaptain of County Armagh, should have spent so many years in exile in Prussia. For exile my Australian wife and I increasingly felt our sojourn there to be as the years went by. It must have been the Celtic strain in my blood that filled me, even as a boy, with a desire to visit "strange strandes." Later on Carlyle directed this romantic longing to Germany. Bach, Schubert and Beethoven completed the spell of my enchantment. A post-graduate scholarship in Modern Languages from the University of Melbourne made it possible for me to realize my dream and visit the old universities of Central Europe. So it came about that I found myself in Berlin, sitting at the feet of men like Zupitzka, Treitschke, Curtius and Herman Grimm. After an absence of nearly three years, spent partly in Italy and Greece, I returned to Australia, where I took up teaching as a profession. The life of a schoolmaster, however, under the conditions then prevailing, was uncongenial to me, and when after some years a lectureship at the University of Königsberg was offered me, through the mediation of my Berlin friend, Professor Herman Grimm, with whom I had remained in correspondence, I accepted it. A year later I was called to a similar post at the University of Berlin, a position which I retained until the outbreak of war in 1914. In the year 1908 the title of Professor was conferred upon me.

Herman Grimm was the only German with whom I ever formed a real friendship. He was, too, the only German I ever met who represented to me the Germany of my dreams. The son of one of those two brothers who

wrote the Fairy Tales, he always seemed to me to be the last representative of a great dying German tradition. Like an island he stood out against the inrushing tide of Prussian materialism. I understand now, as I did not in those days, Herman Grimm's reverence for Emerson and his desire to make Emerson known to Germany. He had formed a plan for a great translation of Emerson's works into German in which I was to collaborate with him, but in the early summer of 1901 death put an end to his Sisyphus visions and Young Germany took Nietzsche instead of Emerson as its mentor. . . . I still remember the look of quizzical distress on Grimm's face one day at table in 1900, when a certain typically Prussian Geheimrat X who was present described how he and his fellow-officers in the FrancoPrussian War had amused themselves by shying the champagne bottles they had just emptied against the old faïence stove of the château in which they were quartered. Joachim, the violinist, was there, and with Frau von Keudel had been playing Bach to us, and the story jarred.

From August 4, 1914, till May 23, 1917, I was a civil prisoner in the German capital. From November 6, 1914, till March 10, 1915, I was interned in that horrible place of cold, eternal twilight, hunger, and Prussian bullying which the German newspapers call the "idyllically situated English camp of Ruhleben." From the day of my release from the Camp till the day I left Berlin I was permitted to residestill of course as a civil prisonerunder police supervision in my own flat in the quiet little Flotow Strasse on the edge of the Tiergarten, so close to the Spree that the thousands of

seagulls which have of late taken to wintering in Berlin could daily wheel and scream round our balcony for food. The police-station at which my wife and I had to report ourselves twice daily (I applied in vain for permission to report myself only once a day) was fortunately just across the road from our house and the police and I came to tolerate each other good-humoredly as mutual bores. These officials could be pleasant enough, deceptively pleasant, on occasion, but I never forgot in dealing with them that underneath their correct uniform and their smiles lay the unscrupulous bully. Often enough I saw specimens of it in their treatment of the poorer classes and particularly of women who came to them with their humble grievances.

My wife and I were supposed to remain within our own four walls from 8 P.M. till 6 A.M. I must confess, however, and I can do so at this distance without trepidation, that my habits were more nocturnal during this period than they had ever been in times of peace; for, having suddenly become willy-nilly a man of leisure, I could, whenever I chose, go out in the evening to concert, theater, lecture or café, and I did so without further ado. It was in the cafés that I could see the English papers, our greatest solace in those long months of the Hun terror. How often did I wish, while reading the English parliamentary reports, that our Snowdens, Outhwaites, Ramsay Macdonalds and others of that ilk could change places with me for a while and perhaps be converted from their folly by knowing Germany and Germany's ruthless aspirations at firsthand. Occasionally Germans who saw me reading the English papers would take me for an American and ask me how I thought the War was going to end. Until experience showed me the absolute hopelessness, not to

say danger, of arguing against their prejudices, I used to try, as tactfully as possible, to put the standpoint of the Allies before them. Repeated observation, however, showed me that their minds were so inoculated with the dogmas of their own Press that they were absolutely immune to all outside influences and to all alien enlightenment. The constant reiteration by Chancellor, M.P.s and newspapers of the statement that Germany had been forced to take up arms in self-defense against an alliance of Powers jealous of German diligence, German science and German success, and bent upon Germany's overthrow and spoliation, had done its work. It thus came about that the German Government could, within a few months of the outbreak of war, allow café readers to have access to enemy newspapers with perfect safety. The Times, in spite of all the abuse the Germans shower upon it, is undoubtedly the most respected and the most attentively read and studied of all the English newspapers in Berlin. I even know of German schoolmasters who have The Times read and discussed in class as an English exercise by the boys in their Gymnasien. The Daily News and Manchester Guardian, though never seen in the cafés, are regarded as the most useful for purposes of quotation in the German Press. In some cafés, instead of The Times, one meets with the Daily Telegraph, or the Daily Mail.

As a rule English papers were at least five days old before we saw them, and one must add, there were frequent gaps, perhaps intentional, when they did not get through at all. In February 1917, when the U-boats began their new campaign, the cocksure waiters, who knew that I was English, rather laughed at me for imagining that the London papers would continue to come through. I

enjoyed their discomfiture when after a week or so they had once more to hand me out The Times. Its arrival, though irregular, showed that the seas were not yet entirely closed to British shipping, as the German public then fondly believed.

French and Italian papers, too, such as Le Figaro, Le Temps, Le Matin and the Corrière della Sera, were diligently read, as their thumbed and ragged appearance clearly signified. The Swiss, Dutch, and Scandinavian papers were also much in demand and I was sorry when the Censor's ban was put upon what the Germans called the "mendacious" Journal de Genève. American papers hung on the rack almost unread. No one ever seemed to read the Continental Times either, a paper printed in English and loudly proclaiming itself the only American organ on the Continent, a title which it has had to drop since America came in. This nondescript journal has, since the beginning of the War, been subsidized by the German Government and used for anti-English propaganda among the Irish and German-Americans. It is the property of a very chic Viennese woman, the divorced wife of an English journalist. In the early days of the War when all Germany was in a frenzy to shout what it called the "Truth" into American ears, this most virtuous lady could be seen in all her elegance, standing on the footpath outside the Hotel Adlon, trying to sell copies of her paper to the rich Americans then crowding the hotel en route for the United States. Near her as henchman stood a sandwichman flaunting the Stars and Stripes and carrying over his arm a sheaf of copies of this hireling journal which persisted with such effrontery in sailing under the American flag.

This tolerance of foreign newspapers did not extend, be it remarked, to

books or pamphlets frankly discussing in German the origins of the War. The book J'accuse, written by a German in German, was absolutely taboo throughout Germany. I had a copy lent me surreptitiously in Berlin, with much whispering and rolling of eyes to signify the danger of being caught with it in one's possession. Its own cover had been torn off and replaced by another bearing the innocent title Englische Grammatik für Anfänger-English Grammar for Beginners. At the house of a Socialist M.P. I was also shown, as a particular delicacy reserved only for the elect, a volume of Raemaekers' cartoons.

I remember, too, how at the house of an Independent Socialist, in the earlier days of the War, Dr. Karl Liebknecht stood forward with a copy of the English Blue Book in his hand, as the accuser of Germany's perfidy. With the strange mixture of meekness and apostolic fire that characterizes him, he mercilessly showed up the mendacity of the doctored reports of the German White Book, liber albus puris nivibus candidior. He alone of all the members of the Reichstag present on that tragic 4th of August had had intelligence and above all moral courage enough to protest against the Great Crime. "What," someone in the room asked him, "do you really suppose our Government reckoned with England's coming into the War?" "Goodness knows!" he said. "They are stupid enough for anything. But anyone with a grain of political insight must have seen that there was no other course open to England."

Liebknecht, as I saw from the way in which he quoted the Blue Book, was thoroughly familiar with English, and his beautiful and talented Russian wife, who was present, told me that he had spent much of his boyhood in England. I also learned from her that he was a direct descendant of