The following account of events in Germany during the period from the Armistice to the Treaty of Versailles was written mostly in the summer of 1919. But the events of the succeeding period from the signature of the Treaty to its ratification during the autumn and winter call for no alteration and but little addition to the text. The six months hereinafter described from February to August were a—perhaps the—critical period for Germany and for Europe. It was the formative and creative stage for

When, in January, 1919, I resigned my commission and made my way out to Berlin as correspondent for the Daily News , I had two purposes in view. One was to find out to what extent we had really won the war—in the only way it could be won—by forcing the German people into revolution; and incidentally to take any opportunity that might offer of furthering that revolution. My second purpose was to find out what prospects there were of making a more or less permanent peace—in the only way it could b

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

The first result of the failure of German Liberalism and of the Weimar Assembly was that revolution and reaction came into active collision with each other in the provincial capitals. These two conflicts ran concurrently, and collision in the provinces was a necessary consequence of collision in the capital. Moreover, when the revolution had failed twice to assert itself by force in Berlin, it stood little chance of surviving in Bavaria, Brunswick, or Bremen. Such spontaneous and sporadic appeal

The mistake we are all making about Germany over here, and a very natural one, is that we can't realise what Germany to-day is like. While we are rapidly getting back to the material and mental conditions of pre-war days, Germany is daily getting farther and farther away from us. It is difficult to express the difference. We all know the curious psychological change that comes over our lives when the doctor tells us we must "give up"; how then in a moment, as we sink into bed, we are changed fro

From its present position and at its present pace the Weimar Parliament will never overtake events. I remember once as a boy pointing out to a cavalcade in red coats jogging along a by-lane that the hunt was off in a different direction. "The hounds, you mean," said an old gentleman severely; "we are the hunt," and they all jogged happily on. Meantime the dogs of war—of civil war between the constitutional and council movements, between Conservatives and Communists—are still running at a fearful

Coming back from Germany to Great Britain one finds oneself in the position of an explorer returned from a new world. For our Edwardian England knows to-day as little of the real conditions in Central Europe as Elizabethan England knew of Central Africa. And our Press cartoonists and Propaganda caricaturists have filled the blank spaces of our mental maps with fancy pictures of monsters whom they label Boches and Bolsheviks, Huns and Spartacists, just as did the old cartographers. Whereas these

Looking at the new German Constitution, without troubling about its inner meanings, and comparing it with the Constitution of 1871, we are struck at once by the very considerable advance it represents in democratic development. One need not be a constitutional lawyer to assert with confidence that this is the most democratic Constitution possessed by any of the principal European peoples, and to add that it seems to have avoided many of the mistakes that have been marked in other Republican Cons

Before the revolution of 9 November, 1918, the Constitution in force was that of 16 April, 1871—the "Constitution of the German Reich," which had replaced the "Constitution of the German Bund" of November, 1870. But the following Constitution has less in common with these later Constitutions, based on alliances between Sovereign Princes, than with the abortive "Constitution of the German Reich" of 28 March, 1849, which embodied the nationalist and democratic revolution of 1848. The November revo