August, 1914.  He remained at his post until the last moment and then left Germany a physical wreck from malnutrition.  In spite of the fact that he was an officer in the consular service of a neutral country, with ample means at his command, and standing in close personal relations with the authorities, he could not get enough to eat; and what he was forced to swallow—­lest he starve—­completely broke down his digestion.

On the other hand, he never ceased to observe; and having made friends of all classes of Germans, and been given facilities for observation and study of conditions enjoyed by few Americans in the Teutonic Empire at the time, he noted every phase and change, both subtle and manifest, through which these afflicted people passed during the first three years of the war.  They are in far worse case now.

Later (in November) I read an article by a German, J. Koettgen, in the New York Chronicle, which was even more explicit.

Herr Koettgen is one of the agents in this country of Hermann Fernau, an eminent intellectual of Germany, who escaped into Switzerland, and wages relentless war upon the dynasty and the military caste of Prussia; which he holds categorically responsible for the world war.  There is a price on Fernau’s head.  He dares not walk abroad without a bodyguard, and cannon are concealed among the oleanders that surround his house.  Not only has he written two books, Because I am a German, and The Coming Democracy, which if circulated in Germany would prick thousands of dazed despairing brains into immediate rebellion, but he is the head of those German Radical Democrats which have united in an organization called “Friends of German Democracy.”

Their avowed object, through the medium of a bi-weekly journal, Die Freie Zeitung, and other propaganda, is to plant sound democratic ideas and ideals in the minds of German prisoners in the Entente countries, and to recruit the saner exiles everywhere.  These publications reach men and women of German blood whose grandfathers fled from military tyranny after their abortive revolution in 1848, and, with their descendants, have enjoyed freedom and independence in the United States ever since.  The best of them are expected to exert pressure upon their friends and relatives in Germany.  There are already branches of this epochal organization in the larger American cities.

Herr Koettgen (who has written a book called The Hausfrau and Democracy, by the way) walked into the office of the Chronicle some time in November and presented a letter to the editor, Mr. Fletcher.  In the course of the heated conversation that ensued, Herr Koettgen exclaimed with bitter scorn:  “Oh, so you think yourself as fiercely anti-German as a man may be?  Well, let me tell you that you are not capable of one-tenth the passionate hatred I feel for a dynasty and a caste that has made me so ashamed of being a German that I could eat the dust.”