of young girls, who had at all times found it difficult to make ends meet, were thrown upon the streets. Charitable organizations did their best to deal with the situation. Cheap kitchens sprang up in all quarters of the town, and the most famous of those organizations, the "Lina Morgenstein," issued an appeal for premises where their relief kitchens could be established. Satisfying meals began to be provided at astonishing prices; young girls thrown out of work could obtain a full meal for prices as low as a penny-halfpenny and as high as fourpence. Side by side with this army of girls there was another, even more pitiable class, for whom it was difficult to make any satisfactory arrangement. This was the great class of lodging-house keepers, proprietors of pensions, and still more of women who had subsisted by letting rooms to factory girls and foreigners.
The city of Berlin, in particular, began suddenly to realize to what extent it had depended upon Russians, Americans, Swedes, and other foreigners. Whole classes of its female population, with scores of tradesmen, found themselves faced, not only by ruin, but by actual lack of food to appease their hunger, and the government was compelled — earlier, probably, than had been supposed — to step in to save these people from sheer starvation.
Very soon, too, it became clear to Germans everywhere what had been effected by the silent, unsensational work of the British fleet. In all directions the military governors had to announce that great restrictions must be placed upon the use of electricity, coal, gas, and so forth. Largely with this object an order was issued suspending inter-urban traffic after midnight. It is true that the dancing halls of the city, which had given Berlin its peculiar cachet, were allowed to keep open their doors in many instances, but they were forbidden to employ orchestras playing ragtime tunes, they were compelled to reduce their lighting plant, and a sharp control was exercised upon the supply of alcoholic beverages. To all intents and purposes the stopping of tram and train service after midnight put an end to the night life of Berlin. The business of the civil population, as the military government conceived it, was not to keep things going, but to discontinue almost all forms of relaxation involving expenditure. Electric light advertisements, illuminated sky signs, and excessive illumination of shop-windows were either forbidden or greatly restricted.