A neutral baby has, therefore, appeared on the scene. It is a case for the League of Nations to decide, We can only hope they will find it possible to give it the status of a "good European."
The first day in Munich was marked by police inspection in bed. The police come early to the hotels so as to catch people before they have got up and gone out. The only people who are immune are Bavarians. If you are a foreigner, even if you are a German from another part of Germany--a Saxon, a Prussian, a Westphalian, it is all the same, you must present yourself at the police-station and obtain permission to reside in Munich. This means some hours in a stuffy room. You must write a request for the permission in German and bring it some hours later and answer the usual set of questions and be charged 150 marks. I said I had not come to Germany to study the police system, and so by dint of perseverance cut through half the formalities and the waiting time and got away. An official wrote the request and even signed it for me himself. Nowhere is red-tape more absurd than when it is being wound by a defeated nation after a great war.
Bavaria is encouraged to think of herself as a separate country. French policy foreshadows an independent State of Southern Catholics. With that in view a French minister plenipotentiary has been sent to Munich, and we British have just followed the French suit by appointing our diplomatic representative also. Bavaria is not supposed to enter into foreign relationships except through the Reich. To this Bavaria has remained loyal. She has stood by the Reich even when the Reich has protested an inability to control her. The appointment of the French plenipotentiary was, therefore, taken as a calculated provocation and the minister was accorded a very hostile greeting in the Press. This annoyed him much, and he put it down, not to the general unpopularity of French policy, but to the secret intrigue of the British who, as it happens, are unusually intimate with Munich editors. The rivalry of English and French in diplomatic action is as marked here as it is in other capitals of Europe. Here, also, the natural antipathy which French chauvinism arouses locally is thought to be aggravated by British Intrigue. Our diplomats are given credit for being much more active than they are.