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known later as Federgeld—feather money. He was the precise duplicateof innumerable men of the same stripe and character who maybe found in this country at any time.Dr. Dingfelder was a gloomy philosopher who foresaw nothing lessthan the downfall of human nature through the failure of productionand who was fond of picturing in dark colors the final dreadfulcatastrophe when Nature herself would go on strike, her fruitsgrowing less and the rest devoured by vermin.Karl Harrer, the journalist, was a moderate man, who did not likethe talk he heard against the Jews. Hermann Esser, on the otherhand, a precocious philosopher, was a valiant Jew-hater and haranguedsmall groups on street corners with a confused mixture ofanti-Semitism and socialism. Here was a nondescript flock which,with no common philosophy and, while neither wicked nor deranged,was quite as dangerous because of its ignorance. Its members werethe type usually described in this country as crackpots. They musteredrecruits. There was a definite socialist tinge to their councilsand the recruits were mostly socialists or ex-socialists or syndicalistsin search of some similar banner. The group could have been duplicatedin a score of other spots in Munich. There was no man so poorthat he might not found, like Anton Drexler, the locksmith, apolitical party. The others, however, lacked what the GermanWorkers' party had, and that was Adolf Hitler.What was Hitler's contribution of doctrine to all this? It amountedliterally to nothing. His social program might be summed up asfollows: That the socialists were scoundrels, the Jews scoundrels, theGerman race is the greatest race, the Versailles Treaty must be destroyed,Germany's army must be restored, the Social Democratsmust be driven from power.But all this has little to do with social organization or solvingthe problems of Germany at that time. It is doubtful if he had anyother views than such as might pop up from time to time. In MeinKampf he confesses that he had rather liked social democracy. "Thefact that it finally endeavored to raise the standard of living of theworking class—in those days my innocent mind was foolish enoughto believe this—seemed to speak rather in its favor." 1 But it is clear*Mein Kampf. Reynal & Hitchcock American translation, 1940.129