“Certainly the Kaiser will come back,” she insisted. “We need our Kaiser; we _need_ princes, to govern the Empire. What are Ebert and all that crowd? _Handarbeiter_, hand workers, and nothing more. It is absurd to think that they can do the work of rulers. We need our princes, who have had generations of training in governing. _Siehst du_, I will give you an example. We have been _Handelsgärtner_ for generations. Hermann knows all about the business of gardening, because he was trained to it as a boy, _nicht wahr_? Do you think a man who had never planted a cabbage could come and do Hermann’s work? _Ausgeschlossen!_ Well, it is just as foolish for a _Handarbeiter_ like Ebert to attempt to become a ruler as it would be for one of our princes to try to run Hermann’s garden.
“Germany is divided into three classes—the rulers, the middle class (to which _we_ belong), and the proletariat or hand-workers, which includes Ebert and all these new upstarts. It is ridiculous to be getting these distinctions all mixed up. Leave the governing to the princes and their army officers and the Junkers. We use the nickname ‘Junker’ for our noble gentlemen, von Bernstorff, for instance, who is well known in America, and all the others who have a real right to use the ‘von’ before their names, whose ancestors were first highway robbers and then bold warriors, and who are naturally very proud”—she evidently thought this pride quite proper and fitting. “Then our army officers are chosen from the very best families and can marry only in the _gelehrten_ class, and only then if the girl has a dowry of at least eight hundred thousand marks. So they preserve all the nobility of their caste down through every generation and keep themselves quite free from middle-class taint—the _real_ officers I am speaking of, not the _Reservisten_, who are just ordinary middle-class men, merchants and doctors and teachers and the like, acting as officers during the war. _Those_ are the men who are trained to govern, and the only ones who _can_ govern.”
[Illustration: GERMANS READING THE PEACE-TERMS BULLETINS BEFORE THE OFFICE OF THE “LOKAL ANZEIGER,” ON UNTER DEN LINDEN]
[Illustration: A CORNER OF THE EX-KAISER’S PALACE AFTER THE SPARTICISTS GOT DONE WITH IT]