If I were forced to answer definitely myself I should say that most educated Germans want nothing more to do with the Kaiser and his family. Their reply to a query on this point is most apt to be an energetic, “_Ausgeschlossen!_” On the question of no monarchy at all they are by no means so decided. Naturally there is still a monarchical class left; there still is even in France. “A vote would probably give a small majority for the monarchy to-day,” said a young psychologist. “I have no politics myself; a psychologist must keep his mind clear of those squabbles, as an engineer must his gears of sand, but at least the Hohenzollerns gave us peace and quiet, and while there were some unpleasant things about their system, they now seem slight in comparison with what the war has brought us.... The German people are really democratic (_sic!_), but they are also monarchical; they want a paternal government, such as they have been used to during all the living generations. But we shall probably remain a republic now.”
Said the peasant innkeeper already introduced: “The monarchy is probably the best system for us; it fits our mentality and training. But now that we have changed there is no use in changing back again. There is not enough difference between the two schemes of government. So we shall probably stay what we are. The great trouble with this king and prince business”—he lived in Saxe-Weimar, where every seventh man used to wear a crown—“was that it was so _übertrieben_, so overdone, with us. They demanded such swarms of _Beamters_, of employees, courtiers, uniforms. And all their petty little nobles! We peasants don’t mind supporting a few such decorations, but.... Now the Kaiser gets eighty thousand marks a year instead of twenty-four million, and I doubt if he is suffering from hunger—which is less than can be said for many of the people he left behind.”
Possibly the most frequently expressed opinion in the length and breadth of Germany was the frank, “It does not much matter what kind of a government we have so long as we can get wise and honest men at the top.” That, after all, is the final answer to the whole problem that has been teasing the world for centuries. “Remember,” smiled a Dutchman, “that this democracy you are shouting about is no new American discovery. We tried a republic centuries ago, and we still have it, though now under a hereditary president called a king—or just now a queen—and we find that works best of all.” “We are like birds just let out of a lifetime cage,” protested a Socialist. “Give us time to try our wings. We shall fly much better two years from now. There was a strong republican feeling in Germany long before the war, but the Kaiser and his crowd ruthlessly strangled it.” “How fair, how revolutionary, how socialistic is the ‘new’ Germany,” raged the Independent Socialists, “is shown by the acquittal of the assassins of Liebknecht and Luxembourg contrasted with the death-sentence of Leviné, who was no more a ‘traitor against the constituted authorities’ than was Hoffmann, who drove him out, or those who upset the monarchy and established the ‘republic.’”