"Certainly," said Hellar; "why should it be otherwise? We are an absurd people, because we have always laughed at the wrong things. Still this principle is very old and has not always been confined to the Germans. After the revolutions in the Twentieth Century the American plutocrats employed poverty-stricken European nobility for servants and exalted them to high stations and obeyed them explicitly in all social matters with which their service was concerned. "The labourers restored William III because they wished to have an exalted servant. He led them to war and became a hero. He reorganized the state and became their political servant, also their emperor and their tyrant. It is not an impossible relation, for it is not unlike the relation between the mother and the child or between a man and his mistress. And yet it is different, more formal, with functions better defined. "The Emperor is the administrative head of the government and we intellectuals are merely his hirelings. We are merely the feathers of the Royal eagle, our colour is black, we have no part in the red blood of human brotherhood, we are outcasts from the socialistic labour world--for we receive money compensation to which labourers would not stoop. But labour owns the state. This roof of Berlin over our heads and all that is therein contained, is the property of the workers who produced it." I shook my head in mute admission of my lack of comprehension. "And who," asked Hellar, "did you think owned Berlin?" I confessed that I had never thought of that. "Few of our intellectual class have ever thought of that," replied Hellar, "unless they are well read in political history. But at the time of the Hohenzollern restoration labour owned all property in true communal ownership. They did not release it to the Royal House, but merely turned over the administration of the property to the Emperor as an agent." These belated explanations of the fundamental ideas of German society quite confused and confounded me, though Hellar seemed in no wise surprised at my ignorance, since as a chemist I had originally been supposed to know only of atoms and valences and such like matters. Seeking a way out of these contradictions I asked: "How is it then that labour is so powerless, since you say that it owns the state, and even the Emperor rules by its permission?" "Napoleon--have you ever heard of him?" "Yes," I admitted--and then recalling my role as a German chemist I hastened to add--"Napoleon was a directing chemist who achieved a plan for increasing the food supply in his day by establishing the sugar beet industry."