Page:Points of View (1924).pdf/252

 bottom, bringing over his young family in 1854, entering the children in school and swiftly adapting the ways of his household to the spirit of a new community. On the persuasion of a Baptist minister, the boys were sent to a Baptist Sunday School, but, remarks Mr. Straus significantly: "My main religious instruction came from conversations with my father and from the discussions the ministers of various denominations had with him, which I always followed with great interest." This Bavarian peddler, who seems to have had Franklin's attraction for "ministers of various denominations," had brought into the country something more than the small merchant's stock in trade; he had brought an ability to explain to the hard-shell, slaveryupholding Southern Baptists that the Bible is an his torical record, requiring historical interpretation, and that the Biblical sanction of slavery is a shaky foundation for modern institutions.

If one were to single out the dominant trait in the Straus family, which was to be most strikingly represented in Oscar Straus, it would be the instinct for civility in its broadest sense, including the duties of good citizenship and considerably more than the average sensual man's preference of intelligence to force in the adjustment of human relations. This instinct reveals itself at the outset in the promptitude with which the family allied itself with whatever intellectual and spiritual elements a small Georgia town afforded, in its appreciation of Southern courtesy and hospitality, in its dislike of slavery,