Page:The Yankee and the Teuton in Wisconsin.djvu/68

 intellectual achievements of the German people, whose governments at the time of his emigration in 1841 seemed to him a compound of despotism and inefficiency.

Doubtless there were Germans of the immigration to Wisconsin who knew not Goethe, or if in a hazy way they did know who he was, had no intellectual right to judge his merits. But the more intelligent were sure to possess some knowledge of the writings of their greatest poet and of lesser men who still were great in the world's estimation. Hence it was that Germans who at that period went to the new world, while acknowledging by their flight the political, economic, and social obstacles to a successful life in Prussia, Bavaria, Baden, Westphalia, or Luxemburg, were always able to maintain a self-respecting attitude when confronted with the pretensions of those Americans who were unsympathetic, jingoistic, or boastful. German immigrants might grant much to superior cleverness, to the stupendous achievements of a liberty loving race, domiciled in a peaceful continent and dowered with free lands and boundless opportunity; but they remembered that William Tell and Faust and The Laocoön were written by Germans.

Though many immigrants were far from being literary, they doubtless possessed, on the average, a knowledge of German masterpieces fully equivalent to the knowledge which Americans possessed of the English Classics. For education was looking up, and while most of the immigrants from German states, like those from other European countries, were of the peasant class, which was usually the most backward, still by 1840 nearly all were sure to have enjoyed some systematic schooling. At an earlier period this might have been otherwise. The condition of limited serfdom, removed but a generation earlier, operated powerfully to neutralize such benevolent plans for universal instruction as kings