Page:The Yankee and the Teuton in Wisconsin.djvu/74

 virtues with which in school if not at home all were indoctrinated. Thrift and industry were additional but fundamental virtues which were widely diffused. It is hard for an empty sack to stand upright. The reason why in America a German's note was more often worth face value than that of some other classes was because the German usually labored unceasingly and saved what he earned, thus enabling him to meet his obligation.

They were not all saints, these Germans, and in the matter of personal morality the Prussians particularly seem in those days to have deserved much of the criticism directed against them. However, it is not necessary to regard even the Prussians as more lax than most other continentals, and their character is always explainable as a vulgarized aping of the low if gilded immoralities of court and aristocracy. Matters of this sort do not lend themselves readily to statistical inquiry. But it can hardly be doubted that in France, Prussia, Austria, or any other country of continental Europe the private morals of the common people were better on the whole than those of the upper classes. In America, where immigrants from those countries came into contact with a self-governing people of simple habits and prevailingly high ideals of personal conduct, though with numerous individual divergences from the type, sharp attention was bound to be directed to this feature in the character of foreigners, and the Germans attracted their full share of suspicion and disfavor from the stricter sort of Americans.

Such suspicions were heightened by certain social customs of the Germans to which Americans reacted adversely. Sunday