Page:The Yankee and the Teuton in Wisconsin.djvu/80

 graces or exceptional social virtues of the parents, and little except the memory of a parent's high respectability to distinguish them from the farmer sons of the clumsiest peasant.

However, this is but half the story. If the superior Germans reared families incapable of remaining on their own social plane, other types of Germans, who in their own persons counted for less, frequently had the happiness to see their children advance to a position perceptibly higher than their own. Natural gifts, industry, the social opportunities which yield to the key of economic success availed much. Sometimes the presence of a good school, a wise and helpful pastor or some other worthy friend gave the necessary impulse. The process, in fact, does not differ essentially from that which, throughout American pioneer history, has enabled the deserving to press forward and permitted the weak, indolent, or vicious to fall behind in the social competition. It is impossible to say how many German families made a step, or several steps, upward, and how many others slipped back. The delinquents may perhaps exceed the meritorious in number, but probably not, and the impression that the children of German immigrants shame their parents is almost certainly an illusion which would be likely to disappear if the facts were fully known.

The social institutions of Wisconsin, based on the earlier Yankee and southwestern immigrations, were profoundly influenced by the German immigration of the late forties and the fifties of last century. Milwaukee, the center of German influence (the Deutsche Athen), became a city in which the German language was spoken and read by many English speaking persons, in order to facilitate communication and trade with the numerically dominant German element. The Germans maintained advanced schools for instruction in both English and German; their parochial schools were conducted