To this day the instrument stands a witness to the tradition of its maker’s fate; the group is immovable, and the few sounds the notes produce are worse than dumbness. Nicholas died two months after, in prison, his mind more and more delirious each day. It is said that, when Lemoinne heard of his death, he remarked to one of his associates:
“That man was the most perfect tool I ever knew. If I had sworn to him that I was a banker, a merchant, a usurer, a spy—an unscrupulous eccentric, whose one mania was the possession of secret power, and whose conscience was dead to any obstacle—he would still have believed in his own theory. But I own I overshot the mark and drove him too far.”
THE GERMAN ELEMENT IN THE UNITED STATES.
The social, moral, and political influence of the German-born and German-descended population of the United States upon their fellow-citizens has already been perceptible; that this influence will vastly increase in the future is highly probable. We may state here one of the many reasons for this belief. The intellectual and political leaders of the Germans in America have hitherto mainly confined their public utterances, in the press or on the platform, to the German language. The German newspapers are very numerous; their circulation is large; they are written for the most part with much ability; their treatment of social and political questions is often marked by a breadth of view and a soundness of logic too frequently wanting in many of their English contemporaries. Their influence upon the minds of their readers is also greater than that wielded by the majority of our newspapers printed in the English language. We have heard this fact attributed to the superior honesty with which the German press is conducted; but upon this delicate ground we shall not enter. Our point at present is that German thought and opinion, as expressed through the German periodical press, influence for the most part only the German population. Few of us who are not Germans read a German journal; what the German leaders in politics, morality, and literature are saying, day after day, is for the most part wholly unknown to the rest of us. Occasionally an American editor translates a leading article from a German journal and gives it to his readers; still more frequently he avails himself of the ideas and the arguments of his German contemporaries and reproduces them as his own.
In the next generation this state of things will be modified; more Americans will read German literature, and more Germans, or German-Americans, will write in English journals, speak in English at public conventions, and sit in our legislative assemblies. The barrier of language, which has hitherto tended to separate Germans from the rest of us to so great an extent, will gradually yield and disappear. The German language will be learned by increasing numbers of our non-German citizens; the common use of the German language by the German-Americans will be dropped, and the English tongue adopted in its stead, not only in business affairs, but in politics, literature, religion, and social intercourse. The English language has made many conquests, but in America it has only to hold its own. It is the language of the country, of the legislature, of the courts, of the markets and exchanges, and of society. Our German citizens must acquire it, or enter handicapped into all the relations of life.
The ability with which the German journals here are conducted does not prevent nearly the whole of them which are not avowedly Catholic from being inspired by an antagonism to religion. The genius of the German mind has little sympathy with socialism or communism, and the theories of socialism and communism find expression among our German citizens only through the writings or speeches of a few insignificant and uninfluential men in New York and some of our other large cities. But the German who is not a Catholic is most often an atheist; and he differs from the French atheist in wishing his wife and children to be atheists also. The non-Catholic German press faithfully represents this phase of the German mind; and it sneers at religion with the same pertinacity and often with more skill than is shown in a like direction by too many of our English-written newspapers.
The total immigration into the United States from the close of the War of Independence to the end of 1876 was 9,726,455 souls. The records of the government do not furnish an ethnological classification of all these; it is only since 1847 that this classification has been made. But every one knows that the bulk of our immigrants have come from Ireland and Germany. At the port of New York alone the total number of Irish immigrants from 1847 up to September 1 of the present year was 2,009,447; of German immigrants 2,345,486; of all others 1,265,240. An estimated classification of those arriving before 1847, added to the above figures, gives 2,463,598 Irish, 2,622,556 German, and 1,542,311 of other nationalities. The present Secretary of the Interior is the only American citizen of German birth who has ever held a cabinet appointment; we believe that he is the only citizen of German birth who has ever sat in the Senate. But among the senators at the last session of the Forty-fourth Congress there were seven who were either of foreign birth or the sons of foreigners; and in the lower House of the same assembly there appears to have been but one German to twelve naturalized citizens of other nationalities. The Secretary of the Interior owes the prominent political position which he fills less to his statesmanlike and philosophical acquirements than to his command of the English language and to his grace and power as a public speaker. No doubt there are among our German citizens many who are his equals in learning and political wisdom, but who are almost wholly unknown outside the German-speaking community, for the reason that they confine themselves, on the platform or in the press, to the use of the German language. The coming generation of Americans of German descent will not subject themselves to this disadvantage; and thus the influence of German thought will be widened and deepened.
Upon this portion of our subject we may as well reproduce in substance, although not with literal exactness, the observations made to us by a German ecclesiastic, a member of one of the German religious orders which are working here with so much zeal and success. In his opinion the German element now in the United States will ere long be greatly increased by a revival of immigration. Immigration from Germany may not again attain the vast proportions which it reached in 1852–53–54, nor during the seven memorable years 1866–1872, but it will still be very large. All other things being equal, the proportion of Catholics immigrating from Germany will be greater in the future than in the past. In looking at the future of the country we should reckon that the German element here will for many years to come steadily and rapidly increase. But it is not probable that, after the passing away of the present generation, our German population will so tenaciously retain its distinctive national or ethnological features. It will become absorbed in, amalgamated with, the rest of the community, but through this very absorption and amalgamation it will leaven the whole mass for good or for evil; and most probably the good will preponderate.
In our present German population, especially the younger portion of it, there is a very perceptible disposition to be a little ashamed of their German origin. This feeling, which has long existed, received a check during and immediately after the triumph of Germany over France in 1870 and the erection of the German Empire. But it has now revived and prevails with more force than before. Our German citizens feel that the golden apples of victory have turned to ashes in the grasp of the conquerors. The milliards wrung from France have sunk into the ground or vanished in the air, and Germany is poorer than before the war—much poorer than France, which Prince Bismarck imagined had been crushed into nothingness. All the glory that Germany won by her conquest of France in the field has been eclipsed by the peaceful victory of France—a victory the effects of which were made manifest at our International Exhibition last year. More serious still than this, in the opinion of the learned and acute ecclesiastic whom we are quoting, is the dislike and contempt with which the iniquitous, unnecessary, and tyrannical policy of the German government toward the church is regarded not only by Catholic Germans in America, but by those of their non-Catholic compatriots here who are not swayed by sectarian hatred of the church. This policy is justly regarded as at once an evidence of weakness and a prolific source of future trouble, and among the non-Catholic German-Americans the remark is common that “between the Red-coats and the Black-coats—the Communists and the Catholics—the empire is in great danger of destruction.” For these reasons, and other slighter ones, our German fellow-citizens are becoming less and less disposed to boast of their nationality, and more and more inclined to Americanize themselves and their children. The “Watch on the Rhine” gives place to “Yankee Doodle”; the suggestive inquiry as to the precise locality and boundaries of the Faderland is not so popular as “Hail Columbia.” Certain considerations of a utilitarian nature aid powerfully in leading our German citizens in the same direction. Their common sense enables them to see that their own advancement in life, and the prosperity and happiness of their children, materially depend upon their thorough Americanization—their complete identification with the rest of the community in which they live. The first step towards this end is the acquirement and use of the English language, and in this the children often outstrip the wishes of their parents. In the German-American schools, secular as well as religious, the study of the English language is compulsory, and necessarily so. The children appear to have a natural affinity for the English tongue; they acquire its use rapidly and soon begin to speak it in preference to their native language. It is not uncommon to meet with families where the parents address the children in German and the children reply in English. The truth is that the English language as now spoken, largely Teutonic in its composition and structure, but enriched and softened by Celtic, Latin, and Greek accretions, more easily adapts itself to the expression of the necessities, the emotions, and the ideas of the age. An amusing illustration of this self-asserting power of the English language was afforded by the experience of a village in Indiana, on the Ohio River, which was settled a few years ago by an exclusively German colony consisting of about three hundred families. Nothing but German was at first spoken in the houses, but in a very brief space of time the language in the streets was found to be English, and ere long that became the prevailing dialect of the place, appearing, as one of the residents said, to have sprung up and taken root there just as the weeds in the fields.