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Show y THE GERMAN RACE. Professor Haeckel of Jena, is quoted as saying that the best of the German race has been driven out of Germany, and has come to the United States. He thinks the Germans who have remained re-mained at home are inferior to those of a generation genera-tion ago, and believes that the power of the race is declining. We suspect that the learned German has been led into a natural error. He sees that German-born German-born men who have been a good many years in the United States are superior to the Germans of their own age in Fatherland, and concludes that the best must have come away. He does not consider con-sider the changed conditions. Take two Irish lads alike in age and intelligence; confine one to the little narrow round of his own country, let the other come to this country and make him porter m a Rockefeller warehouse and then compare them after twenty years. The chances are that the one left at home has not changed except to grow twenty years older, with all his narrow prejudices crystalized into that condition which makes him think that to shoot a landlord is a virtue, while the other will be found at the head of some great department, an alert, invaluable factor in the business. It will not do to say that the best came away, and that the race is degenerating. In the heart of one is hereditary despair, in the other a great hope has been born and he confidently ex pects that his boy, born in this country, will some day be president of the United States, or at least a captain of police. With that hope in his soul is it not natural that he has expanded into a first-class first-class man, good for any call upon him, either in peace or in war? , Take two German boys of like calibre; keep one at home on five acres of land, toilhlg fourteen hours a day in order to barely live, bring the other to these shores, let him work at generous wages for a year, let him then go upon the public lands and locate 160 acres, all to be his, then bring those two together after twenty years and mark the difference. The one is just what he was twenty years ago, except that he has twenty years less work in him, the other is independent; he has a fine home, money in the bank and his daughters wear modern boots and gowns. One has remained stationary, the other has caught the full inspiration inspira-tion of this free land and taken on a self-respect and dignity, and his heart is warmed by hopes such as he never would have dreamed of in his native land. The German race in Germany is not degenerating; degenerat-ing; the German-born men in the United States have expanded beyond their first narrow environments. |