Eclectic Magazine of Foreign Literature, Science, and Art, June 1885Various
History
Eclectic Magazine of Foreign Literature, Science, and Art, June 1885
Various
American literature -- Periodicals; Literature -- Periodicals
The German clerk has become a conspicuous feature in the city, and
tends to bring down still lower the scanty salaries of the class to
which he belongs. There are eating-houses in the neighborhood of Mark
Lane where the mid-day visitor might fancy himself transported into
Hamburg, so general are the guttural interjections around him. Germans
throng, again, into several industries, while in the East-end there
is a large but by no means prosperous body of tailors, whom Professor
Bryce found it prudent, for electoral purposes, to address in their own
tongue.
Even into France the intruding German has found his way. He has
engrossed several branches of trade into his hands, has come to be
the principal maker of the elegant _articles du Paris_, and from time
to time provokes an outburst of indignant chauvinism. According to
consular reports, exclusive of citizens of German descent, the Republic
shelters and maintains 80,000 subjects of the Hohenzollerns. His
presence is also felt in Italy, Hungary, and the Austrian Slav States.
The same qualities win him a foothold everywhere; he works harder,
lives cheaper, and asks less than the native. He threatens, indeed,
in these respects, to become to other Europeans what the Chinese have
become to the American.
Not content with the necessarily rough estimates of the number of
German-descended settlers abroad, the Imperial Government last year set
on foot a careful statistical inquiry into the number of expatriated
German-born subjects. The returns are as yet incomplete, and do not
embrace Russia or Asia. But they are significant as showing the
direction this vast emigration takes. Out of nearly two and a half
millions of German-born subjects in other lands, America contains
1,900,000, France and Switzerland respectively about 80,000, and
England 40,000.
It could hardly be expected that Germany, animated by a proud
consciousness of her newly-won national existence, should look upon
this expatriation of her children with equanimity. There are many
things in the position of their brethren abroad which are only too
galling to the pride of the arbiters of Europe. Hardest of all,
perhaps, for the German patriot to bear is the spectacle of his
countrymen easily surrendering their Deutschthum, putting on another
nationality like a cloak, and becoming oblivious of the common home.
According to Hartmann’s dismal lamentations, the German emigrant is
distinguished above all others by the ease with which he effects this
change.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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