"Strangers who have hastily travelled and superficially examined America, and those who have judged by the statements of others rather than by their own experience, have ascribed to the American a want of sociability and a stiff and repulsive manner towards strangers. True it is that in America it is no very easy matter to become intimate with a man or establish one's self in his family circle--but he who has once attained this point, becomes a home friend in the fullest sense of the word, and will find hidden beneath the stern, earnest exterior of the American, a warm heart, and in his conversation a remarkable degree of familiar confidence. Those who have detected in the confident manner and sense of independence which the American manifests, any thing approaching to presumption, must assuredly have been the newly arrived, who could not accustom themselves to the idea that even laborers should consider that they had with others equal right to express their opinions. The man, however, who is free from prejudice will not fail to admire a nation, wherein the poorest is on an equality with the richest, and where the rich, at least, do not take it on themselves to assert their superiority. Seldom, indeed, do we find a native American, conscious of his right to equality, giving a stranger (his possible superior in intelligence or education) to understand that he considers himself quite as good as any one--the right is to him a thing so natural, that it never even occurs to him to boast of it. This is, unfortunately, far from being the case with the majority of the more ignorant German emigrants, accustomed in their own country to oppressive laws, and not unfrequently hard treatment, yet without learning the orderly conduct which these should have taught, and who think that in America they have a right to do as they please. The American Germans seem to entertain the opinion that it is their republican duty, at all times, with or without occasion or provocation, to give to every man belonging in Europe to the higher classes, to understand and feel that the difference of rank is not recognized--as if indeed, in America far more than in Europe, education and culture did not of themselves indicate the rank which a man occupies. These American Germans all nourish the jealousy of trade (_Brodneid_) the miserable little hatreds, and the whole range of German disunity or local enmities, which they brought over with them, with a care and zeal worthy of a better cause. Seldom indeed do we hear a German there call himself German, he remains as of old a Prussian, a Bavarian, a Hanoverian, a Hessian, or an Altenburger. Even the irritation between North and South Germans still continues, but let one of them only get together so many scraps of English as will barely render him intelligible, _then_ he denies his fatherland--Americanizes both Christian and surnames--adopts tobacco chewing, and other evil