The "Forty-eighters" had given a great stimulus to all German forms of life,--schools, press, stage, festivals, choral societies, and gymnastic societies,--but since the passing of these leaders and the subsidence of the Teutonic freshet, _Deutschtum_ has been on the wane. German newspapers are disappearing, German-American books and journals become fewer, German book stores are failing, German theaters are closing, and the surviving German private schools may be counted on the fingers. Probably not more than ten per cent. of the children of German parentage hear anything but English spoken at home. Champions of _Deutschtum_ admit sadly that nothing but a strong current of immigration can preserve it here. The spreading German-American National Alliance is bringing about a marked revival, but hardly will it succeed in persuading the majority of its people to lay upon their children the burden of a bi-lingual education. It is the apparent destiny of the descendants of the myriads of Germans who have settled here to lose themselves in the American people, and to take the stamp of a culture which is, in origin at least, eighty per cent. British. It is no small tribute to the solvent power of American civilization that the stable and conservative Germans, who, as settlers in Transylvania, in Chili, or in Palestine, among the Russians on the lower Volga, or among the Portuguese in southern Brazil, are careful to keep themselves unspotted from the people about them, have proved, on the whole, easy to Americanize. Years ago, Prof. James Bryce, just back from Ararat, after noting the purity of the German culture preserved by the Swabian colony in Tiflis, added: It was very curious to contrast this complete persistence of Teutonism here with the extremely rapid absorption of the Germans among other citizens which one sees going on in those towns of the Western States of America, where--as in Milwaukee, for instance--the inhabitants are mostly Germans, and still speak English with a markedly foreign accent.... Here they are exiles from a higher civilization planted in the midst of a lower one; there they lose themselves among a kindred people, with whose ideas and political institutions they quickly come to sympathize. INFLUENCE OF THE GERMANS IN AMERICA