The least numerous of the special classes into which we have analyzed the German population of Milwaukee, in 1850, was the professional class. Yet it is not for that reason least important, for the little group of forty-five[54] persons contained most of the individuals whose views swayed public opinion among the 6000 Milwaukee Germans. Among them were two newspaper editors, each in charge of a German language paper. There were six lawyers, nine teachers, and eleven clergymen and preachers. Four of the preachers are described as German Lutheran, one was Evangelical, and one Methodist.[55] Two, Joseph Salzman and Franz Fusseden, were Catholic priests. One, F. W. Helfer, was called a “rationalist preacher.” Two, John Mühlhauser and G. Klügel, were merely called preachers. It is not strange that medicine, among all the professions, should have had the strongest representation. A physician, wherever trained, is equipped to practice anywhere, while a lawyer, clergyman, editor, or teacher is obliged to prepare for service by first fitting himself into the community he is to serve. German medical education was far superior to American at that time, and, in the western states at least, the supply of trained physicians was below the requirements. There were communities in Wisconsin where not one-fourth of the practitioners were graduates of medical schools or had honestly earned the title of “doctor.”[56] This condition made a splendid opportunity for German physicians, who could hope to win the patronage of Americans as well as Germans. That the prospect was alluring to them is shown by the fact that Milwaukee at the census date in 1850 had seventeen German physicians, some of them already men of note in the community. The Yankees and the Germans came into such close and intimate contacts in Milwaukee, that it is easier to study their normal attitudes there than in the outlying portions of the state. On the whole those relations, in the period terminating with the Civil War, appear to have been marked by mutual respect, if not active friendship. At all events, if there were differences causing ill will on one side or the other, these--so far as they were the outgrowth of the social, economic, or commercial interplay of the two groups--rarely became serious enough to be reflected in the public press. The prosperity of the city, providing usually full employment and adequate returns to all who wanted to work, made the bond between capitalist and employees satisfactory, and this solved one important aspect of the class problem. The absence of any decided public interest in the immigrant problem as affecting the city--other than politically--is a fact which obtrudes itself upon one who canvasses the Milwaukee papers, English and German, during the fourteen years which intervened between the first constitutional convention and the election of Abraham Lincoln to the presidency.