146 IN THE DIPLOMATIC SERVICE-XV 



Teutonic censors from American folly and wickedness. 

 One of the main charges constantly made was that in 

 America there was a &quot;Deutschen Hetze.&quot; Very many 

 German papers had really persuaded themselves, and ap 

 parently had convinced a large part of the German people, 

 that throughout our country there existed a hate, deep and 

 acrid, of everything German and especially of German- 

 Americans. The ingenuity of some German papers in 

 supporting this thesis was wonderful. On one occasion 

 a petty squabble in a Eoman Catholic theological school 

 in the United States between the more liberal element 

 and a reactionary German priest, in which the latter 

 came to grief, was displayed as an evidence that the 

 American people were determined to drive out all Ger 

 man professors and to abjure German science. The doings 

 of every scapegrace in an American university, of every 

 silly woman in Chicago, of every blackguard in New York, 

 of every snob at Newport, of every desperado in the Eocky 

 Mountains, of every club loafer anywhere, were served up 

 as typical examples of American life. The municipal gov 

 ernments of our country, and especially that of New York, 

 were an exhaustless quarry from which specimens of every 

 kind of scoundrelism were drawn and used in building up 

 an ideal structure of American life; corruption, lawless 

 ness, and barbarism being its most salient features. 



Nor was this confined to the more ignorant. Men who 

 stood high in the universities, men of the greatest amia 

 bility, who in former days had been the warmest friends 

 of America, had now become our bitter opponents, and 

 some of their expressions seemed to point to eventual war. 



Yet I doubt whether we have any right to complain of 

 such attacks and misrepresentations. As a matter of fact, 

 no nation washes so much of its dirty linen in the face of 

 the whole world as does our own; and, what is worse, 

 there is washed in our country, with much noise and per 

 versity, a great deal of linen which is not dirty. Many 

 demagogues and some reformers are always doing this. 

 There is in America a certain class of excellent people who 



