The Days of a Man 



Lapses 

 from 

 German 

 grace 



many curious observations. Commenting on the 

 elemental character of American society, our "ani- 

 mal relation to nature," he says: 



The American lives with nature like an animal; he delights 

 in wasting time with her; he loves her as well as in him lies, 

 and lacking utterly the pantheistic conception which looks 

 upon nature as a whole and as the highest kind of artistic work. 

 ... He finds especial joy in camping out, in the views from 

 a cabin, the glint of the sun on the ocean, the solemnity of the 

 forests, the loneliness of the prairies, and the rocky solitude of 

 the great mountains. 



Americans of German descent are also taken to 

 task by the writer for lapsing into the same crude, 

 elemental ways, for their lack of self-assertion, and 

 their 



falling into the habits of folk of British origin, from whom in a 

 generation or two they become indistinguishable, developing 

 nothing of the political views which have been growing stronger 

 and stronger in Germany since 1870. 



Our Westerners he compares to the peasantry 

 of the Middle Ages, and quotes from Herndon's 

 "Life of Lincoln" to the effect that the general 

 mental and moral conditions prevailing on the 

 prairies of Illinois in the first half of the last century 

 were more like those surrounding the English 

 peasants in Richard Cceur-de-Lion's day than like 

 any recent phase: 



"Primi- Amid the relaxed experience of Western life the lower sort 



tive " . of American has tended to revert toward the social state an- 

 Amencans cestra ||y extinct before America was discovered. 



From this sad condition German immigration, in 

 his judgment, should have served to "redeem" 



C476 3 



