Reflections and Comments 1865-1895 | Page 7

to reasonable beings, leads to the
most serious platform excesses, and is perfectly incomprehensible to
Continental Europeans. To the former, the drinking even of lager beer
connotes, as the logicians say, ever so many other vices--grossness and
sensuality of nature, extravagance, indifference to home pleasures,
repugnance to steady industry, and a disregard of the precepts of
religion and morality. To many of them a German workman, and his
wife and children, sitting in a beer-garden on a summer's evening,
which to European moralists and economists is one of the most
pleasing sights in the world, is a revolting spectacle, which calls for the
interference of the police. Now, if you go to a beer-garden in Berlin
you may, any Sunday afternoon, see doctors of divinity--none of your
rationalists--but doctors of real divinity, to whom American
theologians go to be taught, doing this very thing, and, what is worse,
smoking pipes. An American who applied to this the same course of
reasoning which he would apply to a similar scene in America, would
simply be guilty of outrageous folly. If he argued from it that the
German doctor was selfish, or did not "live as in the sight of God," the
whole process would be a model of absurdity.
Foreigners have drawn, on the other hand, from the American
"diligence in business," conclusions with regard to American character
far more uncomplimentary than those the Christian Union has
expressed with regard to the Prussians. There are not a few religious

and moral and cultivated circles in Europe in which the suggestion that
Americans, as a nation, were characterized by thoughtfulness for others
and a sense of God's presence would be received with derisive laughter,
owing to the application to the phenomena of American society of the
process of reasoning on which, we fear, the Union relies. Down to the
war, so candid and perspicacious a man as John Stuart Mill might have
been included in this class. The earlier editions of his "Elements of
Political Economy" contained a contemptuous statement that one sex in
America was entirely given up to "dollar-hunting" and the other to
"breeding dollar-hunters." In other words, he held that the American
people were plunged in the grossest materialism, and he doubtless
based this opinion on that intense application of the men to commercial
and industrial pursuits which we see all around us, which no church
finds fault with, but which, we know, bad as its effects are on art and
literature, really coexists with great generosity, sympathy, public spirit,
and ideality.
Take, again, the matter of chastity, on which the Union touched. We
grant at the outset that wherever you have classes, the women of the
lower class suffer more or less from the men of the upper class, and
anybody who says that seductions, accomplished through the effect on
female vanity of the addresses of "superiors in station," while almost
unknown here, are very numerous in Europe, would find plenty of facts
to support him. But, on the other hand, an attempt made to persuade a
Frenchman that the familiar intercourse which the young people of both
sexes in this country enjoy was generally pure, would fail in
ninety-nine cases out of a hundred. That it should be pure is opposed to
all his experience of human nature, both male and female; and the
result of your argument with him would be that he would conclude
either that you were an extraordinarily simple person, or took him for
one.
On the other hand, we believe the German, who thinks nothing of
drinking as much wine or beer as he cares for, draws from the conduct
of the American young woman whom he sees abroad, and from what he
reads in our papers about "free love," Indiana divorces, abortion, and
what not, conclusions with regard to American chastity very different
from those of the _Union_; and, if you sought to meet him in
discussion, he would overwhelm you with facts and cases which,

looked at apart from the general tenor of American life and manners, it
would be very hard to dispose of. He would say, for instance, that we
are not, perhaps, guilty of as many violations of the marriage vows as
Europeans; but that we make it so light a vow that, instead of violating
it, we get it abrogated, and then follow our will; and then he would
come down on us with boarding-house and hotel life, and other things
of the same kind, which might make us despise him, but would make it
a little difficult to get rid of him.
There is probably no minor point of manners which does more to create
unfavorable impressions of Europeans among the best class of
Americans--morally the best, we mean--than the importance attached
by the former to their