The greatest quarrels of these German immigrants with American ways were over the so-called “Continental Sabbath” and the right to drink beer when and where they pleased.  “Only when his beer is in danger,” wrote one of the leading Forty-eighters, “does the German-American rouse himself and become a berserker.”  The great numbers of these men in many cities and in some of the Western States enabled them to have German taught in the public schools, though it is only fair to say that the underlying motive was liberalism rather than Prussian provincialism.  Frederick Kapp, a distinguished interpreter of the spirit of these Forty-eighters, expressed their conviction when he said that those who cared to remain German should remain in Germany and that those who came to America were under solemn obligations to become Americans.

The descendants of these immigrants, the second and the third and fourth generations, are now thoroughly absorbed into every phase of American life.  Their national idiosyncrasies have been modified and subdued by the gentle but relentless persistence of the English language and the robust vigor of American law and American political institutions.

After 1870 a great change came over the German immigration.  More and more industrial workers, but fewer and fewer peasants, and very rarely an intellectual or a man of substance, now appeared at Ellis Island for admission to the United States.[28] The facilities for migrating were vastly increased by the great transatlantic steamship companies.  The new Germans came in hordes even outnumbering the migrations of the fifties.  From 1870 to 1910 over three and a quarter millions arrived.  The highest point of the wave, however, was reached in 1882, when 250,630 German immigrants entered the United States.  Thereafter the number rapidly subsided; the lowest ebb, in 1898, brought only 17,111, but from that time until the Great War the number of annual arrivals fluctuated between 25,000 and 40,000.

The majority of those who came in the earlier part of this period made their way to the Western lands.  The Dakotas, Nebraska, Kansas, Iowa, and the Far West, still offered alluring opportunities.  But as these lands were gradually taken, the later influx turned towards the cities.  Here the immigrants not only found employment in those trades and occupations which the Germans for years had virtually monopolized, but they also became factory workers in great numbers, and many of them went into the mining regions.

It soon became apparent that the spirit of this latest migration was very different from that of the earlier ones.  “I do not believe,” writes a well-informed and patriotic Lutheran pastor in 1917, “that there is one among a thousand that has emigrated on account of dissatisfaction with the German Government during the last forty-five years.”  Humility on the part of these newcomers now gradually gave way to arrogance.  Instead of appearing eager