he least of
physical evils, because he thinks head-work the easiest and least
indispensable of all labor. Happily, many of the younger sons in peasant
families, by going to seek their living in the towns, carry their hardy
nervous system to amalgamate with the overwrought nerves of our town
population, and refresh them with a little rude vigor. And a return to
the habits of peasant life is the best remedy for many moral as well as
physical diseases induced by perverted civilization. Riehl points to
colonization as presenting the true field for this regenerative process.
On the other side of the ocean a man will have the courage to begin life
again as a peasant, while at home, perhaps, opportunity as well as
courage will fail him. _Apropos_ of this subject of emigration, he
remarks the striking fact, that the native shrewdness and mother-wit of
the German peasant seem to forsake him entirely when he has to apply them
under new circumstances, and on relations foreign to his experience.
Hence it is that the German peasant who emigrates, so constantly falls a
victim to unprincipled adventurers in the preliminaries to emigration;
but if once he gets his foot on the American soil he exhibits all the
first-rate qualities of an agricultural colonist; and among all German
emigrants the peasant class are the most successful.

But many disintegrating forces have been at work on the peasant
character, and degeneration is unhappily going on at a greater pace than
development. In the wine districts especially, the inability of the
small proprietors to bear up under the vicissitudes of the market, or to
insure a high quality of wine by running the risks of a late vintage and
the competition of beer and cider with the inferior wines, have tended to
produce that uncertainty of gain which, with the peasant, is the
inevitable cause of demoralization. The small peasant proprietors are
not a new class in Germany, but many of the evils of their position are
new. They are more dependent on ready money than formerly; thus, where a
peasant used to get his wood for building and firing from the common
forest, he has now to pay for it with hard cash; he used to thatch his
own house, with the help perhaps of a neighbor, but now he pays a man to
do it for him; he used to pay taxes in kind, he now pays them in money.
The chances of the market have to be discounted, and the peasant falls
into the hands of money-lenders. Here is one of the cases