Starting with Hecker's criticisms of Kapps's book, the Weser-Zeitung discusses public life in the United States, but falls into the same mistake as Kapp, namely, not distinguishing between New York and the United States.

...Our newspapers are not so much descriptions of public life as critical reviews. They constantly publish accounts of all that is bad, blameworthy and repulsive, and don't need to repeat all the time what is good and deserving of praise, because they may regard that as known to their readers.... A comparison between America and a country where the newspaper press hardly ever touches social conditions is a play with false cards. In Germany far less crimes are reported in the papers, but it does not follow that fewer are committed....Hardly about any other phenomenon of American life do foreigners utter so indignantly a genteel pshaw! as about the frequency of divorces, seductions and elopements. And yet it is a fact that there are in no country of the world so many happy marriages as here. But this general rule never appears in the newspapers; the exceptions fill it.

One cannot judge the relative moral condition of two countries from the newspapers, because these presuppose for comprehension, a personal acquaintance (die unmittelbare Anschauung des Lebens) with the life of both. Least of all is such acquaintance dispensable in regard to conditions that the papers of the country deal with - more or less recognizably - in the interest of their respective parties. If one believes the various papers, all officials in the United States are scoundrels - a statement that even the worst pessimist would not really want to maintain.

How far the Weser-Zeitung falls into this mistake - and in the other one, of regarding the conditions in New York as typical for the whole country - one may see from the following quotation:

"The danger for the United States lies perhaps not in the greater badness of people, but in that, that the better elements are more and more estranged from public affairs. Feeling repulsed by conditions as they are and impotent to change them, they dedicate themselves exclusively to their private interests - which, of course, must affect their moral stamina. Because work for the 3public good is moral salt that preserves nations, and the main value of political freedom is that it forces the individual to care for the common good. Instead, here political liberty has the effect that almost exclusively corruptionists care for public affairs...The system of the Middle Ages, when the peaceful merchant paid fixed fues in advance to the robbers, in order to avoid direct pillaging, has been transplanted on gigantic scale to the most modern Republic, and has slowly taken possession of city, State and Federal governments. The administration of justice is poisoned to the core, and has become a battlefield of grandiose money manoeuvres. That the whole civil service is nothing but an institution to take care of demagogues, every American will admit, and almost all Americans take this evil to be incurable, to be inseparably intertwined with the institutions of the Republic."

To this the Anzeiger des Westens' remarks: "The author of the article in the Weser Zeitung overlooks the fact that Forty million Americans live on a territory that, if it were inhabited by Two hundred and sixty millions, still would not be settled as densely as Germany. The morality of man stands in a 4necessary correlation to the field that is left to human passion....The fact that we are regularly paying off, in spite of the prevailing corruption, an immense debt; that we understand indeed, in our relations to other nations, how to keep on the general level of international morality; that millions of European immigrants are happy in this country and only here have found a chance to develop their talents and to move as free people; this and many other things might convince the distant observer, that the Americans are morally not inferior to other nations. If such an observer could also see the endeavors of the Americans in those fields that are regarded as the fundaments of all present-day social and political institutions - if he knew how the people through improvement of the schools and through serious political studies strive to win depth - he would expect less from an external attack on official corruption than from its elimination from within."

This is what Friedrich Hecker does. This it is that gives him the conviction that he shares with hundreds of thousands of German-Americans who are not "America-tired." Kapp in New York has not had so much occasion to study the sound heart of American democracy, as Hecker had. Besides he was perhaps from the start, not in the right receptive mood for both pleasant and unpleasant impressions. So he has become a 5pessimist, and expects the worst in the future for the U. S. A. However, against such hypochondria the healthy feeling of the millions that Hecker expresses - the trust, in spite of the many undesirable evils, in the moral vigor of the people - in the end will justify itself.