probable amount of this peril. It is generally admitted--and certainly no
German-American will deny--that the most fruitful sources of hostility and
war in all times have been religious, not political. All merely political
antagonism, certainly all which is possible in a republic, fades into
insignificance before this more powerful dividing influence. Yet we leave
all this great explosive force in unimpeded operation,--at any
moment it may be set in action, in any one of those "pretty family scenes"
which "Puck" depicts,--while we are solemnly warned against admitting the
comparatively mild peril of a political difference! It is like cautioning a
manufacturer of dynamite against the danger of meddling with mere
edge-tools. Even with all the intensity of feeling on religious matters,
few families are seriously divided by them; and the influence of political
differences would be still more insignificant.

The simple fact is that there is no better basis for union than mutual
respect for each other's opinions; and this can never be obtained
without an intelligent independence, "I would rather have a thorn in my
side than an echo," said Emerson of friendship; and the same is true of
married life. It is the echoes, the nonentities, of whom men grow tired; it
is the women with some flavor of individuality who keep the hearts of their
husbands. This is only applying in a higher sense what Shakespeare's
Cleopatra saw. When her handmaidens are questioning how to hold a lover,
and one says,--

"Give way to him in all: cross him in nothing,"--

Cleopatra, from the depth of an unequalled experience, retorts,--

"Thou speakest like a fool: the way to lose him!"