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Three great dangers they see threatening the inner life of congregations, viz.: the assumption, by the leading men of particular parishes, of the right to dictate, as a compensation for the perhaps greater amount expected of them for the pastor's support; the lawlessness of immigrants who abuse the freedom of the country, want to break through all rules, and revile all good order, the regular ministry, and divine service as papacy itself; the introduction of worthless men into the country as pretended ministers by the Newlanders, who sell their services from the ship to Lutherans willing to be deceived in this way.
When parents die on the ships and leave children, the captains and the most intelligent of the Newlanders, acting as guardians and orphan-fathers, take the chests and inheritance in their safe-keeping, and the orphans, arriving on the land, are sold for their own freight and the freight of their deceased parents; the real little ones are given away, and the inheritance of their parents just about pays for the manifold troubles caused to the guardians.
Lured on by the highly colored stories of the commercial agents for promoting immigration the "newlanders," who were thoroughly unscrupulous in their methods and extravagant in their representations a migration from Germany began in the second decade of the eighteenth century and quickly assumed alarming proportions.
Many entrust their money to the Newlanders, who remain in Holland, and on their arrival in this country they must either serve themselves, or sell their children to serve for them." The newspapers carried advertisements like the following from the Staatsbote of Philadelphia: "The time of service of a bond-maid is for sale.
Men of rank, skill, or learning, unable to pay their freight, or to give any surety, must serve their masters by doing manual labor like ordinary servants. While learning to perform the unaccustomed hard labor, they are treated with lashes like cattle. Many a suicide was the consequence of the abominable deceit of the Newlanders.
Foremost among those who exposed and condemned it were Germans, notably Muhlenberg, who described the abominable business of the Newlanders as follows: "These Newlanders first make themselves acquainted with the merchants in the Netherlands. In order to attain their object, they resort to all manner of tricks.
Those who are far away hear nothing of it, and the properly so-called Newlanders only laugh about it, and give them no other consolation beyond that given to Judas Iscariot by the Pharisees, Matt. 27, 4: 'What is that to us?
This method of transporting colonists proved a profitable trade for the shipping people, and was soon regularly organized like the modern assisted immigration. Agents, called "newlanders" and "soul-sellers," traveled through Germany working up the transatlantic traffic by various devices, some of them not altogether creditable.
The Germans also were first and most emphatic in condemning the cruelties connected with the "white slavery" of the so-called Redemptioners. Cruelly Deceived by the Newlanders. Toward the middle of the eighteenth century there were some 80,000 Germans in Pennsylvania, almost one-half of the entire inhabitants. In 1749 about 12,000 arrived.
Such being the conditions, one's heart might bleed seeing and hearing how these poor human beings, who came from Christian lands into the New World, partly moan, cry, lament, and throw up their arms because of the misery and separation which they had never imagined would befall them, partly call upon and adjure all elements and sacraments, yea, all thunderbolts and the terrible inhabitants of hell to smash into numberless fragments and torment the Newlanders and the Dutch merchants, who deceived them!
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