I’m currently reading “The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin” by H.W. Brands, and in it the author writes that there came a point in the 1750′s where the Pennsylvania Assembly worried about the integration of the German immigrants and the English colonists. Peter Collinson suggested that intermarriage between Germans and English be subsidized. Franklin said this would never work, because:
The German women are generally so disagreeable to an English eye that it would require great portions to induce Englishmen to marry them. Nor would German ideas of beauty generally agree with our women; dick und starcke; that is, thick and strong, always enters into their description of a pretty girl, for the value of a wife with them consists much in the work she is able to do. So that it would require a round sum with an English wife to make up to a Dutch man the difference in labour and frugality.
No wonder Rainer was all into me 
