hold all as if it were not mine, but God's, and ready to resign it."

It seemed to me a terrible thing that one so peculiarly strong, sentient, luminous, as my father should grow feebler and fainter, and finally ghostly still and white. Yet when his step was tottering and his frame that of a wraith, he was as dignified as in the days of greater pride, holding himself, in military selfcommand, even more erect than before. He did not omit to come in his very best black coat to the dinner-table, where the extremely prosaic fare had no effect upon the distinction of the meal. He hated failure, dependence, and disorder, broken rules and weariness of discipline, as he hated cowardice. I cannot express how brave he seemed to me. The last time I

saw him, he was leaving the house to take the journey for his health which led suddenly to the next world. My mother was to go to the station with him, she who, at the moment when it was said that he died, staggered and groaned, though so far from him, telling us that something seemed to be sapping all her strength; I could hardly bear to let my eyes rest upon her shrunken, suffering form on this day of farewell. My father certainly knew, what she vaguely felt, that he would never return.

Like a snow image of an unbending but an old, old man, he stood for a moment gazing at me. My mother sobbed, as she walked beside him to the carriage. We have missed him in the sunshine, in the storm, in the twilight, ever since. Rose Hawthorne Lathrop.

"WHAT a glorious new Scandinavia might not Minnesota become! Here would the Swede find again his clear romantic lakes, the plains of Scania rich in corn, and the valleys of Norrland; here would the Norwegian find his rapidflowing rivers, his lofty mountains, for I include the Rocky Mountains and Oregon in the new kingdom; and both nations their hunting-fields and their fisheries. The Danes might here pasture their flocks and.herds, and lay out their farms on richer and less misty coasts than those of Denmark. . . . The climate, the situation, the character of the scenery, agrees with our people better than that of any other of the American States."

So wrote Frederika Bremer from St. Paul in the autumn of 1850, when there were barely a score of Scandinavians in all the vast region she called Minnesota. Forty-five years have brought a marvelous fulfillment of these prophetic words, and to-day, of the 11,500,000 direct liv

ing descendants of the Vikings, 2,500,000, more than one fifth, reside in the United States, - born of Scandinavian parents, either in Europe or in America. In the sixty years since the movement really began, about 1,500,000 of these northern peoples have left their peninsular homes and built again in the New World. Few provinces of Denmark, Sweden, or Norway contain so many Scandinavians as the 375,000 who make up one fourth of the population of Minnesota. Wisconsin and Illinois have each 200,000. Iowa, Nebraska, and the two Dakotas have the larger part of the remainder. Twenty-five thousand or more are in Kansas, in each of the far Western States of California, Washington, and Utah, and even in the east coast States of Massachusetts, New York, and Pennsylvania. In the last three States, however, they live for the most part in the great cities and manufacturing towns.

As I have gone about in the new Scan

dinavia and in the old Scandinavia, noting the same points of striking similarity which Miss Bremer described, and differences equally marked, I have ceased to wonder at the coming of the mighty host that has settled so quietly among us. The surprise is rather that so many have been content not to come. That the advantages in life for the vast majority of those who have emigrated are very real and positive is demonstrated by the exceedingly small percentage who return to the homeland for permanent residence. Some of these backsliders from faith in the great West have repented, and emigrated a second time. A physician, graduated at the University of Christiania, had gained a small fortune in a large Wisconsin town, and returned to Christiania with his family and belongings by the same steamer in which I went. He had served his term in exile, and was going back where a man could really live. In two years he was again in the Northwest, to stay.

It is a suggestive fact that so large a proportion of the Scandinavians are settled in the distinctively agricultural States. A glance at a map showing the locations of the various foreign elements of our population would increase the significance by disclosing how much greater that proportion is with the Scandinavians than with any other class of immigrants. The most reliable figures obtainable indicate that, of the Scandinavians, one out of four engages in agriculture; of the Germans, one out of seven; of the Irish, only one out of twelve. But this fact alone must not be over-emphasized. It does not follow that immigrants are desirable because they choose the country rather than the city. The value of the Scandinavians is that they choose a pursuit in which they excel.

In order to understand the conditions and tendency of the generation of to-day, something must be added from a close study of these children of the north, among the mountains of Norway, on the

broader fields of Sweden and Denmark, in their towns, and by the all-surrounding sea. Any one who has investigated the situation on both sides of the water will realize that no class or section can be neglected in such a study, for the immigrants have come from all grades of society and from all parts of the three countries. Many times, in various parishes and cities in Norway and Sweden, I have asked men, as I met them, if they had relatives or intimate friends settled in America, and I cannot recall a single negative answer. Peasants in out-of-theway valleys in the Norwegian mountains or in northern Sweden, fishermen, tradesmen in the cities, editors, government officials, and university professors, all gave me the same reply. Every class is bound to America by the closest ties. An excellent example of one of the Swedish nobility settling in the United States is found in the late Baron Nils Posse, who was so well known in educational circles. Not since the English immigration of the seventeenth century has there come to us such complete representation of all classes of a civilized community.

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The term "Scandinavian " is convenient, but at best only broadly generic. As descriptive of Swedes, Norwegians, and Danes, it is even looser than the use of "British" to describe the English, Scotch, and Welsh collectively. We all know that there is no Scandinavian language, no Scandinavian nation, but we do not so well realize that Sweden and Denmark have different languages, governments, and traditions. To be sure, Norway and Sweden, since 1814, have constituted a dual monarchy, but they are just as widely separated in language and tradition as Spain and Portugal, or as Russia and Poland. The physical features of the countries - the mountains, fjords, and extensive coastline of Norway, the level stretches, the lakes, and the regular coast of Sweden, and the flat, sandy plains and islands of Denmark - seem to find a spiritual counterpart in the people

themselves. The typical Swede is aristocratic, assertive, fond of dignities; he is polite, vivacious, bound to have a good time, without any far look into the future. Yet he is persistent, and capable of great energy and endurance. He is fond of music. In literature his best work has been the lyrics and epics of Bellman and Tegnér. The typical Norwegian is, above all, democratic. He is simple, severe, intense, often radical and visionary. There lies an unknown quantity of passion in him, a capacity for high, even turbulent endeavor, but rarely the qualities of a great leader. He too is fond of music, but with a dramatic element. In his literature of this century, even more than in his music, the dramatic predominates. The towering figures of Björnson and Ibsen, great in both drama and novel, belong not merely to Norway, but to the world. The Dane is the Southerner of the Scandinavians, though still a conservative; gay, but not to excess. He is preeminently a small farmer or a trader, ready and easy-going, not given to great risks, but quick to see a bargain and shrewd in making it. His interests have led him out from his small kingdom in all directions, so that he, more than his brothers to the north, has yielded to foreign influences. His best literature has been romantic.

Judged by American standards, these northern folk are slow, often immoderately slow. Their fastest express train rarely attains a speed of thirty miles an hour, and does not run at all in the winter. The ordinary trains from Christiania north, some years ago, ran only during the day, and passengers were obliged to go to an inn for the night. All three peoples, down to the stolidest laborer, mountaineer, or fisherman, are industrious and frugal. Nature is no spendthrift in any part of the Scandinavian countries. Small economies are the alphabet of her teachings. Only by diligence are the treasures in land and sea wrung from her unwilling grasp.

Björnstjerne Björnson, one of the most striking and original figures of the century in Norwegian politics and letters, himself an enthusiastic patriot and a radical, wrote some years ago to Professor Hjärne, of Upsala, in Sweden, concerning the Norwegian people: "The Norwegians are, in my opinion, not that people in the north which is least gifted or has the weakest character. But... its aims are not far reaching. It is not so grand as the Swedish people, not so flippant, either, perhaps. It is not so industrious and faithful as the Danish people, — not so zealous, either, perhaps. It takes hold and lets go, it lets go and takes hold, of persons and aims. It will exert itself to the utmost, but it demands speedy and signal success. Its ambition is not so

great as its vanity. Hot-headed, impetuous, in small things, it is patient in great ones. . . . The condition of conditions [for great things] is the right of self-determination."

The Scandinavian countries belong to a group of five or six European states which are set down, in ordinary statistical works, as practically without illiteracy; that is, with less than one per cent of persons unable to read and write. These figures are confirmed in the case of Sweden by the statistics of the army recruits. They also gain in meaning immensely when compared with those for some other countries of Europe from which there has been large emigration. Austro-Hungary shows thirty per cent of illiteracy, Italy forty-one, Russia nearly eighty. An educational requirement would debar a large part of these immigrants; but however rigidly the United States might enforce it, the Scandinavians would be only very slightly affected.

They have actually done for themselves, without flourish or bragging, what we, with our boasted system of public schools, have not yet been able to do. In nine years spent in Minneapolis I became personally acquainted with hundreds of them, and in my visits to the various sec

tions of Minnesota and the neighboring States, where they are thickly settled, I met hundreds more. Not a single adult among them all, so far as I observed, was unable to read and write. On the other hand, some of the physicians, ministers, and teachers were men educated in the universities of Christiania, Copenhagen, Upsala, and Lund.

In the matter of religion, all Scandinavians are most uncompromising Protestants. There are barely enough Catholic exceptions in Europe and the United States together to prove that conversion to the Roman Catholic faith is possible for them. Dislike of Catholicism is rather an instinct, coming down from Reformation times, than a matter of knowledge or close observation. It is so strong as an innate sentiment that, consciously or unconsciously, it colors their relations in politics and in society. The distrust of the Irish, which sometimes takes active form, is at bottom religious, and not racial.

Few of them come here without some political knowledge and experience. Freedom, republican institutions, constitutional government, and elections are no novelties. The Norwegian lives under the extremely democratic constitution of 1814, and on the 17th of May, on both sides of the Atlantic, celebrates its adoption. In Norway all titles of nobility have been abolished. The essential difference between the Norwegian system and our own is that in the former a property qualification is still retained. The Swede since the reforms of 1866, and the Dane since those of 1849 and 1866, have lived under much the same conditions as the Norwegian, though in both Sweden and Denmark there is still a noble class. It has been natural, therefore, for all three nationalities to fall in with the method of government in the United States, and at once to take a normal part. There have been none of the excesses characteristic of the use of a new-found liberty.

With such equipments as these, the Scandinavians have come into the United States, not for adventure, but with serious purpose; not merely to get away from Europe, but to "arrive" somewhere in America. Most of them have been far from typical Swedes, Danes, or Norwegians. Conservatism and slowness, with them, have often degenerated into stolidity, independence into stubbornness, and shrewdness into insincerity. They have sometimes been clannish; but how can any class with a foreign speech avoid clannishness? It is a necessary stage in the evolution, and, with the people from the north, only a stage. Out of it, through the gates of the English language, speedy naturalization, and increased prosperity, they pass into broader relations. Until the recent increase of the urban element, none of the three nationalities has deliberately settled apart, intensifying its peculiarities. They mingle freely with each other and with the Americans in business and politics. Intermarriages are by no means uncommon. In the complex people, or mixture of peoples, which may hereafter be called Scandinavian will appear many of the qualities of each component. Fresh additions will continue to reinforce the old, while the third and fourth generations cannot lose completely the original characteristics. They will be sturdy, independent, and Protestant; they will be intelligent, persistent, patient, and thrifty. We shall not, therefore, expect the current of their life to run counter to that of the nation.

For this hopeful expectation there is good historical reason. America has an experience of Scandinavian colonization more than two centuries old, and the result shows what may be expected from the next two centuries. The Swedish settlement of the seventeenth century is doubly instructive: because it was formed from the same classes of society and followed the same lines as the movement of the last fifty years, and because the Swede of the seventeenth century and

the Swede of the nineteenth century, in essential characteristics, are one. Two hundred years have wrought far less change in him than in his cousin of Germany or England. The colony on the Delaware was like an experiment in irrigation the nature of the result must be the same, whether the water be applied by the bucketful in Delaware or by turning a great stream upon the prairies of the Northwest.

Before the second generation of English or Dutch settlers in America had grown to manhood, the Swedes began their colonization. The colony had been originally planned by Gustavus Adolphus in 1624. It was to be no mere commercial speculation, no mere haven for aristocratic adventurers, but "a blessing to a blessing to the common man," a place for "a free people with wives." But sterner duties took the energies of the great king, and it remained for his daughter, Queen Christina, and his faithful Oxenstjerna to carry out the plans. From 1638 to 1655 the Swedish flag floated over a Swedish colony on the banks of the Delaware, and then disappeared forever as a sign of sovereignty in America. In these years several hundreds of settlers had there acquired a home. Their justice in dealing with the Indians had prevented any massacre or war. Their shrewdness and thrift had sent back to Sweden many a cargo of furs. Their loyalty and piety had built the fort and the church side by side. Dutch and English threats did not destroy the prosperity of the company; and when an expedition set out for New Sweden in 1654, about one hundred families who had made preparations to go were left behind for lack of accommodations.

Sweden seems thus to have had a touch of the "America fever" as early as the middle of the seventeenth century. The disease, however, did not become chronic, for in 1656 New Sweden became a part of New Netherland, and in 1664 a part of New York. The prosper

ity of the colony continued, and by the end of the seventeenth century it numbered about one thousand, scattered along both banks of the Delaware.

It was only a handful of quiet, industrious men and women who made up the colony of farmers. Nor was it continually reinforced by additions from Sweden. It cannot be said to have exercised any powerful or controlling influence on colonial life. But as an element it was highly desirable. It contributed only good blood and sturdy good sense to a heterogeneous population that all too often sorely needed just these qualities. The Hon. Thomas F. Bayard, who had lived long among their descendants, wrote in 1888: "I make bold to say that no better stock has been contributed (in proportion to its numbers) toward giving a solid basis to society under republican forms than these hardy, honest, industrious, law-abiding, God-fearing Swedish settlers on the banks of the Christiana in Delaware. While I have never heard of a very rich man among them, I have never heard of a pauper. I cannot recall the name of a statesman or distinguished law-giver among them, nor of a rogue nor a felon." For two centuries can this Swedish thread in our fabric be clearly traced, and to-day many a man bearing the familiar Swedish name of Nelson, Thompson, or Anderson is indebted to the Swedes on the Delaware for characteristics as well as a name. One of these descendants gave clear evidence that he was no degenerate son of New Sweden, for in the defense of Fort Sumter Major Robert Anderson displayed virtues worthy of the terrible field of Lützen, where Gustavus Adolphus and his Swedes sacrificed themselves to win religious freedom for millions who were not of their blood.

The story of the nineteenth-century Scandinavian immigration is but that of the seventeenth-century Swedish settlement, revised and rewritten on an immense scale. With a slight modification.