Traveling along down the Mississippi to the eastern boundary of the State and taking a wide range of country on the Minnesota side of the river, we find many prosperous settlements of our people. Again southwest, up the beautiful valley of the Minnesota River, in Scott, Sibley, Le Sueur, Nicollet and Blue Earth counties, there are numerous Catholic settlements, both in the woods and on the prairie. So, too, in the midland counties of Rice, Steele, Waseca, Olmsted, Dodge and Mower counties, our people are settled, prosperous and happy, their valuable farms giving ample and cheerful evidence, how bountifully the soil rewards honest labor. Nor, in their prosperity, have they forgotten Him from whom all blessings flow.
Where a few years ago the Catholic settlers, few and poor, waited anxiously for the visit of the priest, and where the holy sacrifice of the mass was offered up in the settler's cabin, we now find the resident priest, the handsome church, and in many instances, the Sisters' school. In those settlements the whole atmosphere is Catholic; here, with no bad influences around them, the young people grow up pure and virtuous, with the love of their religion warm in their hearts. An ample reward to their parents, those brave men, the early settlers, who displayed such indomitable perseverance in their battle for
INDEPENDENCE.
They had to steer their way with the compass, over trackless prairies, often while the snow lay upon the ground, to blaze their way through the forest or follow an Indian trail, carrying their provisions on their backs, and when the claim shanty was put up and the provisions exhausted, the new settler would often have to return twenty, forty, sixty miles to some place where he could buy a few more pounds of flour, and with this and perhaps half a bushel of potatoes to put in the ground, he would again set off to his new claim.
But in all the privations they went through, those connected with religion they felt the most. And, praise be to God, among the earliest evidences of their growing prosperity was the erection of temples to His worship, that to-day, on every side, ornament the State. Wherever in the State there is a clustering of Catholic settlements, there you will find a clustering of Catholic churches.
[RELIGIOUS AND MORAL VIEW OF THE QUESTION OF IMMIGRATION TO THE LAND.]
To a Catholic, this is, after all, the most important view, and must not be overlooked; at the same time it is obvious that it cannot be done justice to in a condensed pamphlet of this kind.
There is about the same difference between the moral atmosphere of the rural Catholic colonies to which we invite our people, and the back streets and alleys of the over-crowded city, as there is between the pure air of the prairie and the foul air of the city lane.