The secretaries or commissioners of immigration were usually men of alien birth or extraction, and therefore intelligent and sympathetic in their labors for succeeding immigrants.[212] Probably no State gave better care, guidance, and protection to foreigners coming as settlers than did Minnesota, and naturally, with a Swede as commissioner, the Scandinavians were “preferred stock.” The work of the Minnesota commission included the appointment of interpreters to meet immigrants at New York, Montreal, and Quebec and accompany them to Minnesota; provision for temporary homes for the new-comers until they went to their chosen locality; and wide publication of newspaper articles in different languages. Pamphlets containing maps and detailed descriptions of States and counties were distributed at railroad stations and on steamers, in America and in foreign countries.[213] It would be stretching the truth a little to say that these circulars sent out by States, counties, and railroad companies were always strictly accurate and ingenuous, but they brought the desired results, not in one campaign alone, but year after year. Taken as a whole the energies of the State and railroad agents, were honorable, well-managed, and highly beneficial to both the States and the immigrants. The best evidence for this statement lies in the figures of the censuses of 1880, 1890, and 1900 for the population of Wisconsin, Iowa, Minnesota, and the Dakotas.[214]

The value of so many tens of thousands of immigrants added to the assets of western commonwealths,—so many scores of thousands of “hands,” to make use of the colloquial term for labor units,—is at once great and difficult to measure or estimate. In economic terms, how much is a full-grown, healthy, intelligent, literate young man worth to a community into which he drops himself, for is he not as much a finished labor-performing machine as a new traction engine or a span of mules, either of which the assessor would set down in his books? The risks and pains and costs of up-bringing through unproductive years, of educating, of training for occupation, have all been borne by another community; the increment of wealth arising from his labor, providence, and skill will enrich the United States.

Yet it is not a fair test of the value of an immigrant to this country to measure it by the cost of his bringing up and education, either by the standards of his old home or by the American standards. Professor Mayo-Smith pointed out the fallacy in the oft-quoted estimate of Kapp, made up on this basis, that “the capital value of each male and female immigrant was about $1,500 and $750 respectively, making an average of $1125.”[215] Dr. Young, formerly Chief of the United States Bureau of Statistics, chooses as a basis the “market value” rather than the “cost of production,” and estimates the approximate yearly addition made by each immigrant to the realized wealth of the country in the form of farms, buildings, stock, tools, and savings, to be about $40, which, capitalized at 5%, gives $800 as the value of each immigrant.[216] An interesting German calculation in 1881, made in much the same way as Dr. Young’s, put the capital value of each immigrant at $1,200.[217] Another method of gauging the amount contributed to the earnings of the country by each immigrant, is to multiply the average daily wage of $1 by one-fifth the total number of immigrants, and that by 300, the number of working days in the year.[218] Taking the values of the immigrant over fourteen years of age and under forty-five, as $1000, and estimating conservatively that 80 per-cent of the foreign-born enumerated in the census of 1900 reached the United States between those ages, the Scandinavians so enumerated represented a capital value of about $850,000,000, to which the immigration from the North countries in the next five years added not less than $230,000,000. Viewed from one point, this capital was just so much given by the gods of plenty to accelerate the development of the West.

Another phase of the economic advantages of Scandinavian immigration has to do with the cash capital brought by the incoming thousands. While the first Norwegians were of the poorest class of the community, who escaped from unfavorable conditions almost empty-handed, squeezed out from the bottom of society, as it were through cracks and crevices, and while many of the later arrivals have had no other capital than strong hands and equally strong determination, the great proportion of adults have brought with them average sums variously estimated from $22 to $70 each. G. H. Schwab of New York, whose firm was general American agent for the North German Lloyd Steamship Company, estimated the average money or money equivalent brought by the Scandinavians, at $22 per head, probably including children in the calculation.[219] W. W. Thomas, Jr., Commissioner of Immigration for Maine, and later minister to Sweden, states that 900 Swedes who came to Maine in one year, besides clothing, tools, and household goods, had $40,000 in cash; and elsewhere he puts the average at $50 per head.[220] The figures from Wisconsin, which received better material than the average, would naturally run higher; in 1880 the official estimate of cash brought by each immigrant was “from $60 to $70.”[221] Assuming an average of 50,000 Scandinavian immigrants per year for the last thirty years,—a safe minimum—and an average of $50 cash per capita, the annual addition to the cash capital of the country would be at least $2,500,000.

Whatever may be gained in this way is, however, offset by the steady stream of remittances flowing from America to Northern Europe, especially during the last quarter of a century, and by the large sums spent by the thousands of erstwhile immigrants returning to their old homes for a winter or for a vacation.[222] Many a son, prospering in America, has contributed regularly to the support or added comfort of his parents or family in the fatherland; every holiday season swells the mail sacks with letters containing money-orders and drafts. During 1902 at least $1,000,000 was sent to Norway alone.[223] In the last two months of 1903, it is estimated that $3,000,000 went from the United States to the Scandinavian countries in these personal remittances.[224] Another sort of remittance which does not immediately take the form of cash, is the prepaid ticket for passage to an American port, sent to friends and relatives to assist them to emigrate. The United States consuls at Bergen and Gothenburg reported that about one-half of the emigrants from Norway and Sweden in 1891 made the journey on tickets sent from America.[225] In this connection, it should be noted that the money thus spent by immigrants is not in the nature of a permanent investment of hoarded earnings; it is not the remittance of “birds of passage” like some Italians, for example, who will shortly follow it. In comparison with the millions of dollars sent home by Italian immigrants in an average year, the Scandinavian remittances and spendings are almost insignificant.[226]

From the first, great numbers of the immigrants have come with no other capital than strong and willing hands, stout hearts, and an unchanging land-hunger. They served for a time as laborers on the older farms, in town, in the lumber camps, or in railroad construction, saving their money, learning American ways, and acquiring some English, but as soon as money enough was saved, perhaps in a year, to buy forty or eighty acres of government land at the minimum price, a yoke of oxen or a team of horses, and a few necessary farm tools and implements, the prospective farmer moved upon new land and started out for himself. Under the Homestead Act of 1862 the amount of capital required for the beginning of operations was greatly reduced, and it was under this act that the lands of the northwestern States beyond the Mississippi were so rapidly taken up.[227]

A typical illustration of the process described is found in Levor Timanson, who came with his father in 1848, at the age of eighteen, to Rock County, Wisconsin, where he worked for several years as farm laborer, carpenter, and mason. He visited Iowa and Minnesota in 1853 in search of satisfactory land; finding it at Spring Grove, in the latter State, he settled down there as a grain and stock farmer. In 1882 he owned 840 acres of land of which 550 acres were under cultivation.[228] A study of the histories of counties and townships in eastern Iowa and Minnesota, and of the biographies which usually accompany them, reveals clearly the fact that the larger part of the Scandinavian farmers resident in those counties in the sixties and seventies spent from one to five years in Wisconsin or Illinois before moving into the Farther West.[229] They were in turn apprentices and journeymen, and finally attained to the full dignity of masters of their own estates.

The economic as well as the social importance of the tendency of the Scandinavian immigrants to settle upon the unoccupied farm lands of the West, can scarcely be over-emphasized. It gains still more striking significance when the figures showing such settlement are compared with those of some other races which have more recently contributed largely to the immigrant population; for the man who owns and develops a farm necessarily makes a permanent, long-time investment of himself and his family in a reproductively extractive industry; while the wage-earner in the mines or in lumbering is quite likely to be a “bird of passage,” engaged in destructively extractive industries, with only vague notions of, or longings for, citizenship and its responsibilities. Professor John R. Commons, perhaps the best statistical authority on this subject, gives some striking figures illustrative of the farm-ward tendencies of different alien elements, showing the percentage of total number of males in 1890 engaged (1) on farms, (2) as farmers and planters, and (3) as laborers not specified:[230]

(1)
Farm Labor		(2)
Farmers		(3)
Laborers
Danes40.7827.4113.30
Swedes and Norwegians38.2627.1214.95
Germans27.0421.1411.58
English18.5314.827.47
Irish14.7111.6025.16
Russians13.1911.0310.96
Italians5.813.9134.15
Hungarians3.922.1332.44