An examination of several thousand biographical sketches of Danes, Norwegians, and Swedes who have attained some degree of success in the American West, the very class which would first begin to limit the size of the family, leads to the conclusion that the average number of children per family among them is between four and five. In other words the average is nearly double that of the United States taken as a whole.[326]
Closely connected with this immigration of so many young, unmarried girls of the servant class, is the question of sex morality and illegitimacy. The statistics relating to this question are particularly unsatisfactory so far as the United States is concerned, even for a land where the scientific statistician is a recent product, and where the collection of social statistics, left mainly to the States and to local authorities, is very loosely carried on. The motives for concealment and for prevarication are obvious, and the records of municipal courts, even if closely inspected, would not give much more than a scant minimum of information applicable to an estimate of the Scandinavian element in the population.
To judge from the figures given for certain cities in Norway and Sweden, it would be natural to expect a much higher percentage of illegitimate births among the immigrants from those countries than among persons of American ancestry. The United States Consul at Stockholm reported for 1884 for the whole of Sweden that 10.2% of all births were illegitimate; for the city of Stockholm alone, 29.3%.[327] Twelve years later the figure for the whole kingdom was 11%.[328] For Norway, the figure for the kingdom was 7.2% for 1896; in the city of Christiania, 15.4% of the 5,349 births in 1895 were illegitimate.[329]
Such statistics are certainly ominous, whatever the allowance which should be made for peculiar social conditions in Europe, which make the begetting of children after betrothal and before actual wedlock a less heinous offence against good order and morality than in America. But over against these startling figures stands the fact that it does not seem to be harder to maintain order and decency in cities like Minneapolis and St. Paul, or in the Scandinavian wards of Chicago, than it is in Detroit or Boston, or in the other alien quarters of Chicago itself. Nor does an inspection of the court and police records of cities of the Northwest for crimes and offences against decency, or against women, give cause for any special alarm for the future morality of the Scandinavians of that section.
For a safe and conclusive estimate of the contributions made by the Scandinavian element to the delinquent and defective classes of society, no very complete or satisfactory data are at present to be had. A detailed study of the statistics of these classes in Wisconsin and Minnesota warrants the judgment that the immigrants from Northern Europe, and their immediate descendants, have a much smaller percentage of paupers and criminals and a much larger percentage of insane, than do either the Germans or the Irish, the two other alien elements which approach the Scandinavians in importance in those States.[330] But these statistics are at best unconvincing, because they are acknowledgedly incomplete, and because in them little attempt is made to distinguish between the children of American descent and those born of immigrant parents in America.
The experts working out the interpretation of the results of the Twelfth Census (1900) have made distinct progress towards a fair comparative judgment in matters relating to social classes and conditions. John Koren, for example, the son of the veteran Norwegian Lutheran pastor, the Rev. V. Koren, and an investigator and writer of unusual weight, points out that the insane in hospitals are at least ten years of age, while there are few children under fifteen among the immigrants as compared with the number under that age among the native whites, and he accordingly concludes that “Of the whites at least 10 years of age in the general population of the United States in 1900, 80.5% were native and 19.5% were foreign-born; while of the white insane of known nativity enumerated in hospitals on December 31, 1903, 65.7% were native and 34.3% were foreign-born. Relatively, therefore, the insane are more numerous among the foreign born whites than among the native.”[331] How much more convincing is such a cautious and careful estimate than the sweeping generalizations of another recent writer: “Roughly speaking, the foreigners furnish more than twice as many criminals, two and one-third times as many insane, and three times as many paupers as the native element.”[332]
The statistics for the insane in hospitals at the end of 1903 and of those admitted during 1904, as given by Mr. Koren, show a strikingly high percentage of insane persons of foreign parentage in Wisconsin, Minnesota, North Dakota, and Iowa. No other State comes within ten per-cent of the ratio of the first three. Of those enumerated in December, 1903, 56% in Wisconsin, 48% in Minnesota, 52% in North Dakota, and 34% in Iowa, were of foreign parentage; the percentages of the admissions for 1904 were 53% in Wisconsin, 55% in Minnesota, and 33% in Iowa.[333] In all these States the Scandinavian element has been numerous for at least two generations. Figures gathered for this study for the period between 1885 and 1895, before the children of the Scandinavian immigrants reached in very considerable numbers what might be termed the age for acquiring insanity, gave similarly significant conclusions. Of the inmates of the state hospitals for the insane in Minnesota, the foreign-born Scandinavians were 28% in 1886 and 30.7% in 1890; of the admissions to the state hospital at St. Peter in 1890, 35% were Norse. Of the total admissions for the State in 1900, 23% were Scandinavians, while in the Fergus Falls hospital, located in the heart of a more recently settled Scandinavian area, 40% were of that nationality; Wisconsin reports show like percentages.[334] All of these statistics warrant the general conclusion that of all the foreign-born, the Scandinavians are the most prone to insanity.[335]