No people have answered the call of the land in recent years as eagerly as have the Scandinavians. These modern vikings have within one generation peopled a large part of the great American Northwest. In 1850 there were only eighteen thousand Scandinavians in the United States. The tide rose rapidly in the sixties and reached its height in the eighties, until over two million Scandinavian immigrants have made America their home. They and their descendants form a very substantial part of the rural population. There are nearly half as many Norwegians in America as in Norway, which has emptied a larger proportion of its population into the American lap than any other country save Ireland. About one-fourth of the world's Swedes and over one-tenth of the world's Danes dwell in America. The term Scandinavian is here used in the loose sense to embrace the peoples of the two peninsulas where dwell the Danes, the Norwegians, and the Swedes. These three branches of the same family have much in common, though for many years they objected to being thus rudely shaken together into one ethnic measure. The Swede is the aristocrat, the Norwegian the democrat, the Dane the conservative. The Swede, polite, vivacious, fond of music and literature, is "the Frenchman of the North," the Norwegian is a serious viking in modern dress: the Dane remains a landsman, devoted to his fields, and he is more amenable than his northern kinsmen to the cultural influence of the South. The Norwegian, true to viking traditions, led the modern exodus. In 1825 the sloop _Restoration_, the _Mayflower_ of the Norse, landed a band of fifty-three Norwegian Quakers on Manhattan. These peasants settled at first in western New York. But within a few years most of them removed to Fox River, Illinois, whither were drawn most of the Norwegians who migrated before 1850. After the Civil War, the stream rapidly rose, until nearly seven hundred thousand persons of Norwegian birth have settled in America. The Swedish migration started in 1841, when Gustavus Unonius, a former student of the University of Upsala, founded the colony of Pine Lake, near Milwaukee. His followers have been described as a strange assortment of "noblemen, ex-army officers, merchants, and adventurers," whose experiences and talents were not of the sort that make pioneering successful. Frederika Bremer, the noted Swedish traveler, has left a description of the little cluster of log huts and the handful of people who "had taken with them the Swedish inclination for hospitality and a merry life, without sufficiently considering how long it could last." Their experiences form a romantic prelude to the great Swedish migration, which reached its height in the eighties. Today the Swedes form the largest element in the Scandinavian influx, for well over one million have migrated to the United States.