It is a striking fulfilment of her prophecy that to-day a fifth of the Scandinavian blood in the world is in this very region. Fifty years ago Wisconsin led, with her great Norwegian contingent; then Minnesota passed her, and later Illinois, with Chicago as the lodestone. To-day two-fifths of the people of Minnesota are of Scandinavian strain. Northern Iowa has a strong infusion of the blood, while the Dakotas are deeply tinged. In 1870 four-fifths of all our Scandinavians were in this region. The proportion fell slowly to three-fourths in 1880, five-sevenths in 1890, two-thirds in 1900, and three-fifths in 1910. Of late many have dropped into the ranks of clanging industrialism between Pawtucket and Pittsburgh, while the current of home-seekers into the new Northwest has given Washington and Oregon as many Scandinavians as there are in the Dakotas. SOCIAL CHARACTERISTICS Like the immigrants from Great Britain, the Scandinavians came with a male preponderance of about three-fifths. About a quarter of them were servants at home, a third were common laborers, and a sixth were skilled laborers. They have brought far less skill than the British, and distinctly less than the Germans and the Bohemians. In point of _literacy_ they lead the world. One finds an illiterate among every twenty German immigrants of more than fourteen years of age. Of immigrants from other nations, one may find an illiterate among every twenty-three Dutch, thirty-eight Irish, fifty-two Welsh, fifty-nine Bohemians, seventy-seven Finns, one hundred English, and one hundred and forty-three Scotch; but the proportion among those who come from Scandinavia is _one in two hundred and fifty_. What a contrast between these and the Lithuanians and South Italians, half of whom are unable to read any language! It is perhaps the strain of melancholy lurking in Northern blood that gives our Scandinavians a tendency toward insanity slightly in excess of the foreign-born as a whole, and decidedly greater than that of Americans. In susceptibility to tuberculosis they make a worse showing than any others among our foreign-born save the Irish. They die of it oftener than do their children born in this country, but even these suffer twice the losses of their American neighbors. But the scourge is still worse in the old country; so very likely we have here not a race weakness, but a penalty for unhygienic conditions. In the bitter North, with the forests disappearing, people came to dread fresh air, and the trouble began as soon as the open hearth gave way to the tight stove.