Large families have been a prominent characteristic of the home life of the Northmen in America's Northwest. Race suicide should not be charged against the Scandinavians either in their new homes or in their old, for in spite of the steady drain which emigration has made upon the population of Sweden, Norway, and Denmark for fifty years, each country in each decade has shown an increase of population, due solely to natural increase.[323] In America this natural fecundity was re-enforced by the conditions under which settlement was made, for large families are characteristic of the early years of a developing agricultural frontier. So when the Scandinavians entered the newly-opened regions of the Great West and found land and food abundant, both immediately and prospectively, they felt no necessity for enforcing prudential or other checks upon the increase of population. Putting the case more positively, circumstances put a premium upon families with numerous children; the farmer welcomed additions to his circle of boys and girls who would grow up into helpers upon the expanding cultivated acreage of the farm, and later take up land near the original homestead, buttressing it with prosperous allied homes. Families of ten and twelve were common, while others reached sixteen, eighteen, and even twenty-four.[324] In his remarkably detailed reminiscences of Norwegian settlers in Wisconsin and the further Northwest, the Rev. J. A. Ottesen refers to families of his friends and acquaintances, sometimes in exact figures, as seven, ten, or fourteen children, and sometimes in such general phrases as "many children," or "several children," making use of these phrases no less than seventeen times in three columns of a single article.[325] [323] _Special Reports, Bureau of the Census_, "Supplementary Analysis and Derivative Tables" (1906), 32-33. [324] Sparks, _History of Winneshiek County, Iowa_, 110; _History of Fillmore County_ (Minnesota), 377 ff., 434 ff. [325] J. O. Ottesen, "Bidrag til vore Settlementers og Menigheders Historie," _Amerika_, April-September, 1894, especially July 4. 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]