[154] For Denmark, the increase has been about 1% per year since 1870; Sweden shows a slightly smaller increase, falling as low as ¼% in 1890; Norway has a still smaller average increase than Sweden, estimated by Norwegian authority "1865-1890, .65%". The same writer adds: "The Norwegian race, in the course of the fifty years from 1840 to 1890 must have about doubled itself, which is equivalent to an annual growth of about 1.4%." Norway, 103; _Statesman's Year-Book, 1900_, 491, 1047, 1050. [155] _Supplementary Analysis of 12th Census_, 31-33. [156] These figures are drawn from the tables in the _Census Reports, 1910, Population_, I, 875 ff. The statistics generally deal only with white persons, thus excluding blacks and mulattoes of the Danish West Indies. The distribution of this vast company to the different States of the Union is a consideration of primary importance. The detailed analysis of the motives, processes, and results of the occupation of the Northwestern States by the children of the Northlands, belongs in later chapters.[157] The reasons why the stream flowed to the north of Mason and Dixon's Line are a combination of climate and a fear and hatred of slavery. If the movement from Scandinavia had begun fifty years earlier, before the anti-slavery agitation became acute, the New Norway and the New Sweden of the nineteenth century, would doubtless still have been in the North and probably in Ohio, Indiana, and Michigan, for very much the same reason that the Western Reserve was a New Connecticut. [157] See chapters VIII-X. Desiring ownership of good agricultural land above all else, and finding after 1835 that the best and cheapest was to be found along the advancing frontier west of a north-and-south line drawn through Chicago, the men from Norway, Sweden, and Denmark followed their distant cousins of New England and the Middle States in the great trek into the Any-Man's-Land of the fertile upper Mississippi Valley.[158] For more than two decades after the Civil War, tho slavery no longer existed in the South, that region was still in the depression and uncertainty of the post-bellum industrial disorganization, and hence unattractive to immigrants of any class. So the tide continued to run high in the Northwest and spread wider and wider because of the traditions of two generations, and because of the attracting power of the Scandinavian mass already comfortably and solidly settled there. [158] The "line which limits the average density of 2 to a square mile, is considered as the limit of settlement--the frontier line of population". _Eleventh Census, Report on Population_, I, xviii. See R. Mayo-Smith in _Political Science Quarterly_, III, 52.