In the many monographs and more pretentious works dealing with various phases of the economic history of the United States, much attention has been given to the tariff, manufacturing, banking, currency, transportation, and public lands. Only recently have the economic results of immigration begun to receive the attention which their importance deserves. For a long time the excellent work of Professor Richmond Mayo-Smith, _Emigration and Immigration_ (1890), notable for the strength and breadth of its general treatment, was quite alone in its field. Mere statistical studies no longer suffice, and just as the census-taking of the Federal Government has changed from the simple, old-fashioned inventory of numbers--so many heads, black and white, native-born and foreign-born--to an elaborate investigation of the life problem of the population, so the meaning of immigration as a whole, and of Scandinavian immigration in particular, requires a discussion extending beyond annual and decennial statistics and maps of the density of settlement. In the economic development of the Northwest, as compared with the history of the Eastern, Middle, or Southern States during the nineteenth century, the three principal topics are immigration, the Federal land policy, and improvements in transportation. In a peculiar manner the last two subjects are interwoven with the story of the Norwegians, Swedes, and Danes in America. When people by the hundreds of thousands were settled in the West, when commerce and manufacturing arose upon the sound basis of a prospering agriculture, then and not till then, protection, currency, and bimetallism might be accepted as real and immediate issues.