The railroads left nothing undone to stimulate the economic desire of the Scandinavians to migrate to their particular sections of land and to the adjoining government sections. Several companies maintained for years regular immigration or land agents, besides a considerable and variable corps of sub-agents, port agents, and lecturers; some of them paid the expenses of men representing groups of prospective immigrants, who desired to visit and report upon a particular locality. The St. Paul, Minneapolis & Manitoba Railroad advertised in "Facts about Minnesota" (1881): "The settler--his family, household goods, live stock and agricultural implements--will be carried from St. Paul to any point on either of our lines at one-half the regular price." Besides these efforts and inducements, the railroad companies prepared handbooks in different languages, distributed them widely throughout the East and West, and circulated them systematically in Norway, Sweden and Denmark.[201] A few of the companies even sent special representatives to Europe to work directly with the people of those countries. The Hon. Hans Mattson left the office of Secretary of State in Minnesota in 1871 to become the liberally paid European agent for the Northern Pacific Railroad whose resources he was to advertise from his headquarters in Sweden.[202] He was not, however, to organize regular parties of emigrants. A high official of one of the northwestern roads summed up the matter by saying, "There is as much competition among the railroads desiring to attract immigrants, as among dry-goods stores in aiming to attract customers." [201] Such pamphlets were issued by the Wisconsin Central, the Chicago & Northwestern, the Chicago, Milwaukee & St. Paul, and the Northern Pacific railroads. Some of them were printed in Swedish, Norwegian, German, Dutch, and Polish. [202] Mattson, _The Story of an Emigrant_, 118 ff.