The economic as well as the social importance of the tendency of the Scandinavian immigrants to settle upon the unoccupied farm lands of the West, can scarcely be over-emphasized. It gains still more striking significance when the figures showing such settlement are compared with those of some other races which have more recently contributed largely to the immigrant population; for the man who owns and develops a farm necessarily makes a permanent, long-time investment of himself and his family in a reproductively extractive industry; while the wage-earner in the mines or in lumbering is quite likely to be a "bird of passage," engaged in destructively extractive industries, with only vague notions of, or longings for, citizenship and its responsibilities. Professor John R. Commons, perhaps the best statistical authority on this subject, gives some striking figures illustrative of the farm-ward tendencies of different alien elements, showing the percentage of total number of males in 1890 engaged (1) on farms, (2) as farmers and planters, and (3) as laborers not specified:[230] (1) (2) (3) Farm Labor Farmers Laborers Danes 40.78 27.41 13.30 Swedes and Norwegians 38.26 27.12 14.95 Germans 27.04 21.14 11.58 English 18.53 14.82 7.47 Irish 14.71 11.60 25.16 Russians 13.19 11.03 10.96 Italians 5.81 3.91 34.15 Hungarians 3.92 2.13 32.44 From calculations based upon the reports of the censuses of 1870, 1880, and 1890, it appears that one out of four of the Scandinavians was in the last year engaged in agriculture; of the Americans, one out of five; of the Germans, one out of six; and of the Irish, one out of twelve.[231] [230] _Report of the Industrial Commission_, XV, 301-302. Mr. R. C. Jones, assistant superintendent of Castle Garden, New York, estimated, according to an interview in the _Milwaukee Sentinel_, Dec. 30, 1888, that about one Swede out of a hundred went to a city. [231] See Nelson, _History of the Scandinavians_, I, 246.