In a discussion of the competition of the immigrants with American laborers, an eminent scholar maintains that the Scandinavians of the West have succeeded where the American with a better start has failed.[237] He questions if this success is a survival of the fittest, if it has not been purchased at the expense of American labor which is forced elsewhere, because the Americans will not endure the hard work and live on the coarse fare, through which the immigrants win their success.[238] However true this might be as a generalization about immigrants as a whole, it can hardly be true of the Swedes and Norwegians, except in so far as they have been more willing than the native American to live the life of a pioneer and to stick to the soil. But this cannot fairly be called forcing out American labor, or driving the American to the wall; immigrant labor went in where there was no labor of any kind. Furthermore, up to 1890, there was certainly plenty of land for all the American, or native-born, laborers who desired to devote themselves to that sort of work by which the Scandinavians were gaining their independence. If the agricultural land of the vast West be looked upon as a national asset, to be held for cautious and discriminating distribution to examined and approved settlers, then it may be that the foreigner has occupied land which might have sometime fallen to a better man. [237] Mayo-Smith, _Emigration and Immigration_, 146. [238] _Ibid._, quoting a letter from Fargo, Dakota, July 24, 1887, to the _New York Times_.