will be as firmly fixed as they have been upon the Scotch
and English coasts, where the Northmen intrenched themselves so
numerously and firmly about nine hundred or a thousand years ago. The
Scandinavians in the Northwest become Americans with a rapidity
unequaled by any other non-English-speaking element. Their political
ambition is as insatiate as that of the Irish, and they already secure
offices in numbers. Their devotion to the American school system, their
political aptitude and ambition, and their enthusiastic pride in
American citizenship are thoroughly hopeful traits, and it is generally
believed that they will contribute much of strength and sturdiness to
the splendid race of Northwestern Americans that is to be developed in
the Upper Mississippi and Missouri Valleys. The Northwestern Germans
evince a tendency to mass in towns, as in Milwaukee, and to preserve
intact their language and national traits.

SOCIETY AND GENERAL CULTURE.

The large towns of the Northwest are notable for the great numbers of
the brightest and most energetic of the young business and professional
men of the East that they contain. While they lack the leisure class and
the traditions of culture that belong to older communities, they may
justly claim a far higher percentage of college-bred men and of families
of cultivated tastes than belong to Eastern towns of like population.
The intense pressure of business and absorption of private pursuits are,
for the present, seeming obstacles to the progress of Western
communities in the highest things; but already the zeal for public
improvements and for social progress in all that pertains to true
culture is very great. Two decades hence no man will question the
quality of Northwestern civilization. If the East is losing something of
its distinctive Americanism through the influx of foreign elements and
the decay of its old-time farming communities, the growth of the
Northwest, largely upon the basis of New England blood and New England
ideas, will make full compensation.

Every nation of the world confronts its own racial or climatic or
industrial problems, and nowhere is there to be found an ideal state of
happiness or virtue or prosperity; but, all things considered, it may
well be doubted whether there exists any other extensive portion, either
of America or of the world, in which there is so little of pauperism, of
crime, of social inequality, of ignorance, and of chafing discontent,