478 IOWA DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE 



BREAD UPON THE WATERS. 



STATE GAINING IN POPULATION. IMMIGRATION SETTING FROM 

 NEW QUARTER. 



BY IVANHOE WHITTED. 



The census returns for 1915 furnish some highly interesting conclu- 

 sions in regard to the ownership of Iowa land, population, immigration, 

 emigration, etc., all the more interesting because indisputable. 



The writer has never been able to completely submerge an early ac- 

 quired antipathy to those two words, "immigration" and "emigration." 

 The spelling bothered him for one thing; he was never quite sure where 

 to use the double-m. A strict regard for the truth compels the admission 

 that lis still has to consult the dictionary on occasions. The meaning, 

 too, seemed one of such subtile distinctions that he always felt that 

 one word might have been made to cover the field. Finally it was made 

 clear to his boyish obtusity that the man coming into the state, or vi- 

 cinity, is the immigrant, while the individual hiking forth bag and 

 baggage to new fields of conquest is the emigrant. 



It was during the days of that extraordinary exodus of homeseekers 

 bound for the Great New West. Countless thousands of white-topped 

 wagons pursued a slow-moving way across the boundless prairies, the 

 earnest faces of the travelers set unflinchingly toward the setting sun. 

 It was a wonderful and awe-inspiring sight, one that can never be wit- 

 nessed again. 



There was a certain hill from the top of which it was possible to survey 

 the country for miles in every direction. One well-remembered day the 

 small boy sat upon the eminence and forever established the meaning — if 

 not the spelling — of those two words in his curriculum. He watched the 

 "covered wagons" drift slowly across the prairie from the east, pass 

 through the station, for the river and climb the long clay hill westward 

 bound. "Now," said he, as with screeching brakes the wagons slipped 

 down the hills to-^ard the village, "they are immigrants; and now," as 

 the toiling oxen disappeared over the long clay hill toward the v.e^t, "they 

 are emigrants." 



When the official count of the census enumerators in 1910 was given 

 to the public it was discovered that according to the record Iowa had suf- 

 fered a falling off in population as compared with the figures of 1900. 

 It wasn't much, to be sure, a matter of 7,082, lost some time during the 

 ten-year period, but it was enough for the knocker and he promptly got 

 busy with his hammer. Envious neighbors pointed the finger of scorn; 

 they said that so far as Iowa was concerned that word, immigrant, had 

 been eliminated from the world's vocabulary; that there was only one 

 word for us and that was emigrant; that the citizens of Iowa were 

 passing over the big hill and away. Some of those finicky down eastern- 

 ers even hinted at race suicide, but out here in Iowa we know better than 

 that, for we have the living, hustling proof of the falsity of the accusa- 

 tion in countless numbers. 



