90 RURAL SOCIOLOGY 



almost necessary that a considerable number be allowed, even 

 induced, if need be, to settle in a community. At first, they will 

 live as in a world apart, but they give off ideas and take on others 

 and at the end of a generation or two a few intermarriages will 

 have broken down the hard-and-fast wall between settlements. 

 Common markets, interchange of labor supply, contests between 

 settlements, political and other conflicts, and back of it all the 

 common-school system, soon result in an amalgamated, assimi- 

 lated race. 



The next consideration which should be held in mind in de- 

 termining upon the distribution of immigrants among the dif- 

 ferent branches of the agricultural industry is the economic 

 status of the people to be distributed and their plans or am- 

 bitions for the future. Thus, some are independent laborers, 

 others ready to become tenants, and still others to be landowners. 

 Some plan to be employees as long as they stay; some of these 

 would plan to save a snug fortune in a few years and return to 

 the mother-country, others to earn and use the returns from 

 year to year. Some plan to step up to the position of tenant and 

 employer, others are ready to enter that state at once. Some are 

 ready to become landowners and independent farmers by pur- 

 chase of land in settled districts, others with less capital would 

 go to the frontier with poorer markets and grow up with the 

 country, enduring hardships but accumulating wealth. There 

 is room for all of these classes of people in nearly all parts of the 

 country. 



The extended successes accompanied by individual failures of 

 the English-speaking peoples who early entered the agricultural 

 industry of this country need not be expanded upon here. 

 Neither will any detailed treatment of the extensive settlement 

 by Germans in the North Central States during the last half-cen- 

 tury be made. We may place the general influx of Scandinavians 

 into Minnesota and the Dakotas in the same class and pass by all 

 of these which means the great bulk of immigrants of agri- 

 cultural peoples with the statement that they represent success 

 and with the assumption that students of economics know of these 

 classes and know of their successes. It is because we are too apt 

 to stop at this point and say that other nationalities as a rule 

 have little or nothing to offer that this paper is presented. The 



