The majority of the French who came to America after 1820 were factory workers and professional people who remained in the cities.  There are great numbers of French Canadians in the factory towns of New England.  There are, too, French colonies in America whose inhabitants cannot be rated as foreigners, for their ancestors were veritable pioneers.  Throughout the Mississippi Valley, such French settlements as Kaskaskia, Prairie du Rocher, Cahokia, and others have left much more than a geographical designation and have preserved an old world aroma of quaintness and contentment.

Swiss immigrants, to the number of about 250,000 and over 175,000 Dutch have found homes in America.  The majority of the Swiss came from the German cantons of Switzerland.  They have large settlements in Ohio, Wisconsin, and California, where they are very successful in dairying and stock raising.  The Hollanders have taken root chiefly in western Michigan, between the Kalamazoo and Grand rivers, on the deep black bottom lands suitable for celery and market gardening.  The town of Holland there, with its college and churches, is the center of Dutch influence in the United States.  Six of the eleven Dutch periodicals printed in America are issued from Michigan, and the majority of newcomers (over 80,000 have arrived since 1900) have made their way to that State.  These sturdy and industrious people from Holland and Switzerland readily adapt themselves to American life.

No people have answered the call of the land in recent years as eagerly as have the Scandinavians.  These modern vikings have within one generation peopled a large part of the great American Northwest.  In 1850 there were only eighteen thousand Scandinavians in the United States.  The tide rose rapidly in the sixties and reached its height in the eighties, until over two million Scandinavian immigrants have made America their home.  They and their descendants form a very substantial part of the rural population.  There are nearly half as many Norwegians in America as in Norway, which has emptied a larger proportion of its population into the American lap than any other country save Ireland.  About one-fourth of the world’s Swedes and over one-tenth of the world’s Danes dwell in America.

The term Scandinavian is here used in the loose sense to embrace the peoples of the two peninsulas where dwell the Danes, the Norwegians, and the Swedes.  These three branches of the same family have much in common, though for many years they objected to being thus rudely shaken together into one ethnic measure.  The Swede is the aristocrat, the Norwegian the democrat, the Dane the conservative.  The Swede, polite, vivacious, fond of music and literature, is “the Frenchman of the North,” the Norwegian is a serious viking in modern dress:  the Dane remains a landsman, devoted to his fields, and he is more amenable than his northern kinsmen to the cultural influence of the South.