fare of their children, and convinced of
the possibility of helping to bring about a better social order and a
freer life. They were social idealists. But they based their ideals on
trust in the common man and the readiness to make adjustments, not on
the rule of a benevolent despot or a controlling class.

The attraction of this new home reached also into the Old World and gave
a new hope and new impulses to the people of Germany, of England, of
Ireland, and of Scandinavia. Both economic influences and revolutionary
discontent promoted German migration at this time; economic causes
brought the larger volume, but the quest for liberty brought the
leaders, many of whom were German political exiles. While the latter
urged, with varying degrees of emphasis, that their own contribution
should be preserved in their new surroundings, and a few visionaries
even talked of a German State in the federal system, what was noteworthy
was the adjustment of the emigrants of the thirties and forties to
Middle Western conditions; the response to the opportunity to create a
new type of society in which all gave and all received and no element
remained isolated. Society was plastic. In the midst of more or less
antagonism between "bowie knife Southerners," "cow-milking Yankee
Puritans," "beer-drinking Germans," "wild Irishmen," a process of mutual
education, a giving and taking, was at work. In the outcome, in spite of
slowness of assimilation where different groups were compact and
isolated from the others, and a certain persistence of inherited
_morale_, there was the creation of a new type, which was neither the
sum of all its elements, nor a complete fusion in a melting pot. They
were American pioneers, not outlying fragments of New England, of
Germany, or of Norway.

The Germans were most strongly represented in the Missouri Valley, in
St. Louis, in Illinois opposite that city, and in the Lake Shore
counties of eastern Wisconsin north from Milwaukee. In Cincinnati and
Cleveland there were many Germans, while in nearly half the counties of
Ohio, the German immigrants and the Pennsylvania Germans held nearly or
quite the balance of political power. The Irish came primarily as
workers on turnpikes, canals and railroads, and tended to remain along
such lines, or to gather in the growing cities. The Scandinavians, of
whom the largest proportion were Norwegians, founded their colonies in
Northern Illinois, and in Southern Wisconsin about