nd the men the
unskilled laborers that were needed in the construction camps. They
built roads, dug canals, and laid the first railways. Complaint was
made that they lowered the standards of wages and of living, that
their intemperate, improvident ways tended to complicate the problem
of poverty, and that their Catholic religion made them dangerous, but
they continued to come until the movement reached its climax, in 1851,
when 272,000 passed through the gates of the Atlantic ports. The
Irish-American has become an important element of the population,
especially in the Eastern cities, and has shown special aptitude for
politics and business.

230. =Germans and Scandinavians.=--The Irishman was followed by the
German. He was attracted by-the rich agricultural lands of the Middle
West and the opportunities for education and trade in the towns and
cities. German political agitators who had failed to propagate
democracy in the revolutionary days of 1848 made their way to a place
where they could mould the German-American ideas. While the Irish
settled down in the seaboard towns, the Germans went West, and
constituted one of the solid groups that was to build the future
cosmopolitan nation. The German was followed by the Scandinavian. The
people of Norway, Sweden, and Denmark were increasing in number, but
their rough, cold country could not support them all. As the Norsemen
took to the sea in the ninth century, so the Scandinavian did in the
nineteenth, but this time in a peaceful migration toward the setting
sun. They began coming soon after the Civil War, and by 1882 they
numbered thirteen per cent of the total immigration. They were a
specially valuable asset, for they were industrious agriculturists and
occupied the valuable but unused acres of the Northwest, where they
planted the wheat belt of the United States, learned American ways and
founded American institutions, and have become one of the best strains
in the American blood.

231. =The New Immigrants.=--If the United States could have continued
to receive mainly such people as these from northern Europe, there
would be little cause to complain of the volume of immigration, but
since 1880 the tide has been setting in from southern and eastern
Europe and even from Asia, bringing in large numbers of persons who
are not of allied stock, have been little educated, and do not
understand or fully sympathize with American principles and ideals,
and for the most part a