MATERIAL CONDITIONS

The chief occupation of the Scandinavian peninsula is agriculture, employing more men and yielding larger monetary returns than any other industry in either Norway or Sweden. This may seem strange when it is recalled that sixty per cent of the surface of Norway is occupied by bare mountains, twenty-one per cent by woodlands, eight per cent by grazing lands, four per cent by lakes, and two per cent by ice fields, leaving only seven-tenths of one per cent for meadows and cultivated fields. And yet, the products of the farm equal the combined returns from shipping, lumber, and fisheries.

In Sweden the proportion of land under cultivation is considerably larger, the arable lands consisting of about twelve per cent of the total area, and in Sweden as in Norway, the agricultural products are more than those from shipping, lumber, and fisheries combined.

Nine-tenths of the farms of Norway and Sweden are owned by small proprietors; and although the right to dispose of landed property is relatively free, the laws of the country favor the retention of the farms in the families possessing them. An old allodial right makes it possible to redeem at an appraised value a farm that has been sold. This right is acquired after the property has belonged to the family for twenty years, but it is lost after the farm has been in the possession of strangers for three years. There are some farms that have been worked for a thousand years by the descendants of the same family. The best farms are about the banks of the lakes and in the narrow river valleys, and there are many fertile meadows which have never been plowed or put under cultivation, so that there are great future possibilities for tillage. And yet these meadows furnish fine hay-crops, and every blade of grass represents money in Scandinavia.

In a country extending through thirteen degrees of latitude, one might naturally expect a wide range of agricultural products. In the southeastern part of the peninsula most of the plants and orchard fruits of central Europe are found; whereas in the northern sections it is impossible to grow even the most hardy plants. Oats, barley, and rye are the chief cereals, but their production scarcely meets the needs of the country. Potatoes are the only root crops extensively cultivated. While the summers are short, vegetables and small fruit do excellently during the long, sun-lit hours. Scandinavians, however, do not seem habituated to a vegetable diet, and the cultivation of root plants seems very generally neglected. Pears, cherries, apples, raspberries, gooseberries, and currants may be grown under favorable conditions; but they play a minor rôle in Scandinavian horticulture.

The cow is a staple of wealth to the people of Scandinavia. They are diminutive in size, dun-colored, docile in habits, and excellent milk producers. It is said when they are well-fed they average from six to nine hundred gallons of milk a year. The mountain saeters, or dairies as we would call them, are the centers of the butter and cheese industry during the summer months.

The peninsula is also supplied with an excellent breed of small but hardy horses. The cream-colored fjord horses of Norway are only sixty inches high. They are active, hardy, and gentle; and in the mountainous parts of the country they are vastly more serviceable than mules would be. The Gudbrandsdalen breed, found chiefly in the mountain valleys, are larger than the fjord horses, and they are generally brown or black in color. Good horses bring surprisingly high prices. Working horses cost from $200 to $350 and the best stallions bring as much as $2,500.

The agricultural interests of Norway have suffered unmistakably by the enormous emigration to the United States. Two-thirds of the Norwegians of the world live in Iowa, Wisconsin, Minnesota, and the Dakotas. Nearly every Norwegian farmstead has kinsmen in our country; and the strong and vigorous always emigrate, thus leaving the farms at home in the hands of the old and infirm. America has been greatly benefited by this almost incessant exodus; for the Norse peasants have, without an exception, made splendid citizens, the best, in fact, that have come to us from Europe.

Commenting on the enormous emigration from the Norwegian farms, William Eleroy Curtis remarks:

“Notwithstanding the large emigration of young people, for whom the Norwegian farms are too small, it is apparent that the development of Norway is continually progressing along the highest lines, and that the tendency of the people, is upward socially and industrially, in culture and in wealth. The population of the kingdom not only holds its own, but shows a slight increase which seems remarkable because of the continual drain of young, able-bodied men and women who have removed to our western states. In all public movements, in all social, commercial, and industrial activities, in art, science, and literature, in wealth and prosperity, Norway stands abreast of the most advanced nations of Europe; but its progress is not won without greater effort than any other people put forth, and the application of thrift and industry elsewhere unknown, but which is required in a climate so bleak and inhospitable, and by a soil so wild and rocky. None but a race like the Norsemen could have kept a foothold here.”

Norwegian economists recognize the loss to the country through emigration, and in recent years the national parliament has attempted to improve the condition of agricultural laborers. A fund of $135,000 has been set aside by the government for the purchase of land. Loans are granted to municipalities (1) for the purpose of buying large estates to be assigned to people without means at the purchase price, in plots of not more than twelve acres of tillable soil, and (2) for the purpose of being granted as loans on the security of parcels of the same size, which people without means may acquire as freehold property. The interest on these loans is from three to four per cent, and the time of payment is up to twenty-five years.

There is also a cultivation fund of $270,000, from which loans are granted for the purpose of cultivating and draining the soil. The interest is two and one-half per cent, and the time of repayment is up to twenty years, including five years in which no instalments are required. Such loans are granted (1) on the security of mortgages and (2) on the guaranty of the municipality.

Agricultural societies national and county receive government grants for the purpose of holding meetings and issuing documents that might be of service to farmers. There is also a staff of surveyors paid by the state to assist in the public allotment of land and otherwise to render assistance to needy lot-owners.

Considerable attention is also being given to the matter of agricultural education. Connected with the state agricultural college is an experimental farm, where not only farmers but also dairymen, gardeners, and foresters receive practical instruction.

Connected with the larger farms of Norway and Sweden are cotters’ places farm laborers who have leased a small part of the farm for a definite period (often during their natural lives). In some cases the cotter leases only a building with a garden attached; in other cases several acres of ground. The cotter is usually required to work on the farm of the owner at certain times of the year for a small wage regulated by contract. These cotters correspond to our truck farmers, and their plots of ground number about 35,000 on the outskirts of the cities and villages. They raise potatoes and other vegetables, and hay enough to feed a horse and several cows. In most cases the women and children do the work, while the men are engaged in other occupations.

It is no longer permitted to establish entails which can not be sold or mortgaged, and the national government in recent years has sought to further the partition and allotment of the common ownership of land. Pastures and grazing lands are still often held by the community, and similarly mountain pastures. But the community farms, when the consent of all the part owners and tenants has been secured, may now be partitioned by surveyors appointed by the public authorities.

In the great timber districts of the mountain ranges, the trees are felled in winter and the logs are dragged to the tops of the steep mountain sides, where they are slid down to the river, or they are carted on sledges to the river’s edge. During the early summer, after the ice has gone, and while the rivers are yet full of water, they are floated down the streams to the sawmills. But, as the logs are constantly being driven into corners or lodging against piers, floaters are employed to keep the logs in the current. Log-floating is both the most dangerous and the most unhealthful occupation in Norway. Men often fall into the streams; they are forced to sleep on the cold ground in uninhabited parts of the country; they frequently fall from the rolling logs into the whirling currents and are tossed against sharp rocks; and the marvel is not that the death-rate among floaters is so high, but that any of them survive the perilous occupation.

The value of the exports of forest products and timber industries reaches about eighteen million dollars a year, and the combined forest industries furnish employment to a large number of laborers. The state forests occupy about 3,500 square miles, more than half being located in the northern provinces of Tromsoe and Finmark. The state also has nurseries at Vossevangen and Hamar, and three forestry schools, by means of which widespread interest in tree-planting has been aroused. Destructive forest fires and the slaughter of the trees by the remarkable development of the wood-pulp industries have emphasized in recent times the need of larger forest reserves and closer government supervision. Under the most favorable conditions, the pine requires from seventy-five to one hundred years to yield timber twenty-five feet in length and ten inches in diameter at the top. Spruce will reach the same size in seventy-five to eighty years. In the higher altitudes of the central part of the country the pine requires one hundred and fifty years, and rarely exceeds one hundred feet in height, and it decreases toward the coast and northwards.

The fisheries of Norway are among the most important in the world, yielding the nation more than seven million dollars a year, and furnishing employment to eighty thousand men. The sea-fisheries play the chief part in this branch of industry. The long coast line and the great ocean depth near the coast combine to give the fisheries of Norway unusual advantages. The abundance of fish is also due to the presence of masses of glutinous matter, apparently living protoplasm, which furnishes nutriment for millions of animalcules which again become food for the herring and other fish. The fish are mainly of the round sort found in deep waters, the cod, herring, and mackerel being the most important.

The cod yields the largest monetary returns. This fish migrates to the coast of Norway to spawn and in search of food. The best cod fisheries are in Romsdal, Nordland, and Tromsoe counties, the Lofoten islands in Tromsoe alone furnishing employment to more than four thousand men. The cod weighs from eight to twenty pounds and measures from five to six feet in length. Some are merely dried after having been cleaned. This is done by hanging them by the tail on wooden frames. The others are sent to the salting stations where they are salted and dried on flat rocks. A fish weighing ten pounds will yield two pounds of salted cod, the loss being due to the removal of the head and entrails and the drying out of the water.

There are numerous secondary products from the cod, the most valuable being the cod liver oil. The livers of the fish are exposed to a jet of superheated steam which destroys the liver cells and causes the small drops of oil to run together. The roe are salted and sent to France to be used for bait in the sardine fisheries.

In the matter of the handicraft industries carried on in the homes, Norway has long taken high rank. As early as the ninth century her artisans were skilled in the manufacture of arms, farming implements, and boats, and her women in cloth weaving and embroidery. During recent times the ease and cheapness with which foreign products could be obtained caused a marked decline in home industries; but at the present moment an effort is being made to rehabilitate them through a national domestic industry association, organized in 1891, which has taken up the manufacture of hand-carved articles, sheath-knives, skis, sledges, and woven and embroidered woolen and linen goods after the old Norwegian patterns.

The manufacture of lumber and wooden ware is one of the leading industrial pursuits. With the exception of the two most northern counties, practically every section of the country is represented by sawmills and planing mills. Ship-building in recent times has attained considerable importance, and the manufacture of paper of the chemical wood-pulp variety has become one of the leading industries. There are a few cloth, rope, and jersey mills at Bergen and Christiania, but the textile industries of Norway are relatively unimportant. On the other hand, leather, India rubber, glass, metal, and chemical industries have become important of late years.

Norway is not rich in mineral products. The combined mining industries do not yield more than two million dollars a year, and they furnish employment to less than four thousand men. The Kongsberg silver mines have been operated for more than three hundred years, but the recent fall in the price of silver has reduced the output. The copper mines at Roroes have been operated for two hundred and fifty years, and there are less important copper mines in Nordland, Telemarken, and the Hardanger. There are iron mines at Arendal and elsewhere, but the rise in the cost of charcoal, due to the scarcity of wood, has greatly crippled the iron industry. There are important soapstone quarries in the Gudbransdal and the Trondhjem basin; green colored slate in the Valders and at Vossevangen; and granite, syenite, and porphyry in many parts of the country.

Measured by population and national wealth, the commerce of Norway is relatively important, due in a large measure to her enormous merchant marine and the efficiency of her hardy seamen. Relatively to the population of the country, Norway has the largest merchant fleet in the world, and in the matter of steamships and sailing vessels she is surpassed only by three countries Great Britain, Germany, and the United States. Not only is her fleet large, but her service is efficient. Norwegian seamen the world over are esteemed for ability and honesty, inspiring all commercial nations with confidence that goods carried in Norse bottoms will be carefully and conscientiously treated; and her seamen are everywhere sought to man foreign vessels.

In industries, the Swedes excel in the manufacture of iron. To fully appreciate the value of this industry, one should visit Gefle, the most important shipping point on the eastern coast of Sweden. Here there is a fine harbor, with docks and warehouses owned by the government. From this port the ore from the mines of central Sweden is shipped to all parts of the world and handled by Brown hoisting machinery, which is made in Cleveland, Ohio the same that you see on the ore docks at South Chicago and at Cleveland, Buffalo, Ashtabula, and other points on the Great Lakes where iron ore and coal are handled.

At Gefle, too, an annual industrial exposition is held, where you may see on exhibit all the utensils manufactured or used by the people all kinds of machinery, tools, and implements, recent novelties in patents, weaving, wood-carving, and a large part of the exposition building is given up to beautiful articles in iron, in the manufacture of which we have said the Swedes excel.

A little west of Gefle is the town of Fahlun, which is the headquarters of the Kopparberg Mining Company, the, oldest industrial corporation in the world. The buildings date back to the seventeenth century and the mines are even more ancient. A mortgage bond was filed upon them in the year 1288 by a German company, and the records show that in 1347 the privilege of working them was sold by the king of Sweden to a syndicate of Lubeck miners. But these documents which are on file in the archives of the town are comparatively modern, because the copper deposits at Fahlun were known and worked in prehistoric times, and from them the Vikings obtained the sheathings for their ships and the material from which their copper armor, implements, and utensils were made. An immense amount of copper was used and worked with great skill in Scandinavia even before the Christian era, and the most of it came from the great deposits at Fahlun.

The iron industry is old in Sweden. Isaac Breant, a tradesman in Stockholm, founded a company and received a charter from Charles XI in 1685. He built the first blast furnace in Sweden, and died in 1702, leaving the property to his son, who died in 1720. The heirs sold out in 1722 to a man named Grill, in whose family the property remained until 1800, when it was purchased by the ancestors of the present owners.

The famous Dannemora mines, which produce the best Bessemer ore in the world, have been worked continuously since 1481. It is one of the most valuable and extensive iron deposits in the world, and resembles those of Lake Superior. The area of ore already located covers 12,500 square meters.