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 role 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 Tromsö 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 Tromsö counties, the Lofoten islands in
Tromsö 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 Rorös 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.[m]