Page:The Yankee and the Teuton in Wisconsin.djvu/25

 that nothing could halt the march of improvement. The chief point was to obtain prompt possession of the right kind of farm. Having this, he could count on doing a big agricultural business as a wheat grower, which promised generous financial rewards. But if for any reason he failed to get the right kind of farm, if improvements were unexpectedly dilatory, or if the land ceased to respond to his demand for wheat and more wheat, he "sold out" with slight compunction and went elsewhere, confident of success on a new frontier, especially the great wheat plains. To him land was a desirable commodity, but by no means a sacred trust.

The German, on the other hand, came from a land of very gradual change. Although agricultural conditions there were actually considerably modified in the first half of the nineteenth century, he still, for the most part, looked upon his dwindling patrimony as the basis, not of a money making business, but of a livelihood. If, by the combined labor of all members of the household, the family could be fed, clothed, and sheltered, the heavy obligations to church and state redeemed, and a few gulden sequestered for times of emergency, the peasant was content. His land was his home. It had been his father's, grandfather's, great-grandfather's. The original estate was parted into ever more and smaller divisions, as generation succeeded generation, until the tracts of many holders were at last too small to support the families. These had no choice but to sell and go to the city, or go to America. This condition was one of the most general economic causes of the large German immigration to this and other states. When the German farmer, or other German, came to Wisconsin and bought a piece of land, one purpose dominated his mind—to make a farm for a home, and establish a family estate. In the beginning it did not occur to him to speculate in land, although in this as in other things he proved an apt pupil. Accustomed to a very limited acreage, he was not