Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 40.djvu/478

 460 from 6 in 1790 to 286 in 1880, since which time the number has grown to 443. New York was the only city in 1880 which had a population in excess of one million, but Chicago and Philadelphia now come into this list. The cities in 1870 which contained more than one hundred thousand inhabitants numbered 14, in 1880 they had increased to 20, and in 1890 to 28. The North Atlantic Division of States, with a population of 17,401,545, contains an urban population of 8,976,426, or 49·22 per cent of the entire urban population of the country. The population of the South Atlantic Division is 8,857,920, and the urban population is 1,420,455, or 7·79 per cent of the entire urban population of the United States. The Northern Central Division, the largest group in the country, has a total population of 22,362,279, and it has a large urban population (5,791,272), which is 31·76 per cent of the entire urban population. The Southern Central Division contains 10,972,893 inhabitants, but its urban population is small, it being 1,147,147, or 6·29 per cent of the urban population of the country. The Western Division, being the smallest group and having 3,027,613 inhabitants, has a city population of 900,370, which is 4·94 per cent of the entire urban population. While the North Atlantic Division contains nearly one half the urban population of the entire country, 51·58 per cent, or more than one half of its own population, is contained in cities of eight thousand or more inhabitants, and during the past ten years this urban element in this division has increased 43·53 per cent, while the total population has increased but 19·95 per cent. The greatest numerical increase in the urban element is to be found in Maine, Vermont, Massachusetts, and New York, so far as the North Atlantic Division is concerned; so that in the States named the rural population must have actually diminished. Of course, this rapid increase in the urban population of the North Atlantic Division finds its cause in the great extension of manufactures and commerce, lines which require the aggregation of inhabitants in restricted localities. This large increase of city population is due in some degree to annexations to already existing cities, but this makes no particular difference with the fact itself, that there is a large and rapidly increasing city population as compared with the population of rural districts.

The bare statement of the facts which I have cited often causes great apprehension as to the character of our population and as to the rapid growth of the influence of cities as controlling powers in the politics of the country, and very frequently it excites the fears of students of social science relative to the supposed increased intensity of the congestion in cities of the slum population. It is upon this latter point that I have for some years made more or less examination, and with a conclusion different from that of statisticians and writers generally. The limits of this series of