Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 41.djvu/780

760 From this short table we see the changes that are going on. Taking the last census decade of years, we find that the aggregate population increased 24·86 per cent. Analyzing this, it is seen that the native-born population increased 22·76 per cent and the foreign-born 38·47 per cent. The heaviest increase in the foreign-born was between 1850 and 1860, when it was 84·38 per cent. This was soon after the great tide of immigration set in toward this country. The highest percentage of increase in the native-born population was between 1870 and 1880, so far as the decades in the table are shown, it then being 31·78 per cent. The percentage of the native and foreign-born of the total population is given in the following tabular statement:

This little table answers very fully the question as to whether the foreign-born are increasing out of proportion to the increase of population. Leaving out 1850, as immigration had just then begun to be felt strongly, and commencing with the decade of 1860, the percentages are very interesting. In that year the foreign-born constituted 13·16 per cent of the total population of the country. In 1890 it constituted 14·77 per cent, or an increase of ·61 of 1 per cent in the thirty years, certainly not a very alarming figure. In 1870 the foreign-born population constituted 14·44 per cent, while in 1890 it was, as stated, 14·77 per cent, an increase in percentage of ·33 per cent in twenty years. The native population in 1860 was represented by 86·84 per cent of the total population, and in 1890 by 85·23 per cent.

If we examine particular sections of the country, however, we find some extraordinary proportions. Massachusetts, for instance, in 1880 had 443,491 foreign-born persons as part of her population. This was 24·87 per cent of the total population. In June, 1890, her foreign-born population numbered 657,137, and was 29·04 per cent of the total. The foreign-born population in Rhode Island increased from 78,993 in 1880 to 106,305 in 1890. The great State of New York had 1,211,379 foreign-born persons in her borders in 1880, while in 1890 this body had increased to 1,571,050. Pennsylvania showed like proportions. In Wisconsin the foreign-born population increased from 405,425 in 1880 to