Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 42.djvu/654

 634 rates of growth, of the cities of the same class are likely to be greater in the smaller cities than in the larger. Among the smaller places, and especially among those with less than 4,000 inhabitants, instances of an actual decrease in population during the decade are not unusual. The contrary is true for the larger cities. During the decade, every one of the 101 cities which in 1880 had upward of 20,000 inhabitants, gained in population more or less rapidly. Of the 82 cities which in 1880 had between 12,000 and 20,000 inhabitants each, only three, and of the 110 having in 1880 from 8,000 to 12,000 inhabitants only six, have less population than they had ten years ago. But out of the 333 places which in 1880 had a population of from 4,000 to 8,000 each, no less than 40 suffered during the decade a net loss of inhabitants, and among the still smaller places the proportion of those whose population decreased was still greater. Taking all the cities together, however, their increase was so great and so general that only in the Dakotas, Idaho, Arizona, and Louisiana does the rural population constitute a larger percentage of the entire population than it did in 1880. In all but the last of these the total population in 1880 was very small, and during the decade the greater portion of the immigrants to them have not sought the cities.

For some reason the cities and towns of Louisiana have grown very slowly during the decade, but even in this State the proportion of urban to the total population has fallen but one tenth of one per cent.

Although four of the five States and Territories in which the urban population constituted in 1890 a less proportion of the aggregate number of inhabitants than in 1880 lie wholly or partially west of the Missouri, in some of the trans-Missouri States the growth of the cities has been phenomenally rapid. Thus, in Washington the urban population in 1880 was but 14,474, while in 1890 it was 152,033, or more than ten times as great. In 1880 Seattle, Tacoma, and Spokane Falls had but 4,981 inhabitants, and ten years later 98,765, or nearly twenty times as many. It is significant of the altered conditions of modern life that a larger proportion of the population of Washington—the serious settlement of which dates back but a little over forty years, which spreads over more than eight times the area of Massachusetts, and which is not yet a manufacturing State—resides in cities of over 8,000 inhabitants, than was the case in Massachusetts as late as 1840, nearly two centuries and a quarter after the Plymouth landing, and when it had long been the principal manufacturing State in the Union.

In the three Pacific States as a whole very nearly one half of the entire population reside in cities, the urban population