Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 48.djvu/257

Rh rapid manner as the natives, the population, wealth, and strength of the United States would be forced forward in a manner that would produce results of inconceivable grandeur. It certainly did look like an enormous boom, irresistibly attractive both for its possibilities and for its uncertainties. The difficulty with it was that, like the rest of the experiment, it was all based upon "presume" and "suppose."

If the calculations had turned out as expected, we should undoubtedly now have a population of at least a hundred millions. Jefferson, writing in the year 1815, prophesied eighty millions for the year 1875, which would give considerably over a hundred millions for the year 1893. But, curiously enough, when the alien element had reached a certain point, about the year 1830, the native population began to fall off in births, and the more the aliens increased in numbers the fewer became the births of the natives. The foreigners themselves were not as prolific as the old native stock had been; and the consequence is that we have now to-day not as many people as we would have had if the immigrants had never come near us and the native stock had continued their old rate of increase.

The statistics which show this were very ably discussed many years ago by Mr. Edward Jarvis, and recently General Francis Walker has again called attention to them. The calculation is a simple one. We have the population at the close of each decade and also the number of foreigners in the country. Confining ourselves to the white population, if we subtract from the total whites at the close of a decade the number of foreigners at the close of the decade and find the difference between that result and the native whites at the end of the previous decade, we have the natural increase of the native population, and can easily find the percentage.

Let us therefore construct in this way a table which will show the growth of the native white population by decades from 1750 to 1890. Previous to 1750 the numbers by even decades are not obtainable. For the population previous to 1790 we shall take Bancroft's estimates, which are now generally accepted, and for the time after 1790 we shall rely on the revised figures of the national census. For the time previous to 1800 the number of foreign born living in the country has never been estimated, but they were very few and would not materially alter the results.

To find the number of natives it will be necessary to deduct from the total number of whites not only the European foreign born but also the people who came to us by a stroke of the pen when we acquired the Louisiana territory, Florida, Texas, New Mexico, and California. Louisiana was purchased in 1803, and her people considerably swelled the census of 1810. How much