Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 52.djvu/408

392 to the higher advances in arts and material prosperity, and with the creation of a servient class which was composed principally of aliens, a dominant class inevitably arose, which may be numbered among the earliest contributions of the foreign element to American civilization.

In 1812, at the commencement of the second British war, the state found itself in a most depressed financial condition; national and individual ruin were freely predicted, an extensive westward movement began, and that great central section of the country lying between the Ohio River and the lakes, the Mississippi and the Appalachian Mountain system, then almost a terra incognita, commenced to receive large increments in population from among these pessimistic Easterners. What the result would have been had these gaps in the population of the New England and Middle States not been filled within a few years by aliens it is hard to discern; possibly the development of this section might have been slightly delayed, although not by any means necessarily so, as a diffusion of the then existing population would otherwise inevitably have followed, doubtless with beneficial results. But it is unnecessary to here speculate upon something which never happened.

These earlier immigrants to the country were, as we have already seen, largely of the better class of mechanics and skilled laborers. The farmers constituted about a sixth of the entire alien arrivals, and the remaining five sixths usually found occupation in the towns; in fact, the growth of the urban population is closely identified with the immigration movement. In 1790 the urban population constituted but three and a third per cent of all the inhabitants, and there were only six cities with a population in excess of eight thousand; in the decade between 1810 and 1820, when, as already noted, there was a large westward movement and a decrease in immigration by reason of the war, the percentage of urban inhabitants remained unchanged, but otherwise it has increased in an almost constant progression until the decade from 1880 to 1890, during which the rate of progression advanced considerably.

The first definite statistics which we have of the immigration movement begin with the year 1820, when we find the Irish element largely predominating over all other arrivals; it is regrettable that we can not distinguish the north Irish and the south Irish, as they may be regarded as widely variant factors. It was from, among the latter that the servient class—day laborers, domestic servants, etc.—was drawn, and it was also largely from among them that the delinquent classes were recruited. In 1830 the German aliens began to constitute a considerable factor among the arriving immigrants, being in excess of those from Great Britain, but the Irish continued in the