Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 52.djvu/614

594 more than the natural increment of country population; they are drawing off the middle-aged as well as the young. Thus great areas are being actually depopulated. For example, in the decade from 1881 to 1891, the French cities of 30,000 inhabitants or over added to their respective numbers more than three times as many as the total increase of population for the entire country. Even their due proportion of the abnormally slow increase was denied to the rural districts; the ten years left them less densely populated than before. In 1846 almost half of the eighty-eight departments in France had a larger population than they have to-day. Paris alone, the metropolis, has, as we have already observed, absorbed four fifths of the entire increase of the land; the remainder was added to the other large cities in proportion to their size. The British Isles exemplify the same tendency. More than half of the English towns with populations over 25,000 are the product of this century. Sixty out of one hundred and five of these cities have arisen since 1825. This is, of course, due to the extension of the factory system in great measure. The same depopulation of the rural districts is noted. Ten rural counties in England and Wales alone have fewer inhabitants than in 1851. The fact is that western Europe is being gradually transformed into a huge factory town. It is being fed less and less from the products of its own territory. The wheat fields of the Americas, India, and Australia are contributing what formerly was raised by the peasantry at home. It is not surprising that the trend is toward the cities; were it even more marked it would be no marvel.

This growth of city populations has, then, taken place largely at the expense of the country. It must be so, for the urban birth rates are not enough in excess of the mortality, save in a few cases, to account for more than a small part of the wonderful growth which we have instanced. The towns are being constantly recruited from without. Nor is it an indiscriminate flocking city-ward which is taking place. A process of selection is at work on a grand scale. The great majority to-day who are pouring into the cities are those who, like the emigrants to the United States in the old days of natural migration, come because they have the physical equipment and the mental disposition to seek a betterment of their fortunes away from home. Of course, an appreciable contingent of such migrant types is composed of the merely discontented, of the restless, and the adventurous; but in the main the best blood of the land it is which feeds into the arteries of city life.

Another more certain mode of proof is possible for demonstrating that the population of cities is largely made up either of direct