24+ THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



HAS IMMIGRATION INCREASED POPULATION? 



By SYDNEY G. FISHER. 



THE immigration which formed the basis of our colonial pop- 

 ulation was very slight. The men who fought the Revolution 

 and created the United States were almost exclusively native. 

 The population of New England, as is well known, was produced 

 out of an immigration of not much over 20,000, all of whom ar- 

 rived before the year 1640. From 1640 until about 1820, a period 

 of nearly two hundred years, the growth of New England was by 

 the childbearing of the original and native stock. There was no 

 immigration worth mentioning; but, on the contrary, an overflow 

 into neighboring colonies. New York and the West. Franklin, 

 writing in 1751, when the population of all the colonies was about 

 a million, said that the immigration which had produced this 

 number was generally believed to have been less than 80,000.* 



Modern immigration set in some time in the beginning of the 

 present century, and had grown to noticeable proportions about 

 1820, when the national Government decided to take statistics of 

 it. By 1830 all observers agree that the foreigners had begun to 

 have a decided influence and effect, and that a change could be 

 distinctly seen. By 1840 the Native American or Know-Nothing 

 movement had begun ; in 1850 it had become a distinct political 

 party ; and in 1856 had a candidate for the presidency. 



One of the strongest arguments used against the Know-Noth- 

 ings was that immigration would greatly increase the population, 

 and in that way the wealth and strength of the country. The rate 

 of increase by births among the colonists had been remarkably 

 rapid and had astonished the people of Europe. Franklin was 

 among the first to call the attention of learned men to this phe- 

 nomenon. In some parts of the country the people, without the 

 aid of immigration, doubled themselves in twenty-five or twenty- 

 seven years ; and there were traditions of particular localities in 

 which the doubling had taken place within less than twenty 

 years. No record of a like increase over such an extended terri- 

 tory could be found in the history of the civilized world. 



For the fifty years that followed the Revolution, when immi- 

 gration was at a minimum, this natural increase was greater than 

 ever. The whole population in that time doubled itself about 

 every twenty-three years. It was therefore very natural for the 

 people who believed in the immigration experiment to suppose 

 that if to this increase in every decade were added a couple of mil- 

 lion immigrants, who would presumably have children in the same 



* Franklin's Works (Sparks's edition), vol. ii, p. 319. 



