THE DECREASE OF RURAL POPULATION. 621 

 THE DECREASE OF RURAL POPULATION. 



By JOHN C. ROSE. 



WHEN the Constitution of the United States was adopted, only 

 one in every thirty of the people who ordained and estab- 

 lished it were residents of cities or towns having eight thousand 

 inhabitants or upward. There were but six such places in the 

 entire country. San Francisco, situated sixteen hundred miles west 

 of our then western boundary, and not founded until nearly sixty 

 years after Washington was inaugurated, has now more than 

 twice as many inhabitants as had all the cities of the United States 

 together when the first census was taken. To-day we think and 

 speak of such States as Kansas, North Carolina, Texas, and Ar- 

 kansas as almost purely agricultural States. On such political 

 questions as the tariff and the currency we expect to see their rep- 

 resentatives take such positions as the farmers, whether rightly 

 or wrongly, suppose will best promote their interests. Yet every 

 one of the States just named, and indeed every State east of the 

 Missouri River, with the single exception of Mississippi, has a 

 larger proportionate urban population than had the country as a 

 whole when Hamilton carried through Congress his measures to 

 levy duties on imports for the " support of government, for the 

 discharge of the debts of the United States, and the encourage- 

 ment and protection of manufactures " ; to make " provision for 

 the debt of the United States," and "to incorporate the sub- 

 scribers to the Bank of the United States/' So great and far-reach- 

 ing are the differences between the social, economic, and politi- 

 cal conditions of city and country communities that there are few 

 features of the eleventh census which are more deserving of close 

 study than those which show how rapidly the United States is 

 changing from an almost purely rural to what promises ere long 

 to be a predominantly urban country. 



In making such a study the first thing to do is to determine 

 where the necessarily arbitrary line between urban and rural shall 

 be drawn. For the purpose of this article, all cities, towns, and 

 villages which were separately returned by the census as having 

 on June 1, 1890, 1,000 inhabitants or upward, are considered as 

 urban communities. There were 3,715 such cities, towns, and vil- 

 lages; and when hereafter in this article mention is made of 

 " urban population," the population of these places is intended, 

 while the term " rural population " will be used to designate all 

 the inhabitants residing outside of such cities, towns, and villages. 

 Of course, this division is not only arbitrary, but to a certain ex- 

 tent, particularly in New England, it may be misleading as well. 

 There are in the New England States 411 towns of between 1,000 



