6z 4 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



Certainly in Massachusetts, in which State I have carefully 

 examined the returns of the towns at every Federal census, and 

 in some of the other New England States probably, this decrease 

 of the population of the smallest and most purely rural towns — 

 that is, of those which had in 1890 less than 1,000 inhabitants each 

 — has been going on steadily ever since 1840, and they now have 

 less population than they had ninety years ago. The next larger 

 towns, still purely or nearly purely rural, but more favorably 

 situated, being those which had in 1890 between 1,000 and 2,000 

 inhabitants each, increased steadily and with a reasonable degree 

 of rapidity until 1850. During the decade between 1850 and 1860 

 there was a barely perceptible increase, and since 1860 the de- 

 crease has been continuous. In the aggregate all the towns hav- 

 ing less than 2,000 inhabitants each, comprising as they do 179 of 

 the 351 towns and cities in the State, had a larger population in 

 1820 than they have to-day. 



In the early days of the century, railroads there were of course 

 none. Even canals as yet existed principally on paper. The cost 

 of land carriage was on the average probably at least twenty-five 

 times as great as it now is. Articles whose bulk was large as 

 compared with their value, as is generally the case with agricul- 

 tural products, could not profitably be carried great distances 

 overland. Under ordinary circumstances, if they could not be 

 consumed or reach navigable water within a hundred and fifty 

 miles or less of the place of their origin, they were practically 

 valueless. Under such conditions the proximity of most of the 

 New England country towns to the seacoast and to the commer- 

 cial and manufacturing centers gave them an enormous geograph- 

 ical advantage, which went far to compensate for the comparative 

 sterility of much of their soil. Now, however, when it costs less 

 to bring a barrel of flour or a bushel of wheat from Nebraska or 

 the Dakotas than it did eighty years ago to wagon like articles a 

 hundred miles, those advantages which were once so great have 

 become of little practical importance. Were the decrease of rural 

 population confined only to New England and to such portions of 

 the other older States as had a soil below the average of produc- 

 tiveness, the phenomenon would have a very obvious explanation. 

 It could be said that when a farm in the valley of the Mississippi or 

 the Missouri produces with equal labor and capital twice as much 

 as a similar farm east of the Hudson, and when it costs compara- 

 tively only a small fraction of the market price at Boston or New 

 York to transport the Western product to those cities, the Eastern 

 farmer must abandon the unequal struggle. But while the gener- 

 ally harsh and forbidding character of much of the New England 

 soil is doubtless one of the reasons why most of its country towns 

 have to-day less population than they had when the election of 



