THE DECREASE OF RURAL POPULATION. 625 



Abraham Lincoln furnished the occasion for the long-contemplated 

 secession of the cotton States ; many of them less than when the 

 embargo and the War of 1812 infuriated its Federalists almost to 

 the point of armed resistance to the Washington government ; 

 and a few of them less than they had when the passage of the 

 Stamp Act began the long struggle which was to terminate in the 

 independence of America — it certainly is not the sole and is prob- 

 ably not the principal cause of this partial depopulation. The 

 same thing is going on over extensive areas of the most fertile 

 portions of the country. There are men still living who can 

 remember when the "Genesee Country" filled the same place 

 in popular imagination as a frontier wheat-producing district 

 of marvelous fertility that is now occupied by the valley of the 

 Red River of the North. Nor was it or is it only in one or a 

 few great staples that the rich counties of central and western 

 New York excelled. In all the products of the field, the orchard, 

 the vineyard, the flock, and the dairy they occupied a high and 

 in some the highest rank. Indeed, in the variety of its agricul- 

 tural and pastoral productions New York is probably unsurpassed 

 among the States, or surpassed by California alone. Yet with all 

 these abounding resources for the support of a prosperous rural 

 population, fifty of its fifty-five counties north of the Harlem have 

 fewer inhabitants outside of their cities and towns than they had 

 ten years ago. Of the five exceptions to the general rule of rural 

 decrease, two, Westchester and Rockland, lie immediately north 

 of New York city ; two others, Franklin and Hamilton, include 

 the most thinly settled portion of the Adirondack wilderness ; and 

 in the fifth, Schenectady, the increase during the decade has been 

 just twelve, or at the rate of about one eighth of one per cent. 

 The decrease of rural population has thus been as general in fer- 

 tile New York as in sterile and rock-bound New England. The 

 rural population of New York north of the Harlem in 1880 and 

 1890 compares as follows : 



1880 1,894,795 



1890 1,725,913 



Decrease 168,882 



Percentage of decrease 8"91 



When the nineteenth century began, western New York was 

 almost entirely destitute of white inhabitants. Yet so rapid are 

 the movements of population in the United States— in which, 

 what sixty years ago was a mere hamlet clustering around the 

 frontier Fort Dearborn, is now a mighty municipality with a 

 population larger than had any of the historic capitals of Europe 

 a century ago — that most Americans would consider all the region 

 from the Niagara to the Hudson as a portion of the older settled 



