636 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



rapidly going on. In almost all countries those who desire to 

 change existing systems of taxation try to enlist in their behalf 

 this popular feeling by ascribing the decline of rural population 

 to the operation of the fiscal machinery they dislike. Thus, in 

 free-trade England, " fair-traders " assert that some scheme of re- 

 taliatory duties is required to arrest the depopulation of the rural 

 districts. In France an extremely protective tariff has recently 

 been adopted, largely at the demand of the agricultural classes. 

 In the United States, on the other hand, those who are opposed to 

 protective taxes are equally positive in their assertions that such 

 taxes are the principal cause of the decrease of population in so 

 many fertile sections. Doubtless, like other local conditions, 

 tariff changes may help or hinder the operation of the general 

 causes which are at work the world over. Those causes, however, 

 were not set in motion by legislation, and could not be perma- 

 nently checked by it, unless it should take so drastic a form as to 

 be fatal to the material welfare of the whole community. 



That the urban shall grow more rapidly than the rural popu- 

 lation is, under present conditions, an economic necessity. The 

 generally low prices of agricultural products during the last few 

 years unite with most other available data to show that the sup- 

 ply of such products is increasing at least as fast as and probably 

 faster than the increase in aggregate population. In this country, 

 although the census of 1890 showed an increase of but twelve per 

 cent in the rural population, and of less than twenty-five per cent 

 in the aggregate population, the average production of wheat for 

 the decade preceding the census of 1890 was forty-four per cent 

 greater than that for the decade preceding the census of 1880; 

 that of corn forty-three per cent greater, and of oats eighty-five 

 per cent greater. In the cotton belt, the only agricultural portion 

 of the older States in which there has been any considerable in- 

 crease of rural population, we see in the great overproduction of 

 cotton for several years in succession what would necessarily hap- 

 pen in other staple products if as large a proportion of the popu- 

 lation as formerly attempted to earn their living by tilling the soil. 



In a neighborhood in which all the tillable land was taken up 

 thirty years or more ago, as is the case in all or nearly all the 

 counties of the older States in which the rural population has 

 diminished, there are general causes at work to bring about the 

 result. The constant and steady improvement in agricultural 

 machinery enables fewer hands than were required thirty years 

 ago to cultivate the land with equal efficiency. To employ the 

 same number of men as formerly, closer cultivation would be 

 necessary. Perhaps, because such closer cultivation will not pay 

 when its products have to be sold in competition with the more 

 easily raised crops of the trans-Mississippi or trans-Missouri 



