420 MUNICIPAL ADMINISTRATION 



the days of Napoleon and Jefferson than during any previous ten 

 or twenty centuries of the world's history. 



The new economic efficiency resulting from the creation and em- 

 ployment of productive capital has multiplied the population of all 

 civilized countries. It has placed a premium upon intelligence, 

 moreover, and has been the most potent agency in the banishment 

 of popular ignorance. Its inevitable concomitant, moreover, has 

 been the wide diffusion of the means of subsistence and the steady 

 reduction of the domain of poverty. 



Not only, however, has the modern system of economic produc- 

 tion multiplied population and lifted the people up in the scale of 

 physical well-being, but it has had a most striking and even sensa- 

 tional effect upon the re-grouping of population. It is this re- 

 grouping that has created the modern conditions of industry and 

 of transportation, and that has concentrated the steadily increasing 

 surplus of the population in centers of manufacturing and trade. 



The growth of capital and the average increase in wealth have 

 created many new wants, which in turn have been supplied by the 

 products of new forms of trade and industry. And these differen- 

 tiations have in turn increased the town population and added to 

 the complexity of town life. 



The same conditions of industry and transportation which have 

 created our modern cities and multiplied their population have had 

 a striking though not revolutionary effect upon agriculture and the 

 rural industries. They have tended to bring about the opposite 

 condition of a relative sparsity of rural population. This has been 

 due to two principal facts: first, the introduction of machinery, 

 which has made possible the cultivation of a given area of land by 

 a smaller number of people; second, and more important, the new 

 prevalence of extensive, as opposed to intensive, methods in agri- 

 culture, as a result of the opening-up of vast areas of new and virgin 

 soil through the construction of railways. 



The competition of the new soils, with their access to markets, 

 will continue for some time to come to keep the older lands depressed 

 in value and subject to extensive rather than intensive methods 

 of culture. So long as this condition remains, surplus population 

 will continue to flow from the agricultural to the manufacturing 

 neighborhoods, that is to say, from country to town. These tenden- 

 cies can be amply illustrated by facts derived from every country 

 within which Occidental civilization prevails. Even here in the 

 states which have been built up upon the soil of the Louisiana Pur- 

 chase, in all the older parts of states like Missouri, Iowa, or Minne- 

 sota, the agricultural population has been a fixed or slightly 

 diminishing factor for two or three decades past, while the town 

 population has been increasing by leaps and bounds. 



