1889.] PUBLIC DOCUMENT — No. 4. 339 



population in the present condition of agricultural science 

 may be regarded. The conditions of their increase undergo 

 a change upon the general occupation and allotment of their 

 areas. Manufactures and commerce then come in to supply 

 the means of subsistence to an excess of inhabitants beyond 

 what the ordinary cultivation of the soil can sustain. 



But people who enter other occupations and pursue other 

 industries must be maintained in food ; they cannot live on 

 the products of mechanical, manufacturing or professional 

 labor alone ; their actual support must come from the soil, — 

 naturally, where they live. And when the land where they 

 have settled fails to furnish that support which they need, 

 they must seek it elsewhere, either by buying it froni abroad, 



— not always practicable, — or, as in this case, migrating to 

 broader and more fertile fields, from which to draw the 

 means by which they live. 



By the normal increase, without the addition of immi- 

 grants, the population of 378,787 in 1790, in doubling at 

 the moderate rate of every thirty years, would have been 

 757,574 in 1820, 1,515,148 in 1850, and in 1880, 3,110,296, 



— a population of 386 to every square mile of territory in 

 the State, exceeding in density every other State or country 

 recorded, except Belgium, which has 481 to the square mile, 

 but on over six million acres of cultivated land (five million 

 in the highest state of tilth), while we have but 939,260 

 acres. 



It is, therefore, evident that such a population could never 

 have been maintained on such an acreage of such soil as our 

 State ; nor would even the subjugation of the million and a 

 half acres of our ' ' uncultivated land " have afforded relief. 



It was only the migration from the farms of able-bodied 

 young men and women, that both held in check our ever- 

 increasing population, and planted in other sections of this 

 wide land the germs of great States and a stable government. 



While the laws of nature have forbidden any great advance 

 in our agriculture by the ordinary increments of population, 

 counteracted as they have been by constant emigration, we 

 must turn to the remarkably full and accurate statistics of our 

 own census, to judge somewhat by comparison of our standing 

 at the present with that of former years. 



