HAS IMMIGRATION INCREASED POPULATION? 24.5 



rapid manner as the natives, the population, wealth, and strength 

 of the United States would be forced forward in a manner that 

 would produce results of inconceivable grandeur. It certainly 

 did look like an enormous boom, irresistibly attractive both for 

 its possibilities and for its uncertainties. The difficulty with it 

 was that, like the rest of the experiment, it was all based upon 

 "presume" and "suppose." 



If the calculations had turned out as expected, we should 

 undoubtedly now have a population of at least a hundred millions. 

 Jefferson, writing in the year 1815, prophesied eighty millions for 

 the year 1875, which would give considerably over a hundred mil- 

 lions for the year 1893. But, curiously enough, when the alien ele- 

 ment had reached a certain point, about the year 1830, the native 

 population began to fall off in births, and the more the aliens 

 increased in numbers the fewer became the births of the natives. 

 The foreigners themselves were not as prolific as the old native 

 stock had been ; and the consequence is that we have now to-day 

 not as many people as we would have had if the immigrants had 

 never come near us and the native stock had continued their old 

 rate of increase. 



The statistics which show this were very ably discussed many 

 years ago by Mr. Edward Jarvis, and recently General Francis 

 Walker has again called attention to them. The calculation is a 

 simple one. We have the population at the close of each decade 

 and also the number of foreigners in the country. Confining our- 

 selves to the white population, if we subtract from the total 

 whites at the close of a decade the number of foreigners at the 

 close of the decade and find the difference between that result and 

 the native whites at the end of the previous decade, we have the 

 natural increase of the native population, and can easily find the 

 percentage. 



Let us therefore construct in this way a table which will show 

 the growth of the native white population by decades from 1750 

 to 1890. Previous to 1750 the numbers by even decades are not 

 obtainable. For the population previous to 1790 we shall take 

 Bancroft's estimates, which are now generally accepted, and for 

 the time after 1790 we shall rely on the revised figures of the 

 national census. For the time previous to 1800 the number of 

 foreign born living in the country has never been estimated, but 

 they were very few and would not materially alter the results. 



To find the number of natives it will be necessary to deduct 

 from the total number of whites not only the European foreign 

 born but also the people who came to us by a stroke of the pen 

 when we acquired -the Louisiana territory, Florida, Texas, New 

 Mexico, and California. Louisiana was purchased in 1803, and 

 her people considerably swelled the census of 1810. How much 



