28 RURAL SOCIOLOGY 



population in the East. The Back Bay may think of the Illinois 

 farmer as raising more corn to feed hogs, which he will sell in 

 order to buy more land on which to raise more corn to feed 

 more hogs with which to buy more land, and so on. But the 

 grandson of the man of whom this was said, sends his daughter 

 to college, taxes himself for a public library, and is patron of 

 the local art-loan exhibit. 



Nor is the Middle West without its delusions. It imagines 

 it is growing faster than the East, because the drift from the 

 crowd toward the edge of things, and from the wearied land to 

 the virgin soils, has been constant in American history. That 

 the center of population, which has traveled westward at the 

 average rate of fifty miles a decade, should halt or even retreat 

 would be deemed a marvel, like the sun standing still in the 

 vale of Ajalon. Yet that very portent impends. The center, 

 which migrated fifty-eight miles in the seventies, and forty-eight 

 miles in the eighties, shifted only fourteen miles in the nineties. 

 That it then moved on thirty-one miles was due to the rush to 

 the Pacific slope, where one family being at the long arm of the 

 lever, balances half a dozen Slovak families shantied in Pittsburg. 



The truth is that the East grew faster than the Middle West 

 through the nineties, and in the last ten years it has been 

 gaining nearly twice as rapidly, having added a quarter to its 

 people while the West was adding a seventh. While in the East 

 one county out of four lost in population, more than two coun- 

 ties out of five in the Middle West showed a decrease. One 

 reason is that the Western farmer resents cramping conditions 

 more strongly, and responds sooner to the lure of fresh acres, 

 than the Eastern farmer. The West it is that peoples the newer 

 West, while the enterprising spirits of the older commonwealths 

 seek their chance in the near cities. A lifetime ago the old 

 Yankee stock was faring overland to settle the wilderness. To- 

 day only a sprinkling of the native Americans west of the Great 

 Lakes claim an Eastern state as their birthplace. If in Iowa 

 seventy-one counties out of ninety-nine have gone back in popula- 

 tion during the last decade, and an equal number in Missouri. 

 it is assuredly not from bad times, but from the call of cheap 

 land in Texas or the Canadian Northwest. 



