22 Henry Gannett — Movements of our Population. 



in 1681. It was not until 1733 that settlement was established 

 in the present state of Georgia, in the neighborhood of what is 

 now the city of Savannah. 



The early colonies suffered many hardships and dangers and 

 grew but slowly. Bancroft estimates their people at approxi- 

 mately 200,000 in 1688, thr^e-quarters of a century from the time 

 of the first settlement. He estimates the population in 1750, 

 nearly a century and a half after the first settlement, at 1,260,000. 

 Ten years later, in 1760, it was 1,695,000 ; in 1770 it was 2,312,000, 

 and in 1780, 2,945,000. Thus, at the outbreak of the Revolu- 

 tion the population of the colonies was probably not far from 

 2,500,000, of which it is estimated that 2,000,000 were whites and 

 500,000 blacks. 



In 1790 the first census of the United States was taken. From 

 that time to the present a census has been taken every ten years. 

 For a century, therefore, Ave have a trustworthy record of our 

 numbers. Starting a century ago, with 3,929,214 inhabitants, 

 we have gone ahead by great leaps, as shown in the following 

 table and diagram, until our country contains to-day 62,622.250 



people : 



Population of the United States by Decades. 



The diagram (plate 6) shows by the lengths of the bars the 

 population as returned at each census, the difference between 

 their absolute lengths representing the numerical increase from 

 census to census, and their relative lengths the proportional 

 increase. In the first twenty-five years the population doubled ; 

 in the second twenty-five years it doubled again, the population 

 in 1840 being four times that in 1790. But in recent years the 



