Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 40.djvu/484

spread and characteristic of all, as the rural has been in the past and as the urban may perhaps be said to be in the present." This aspect of affairs is perfectly reasonable, and is the only condition that could have been expected. It should be remembered that the cities named are great mercantile and manufacturing centers, their prosperity developing rapidly, and it should also be remembered that the rapidity of the development of cities in commercial or industrial ways retards the growth of population in the compact quarters to a very large degree. Every time an advance is made along a street by the extension of business houses, the families living there are crowded out; they may move to other parts of the city or locate in the suburbs; in either event there is only a shifting of population, and not an increase. The transfer of great manufacturing establishments from the city to the country carries large numbers of families, or if the transfer is made within the city limits there is simply a change in location of the population interested in the establishment. In taking the Federal census of 1880 for the State of Massachusetts I discovered a loss in one of the wards of the city of Boston; but I found upon investigation that the removal of one establishment from that ward to another in a distant part of the city had carried with it more than one thousand people; so the increase in the population of the part of the city to which the removal was made apparently indicated growth. Cities lay out new streets and avenues, necessitating the tearing down of rookeries and crowded tenement-houses. Every such improvement displaces a large number of families, who seek a residence either in some other part of the city or in the suburbs. Thus, the building of a large number of houses, often referred to as an evidence of increase of population, may not mean any increase whatever. If a hundred families are crowded out of their old locations by improvements or by the encroachments of trade, there is an immediate demand for a hundred new tenements, which makes it appear that the population is increasing rapidly, when there is no increase. That the argument that new houses always indicate an increase of population is unanswerable can not be admitted, for very frequently the reverse is true; even in a country town a new house or a dozen new houses may not indicate an increase of a single person in the population, as it may be entirely the result of the improved financial condition of one or several families formerly living in the same house. The building of new houses is an indication of prosperity and of increase, but not positive evidence of increase. The retarding influence of the increase of trade and of manufactures must be felt more and more as their extension becomes more rapid, and in all great cities where large business blocks are erected in place of crowded tenements there must be a dispersion of population.