of some of the most purely agricultural and most purely manufacturing counties:

* Census of 1861. Population Tables, vol. i. p. 18. The negative sign (—) indicates a decrease of population, as in the cases of Cambridge, Norfolk, and Wiltshire.

To demonstrate how clearly Mr. Bright foresaw the dangers that lay ahead, it is only necessary to glance at the following and compare it with the table above:

Thus, while the population in some of the large manufacturing towns in England has increased at the rate of 30 and 37 per cent, 8 per cent is the highest rate of increase in the agricultural districts, and in three counties the population has actually decreased. But as Professor Rogers pointed out in the July number of this REVIEW, emigration has had much to do with this change. In the sixty-two years from 1815 to 1876 the total

number of emigrants who have left the United Kingdom is 8,424,942. Their destinations were as follows:

Taking the money value of these emigrants at $1000 apiece, as is ordinarily assumed in this country, we find they represent a sum of $5,467,075,000 that English emigration has given the United States. But we find that here, as in England, there is a decided tendency to leave the millions of acres of magnificent lands unoccupied, and seek the large towns. Population seems to seek life for the brain, and such excitements as our cities afford prove too attractive for the rural populations, as the following will show:

No doubt the census of 1880 will show a still larger proportion. In 1850 less than one quarter of the population of the United States lived in cities; now the towns contain upward of one third. The change may be to some extent accounted for in the change of the industrial condition of the West, but in general the immense demand for manufactured products which followed the war drafted the country population into the towns, there to exchange the quiet village for the crowded, squalid alleys, the busy workshop, or the gloomy mine. But it must not be forgotten that in the United States there is a happy medium between the large cities and their toiling thousands and the villages with their half-dozen stores and school-house. I allude to the manufacturing cities of from 10,000 to 25,000 inhabitants, which are growing up so rapidly, especially in our Western

States. Lots are cheap in such towns, and the careful, industrious mechanic soon has a home of his own, and he becomes identified with the city in which he lives.

We are now brought face to face with the real subject of this article the basis of our prosperity. The actual condition of the United States is generally summed up as follows: The South with cotton, the staple textile fibre of the world's clothing; the West with meat and grain; the Northwest with. lumber and leather; the Middle States with coal and iron; New York and New England with textile and other manufactures; the Pacific States and Territories with their vast stores of mineral wealth. But the last ten years has brought about many changes, and the movements of centres of industry make the above statement correct only with many modifications. As Mr. Courtney' has shown of England, so in the United States many industries that have died out in one section of the Union have grown up in another. For instance, take the effect of the war from 1861 to 1865 on the production and consumption of domestic cane-sugars. The product of the then three sugar-producing States, Louisiana, Texas, and Florida, for the year 1861-2 was unprecedentedly large, and was estimated at upwards of 191,000 tons, or 427,840,000 pounds. In 1865, however, this branch of industry had become so nearly extinct that it was estimated that no more than 5000 tons of domestic cane-sugar entered into the total sugar consumption of the country.

ing the last decade the production has rapidly increased. In the early history of Virginia the light lands of the eastern counties were cultivated in tobacco, extensive shipments to England being made from towns on the Chesapeake, long since abandoned. Less than a century of tobacco-growing completely exhausted the coast counties, and left the towns, mansions, and churches that once flourished there buried in a forest of pine. Charleston formerly supplied almost wholly the northern part of Georgia and a large part of Tennessee with nearly everything that the country merchants dealt in, and Savannah shared to

"The Migration of Centres of Industrial Energy" (Fortnightly Review December, 1878).

The Sugar Industry of the United States," by David A. Wells, p. 15.

some extent in this trade also. The two cities did an immense business. Now the channels of trade have changed with the growing competition of transportation. Trade has been diverted from its former course, and a depreciation of the business interests of these cities has followed. Country dealers are doing a large business, and are supplied directly from the North and West by rail, and new towns are springing up along the lines of railroad. Again, prior to the war the Eastern States alone manufactured textile fabrics. Since that time cotton manufactories have been put into operation in the South and West. Some fime ago Tennessee had forty cotton - mills, running 56,358 spindles. In Georgia, at Atlanta, Augusta, Columbus, and Macon, are cotton-mills. Alabama, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Virginia have mills already in operation. The total amount of cotton manufactured in the South during the year ending September 1, 1879, was 152,000 bales; not a large amount, to be sure, but it indicates the beginning of a change. The South, it has been said, dreams of a period when the vast interest of cotton-weaving shall be distributed through the cotton belt itself. The West similarly has faith in a time when it shall monopolize, at least as far as home consumption is concerned, all those manufactures into which wood and iron enter. The fulfilment of both these expectations would silence and depopulate many of the industrial centres of the East. The following table shows that the contingency of a removal of the cotton-spindles southward is remote:

The increased consumption at the South within the last five years has been 7000 bales; at the North, 354,000 bales.

But that a division of the business of those who work in iron and wood between the East and the West is as remote I do not believe, and indeed the facts indicate the reverse. The West is no longer purely given over to meat and grain. It is growing more important every year in manufacturing; and in industries where recent and reliable data can be obtained it will be seen that the strides made within the past few years are surprising, and worthy of the most careful consideration of political economists. In 1878 the State of Illinois alone made as many rails as the whole United States made in any one year prior to 1860. The four States of Illinois, Wisconsin, Indiana, and Kansas produced last year 266,783 tons of rails, upward of 30 per cent of all the rails produced in 1878 in the United States. Illinois and Indiana alone produced half a million tons of cut nails, over one ninth of the total production of the country. The spring of the present year witnessed the starting of new rail manufactories at Omaha, Nebraska, and Centralia, Illinois. The total production of rolled iron of all kinds in the United States for 1878 was 1,555,576 tons; of this, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, Missouri, and Kansas produced 232,553, or about one seventh. The ore in the iron regions of Michigan and Missouri is very rich and free from injurious ingredients, and is capable of being successfully employed for the manufacture of all varieties of iron and steel. Professor Newberry,' one of the best authorities on the subject, has observed that in these two iron districts the inhabitants of the Valley of the Mississippi have a supply of remarkably rich and pure ores, which is not likely to be exhausted for some hundreds of years, and which, from the small amount of phosphorus which they contain, will be the chief dependence of the American people for the manufacture of steel. To Chicago and Milwaukee, and other points on the shores of the Great Lakes, the ore of the Lake Superior iron regions is floated cheaply, and is manufactured where disembarked, or is distributed through the interior of Illinois and neighboring States to be brought in closer proximity to the coal. Already an immense iron rail industry, second only to Pennsylvania, has grown up, based on the relations which have been "Iron Resources of the United States" (International Review, November, 1874).