revealed slight change in the centre of population.
This now stood six miles southeast of Columbus, Ind., having moved west
only fourteen miles since 1890. In computing its position neither Hawaii
nor Alaska were considered. Never before had its occidental shunt been
less than thirty-six miles in a decade. For three score years it had not
fallen under forty per decade. What sent it southward two and a half
miles was the doubling of population in the Indian Territory and the
filling of Oklahoma. The trifling shift of fourteen miles westward
pointed significantly to the exhaustion of free land in the West and to
the immense growth of manufactures, mining, and commerce in eastern and
central States, retaining there the bulk of our immigrants and even
recalling people from the newer States and territories.

Males still bore about the same proportion to females as in 1890,
although females had increased at a rate 0.2 per cent. greater than
males. In the North Atlantic and South Atlantic groups the sexes were
equal in numbers.

At the South alone did the negro continue a considerable element.
Eighty-nine per cent. of the negroes lived there. At the North only
Pennsylvania had any large numbers. The country held 8,840,789, an
increase of 18.1 per cent. in ten years, the percentage of white
increase being 21.4 per cent. In West Virginia and Florida, also in the
black belts, especially that of Alabama, blacks multiplied faster than
whites. In Delaware and Georgia the pace was even. In Alabama as a
whole, however, the negro element had not relatively increased since
1850. Blacks outnumbered Caucasians in South Carolina and Mississippi,
no longer in Louisiana. In Mississippi the black majority shot up
phenomenally. Of the total population the negroes were now only 11.6 per
cent., barely one-ninth, as against one-fifth in 1790. Between 1890 and
1900 the proportion of the colored increased both at the North and at
the far South, diminishing in the border southern States. This indicated
migration both northward and southward from the belt of States just
south of Mason and Dixon's line.

[Illustration: Large office building.]
The Census Office, Washingtonl D. C.

The foreign-born fraction of our population, which had alternately risen
and fallen since 1860, now fell again, from 14.8 per cent. to 13.7 per
cent. The South retained its distinction as the most thoroughly American
section of the land, having a foreign nativity pop