Mississippi area of decrease would form an unbroken continuation of a still larger contiguous territory of decreasing counties, extending from the eastern border of Illinois to Cape Cod, and from Alabama into the Maritime Provinces of the Canadian Dominion. The portion of this territory lying within the United States extends into fifteen States, covers an area of 174,500 square miles, or over a third more than that of the British Isles, and comprises 289 counties. Of these counties 276 have less rural population than they had in 1880. Of the thirteen increasing counties lying within the lines of this territory and surrounded by the decreasing counties, two are in the Adirondacks; eight of them comprise the suburbs of Cleveland, Cincinnati, Louisville, Indianapolis, Dayton, and Columbus; and in the remaining three the increase during the decade has been but thirty-two, or at the rate of less than one sixteenth of one per cent.
Taking the entire area together, the rural population in 1890 and 1880 compares as follows:
| 1880 | 6,542,070 |
| 1890 | 6,145,943 |
| Decrease | 396,127 |
| Percentage of decrease | 6·05 |
This tract, beginning in the province of New Brunswick, extends over all New England, except the northern portion of Maine and New Hampshire and the northeastern county of Vermont; over large portions of Ontario and Quebec; over all New York north of the counties of Rockland and Westchester; over north-western New Jersey, and large areas of northeastern and north-western and a small part of southwestern Pennsylvania; over the greater part of Ohio, except its northwestern and some of its eastern and southern counties; over a couple of West Virginia counties lying on the Ohio border; over all southeastern and much of central Indiana; over a number of the Ohio River counties of Kentucky, and thence over a long and in places comparatively narrow strip of central Kentucky and Tennessee into northern Alabama, in which State it includes four counties; finally coming to an end some thirty miles south of the Tennessee River. The New England States, with New York and the adjacent counties of Canada, form the compact portion of this tract. From the southern boundary of New York it stretches out in two arms, one to the east and the other to the west of the Alleghanies. The eastern arm is much the shorter of the two, and without a break reaches only to the southern boundary of Carbon County, Pennsylvania, on the one side, and to the Atlantic coast in Burlington County, New Jersey, on the other. The break here is, however, very short, it being not over five or six miles to the point at which
