Russian Increase of Population.
Russia, whose population was formerly largely rural, is meeting the same tendency manifest in other nations, namely, the increase of city population. Twenty years ago the number of towns in Russia whose population exceeded 100,000, says a recent writer in the New York Observer, was only eight; now it is nineteen, and in ten years it will probably be thirty, as eleven more towns have populations between eighty and ninety-five thousand. Certain Russian cities have risen at a surprising rate. Moscow in five years increased its population by 20 per cent.; St. Petersburg, by 22½ per cent.; Odessa, by 24; Rostoff, by 78; Tula, by 68; and Lodz, the great iron city, rose from 150,000 in 1892 to 314,780 in 1897, 109 per cent. Perhaps more important still is the increase of the population of the empire as a whole. In 1851 European Russia contained not quite 53,000,000; in 1897 it was over 94,000,000. Poland, in the same period, and notwithstanding the general political dissatisfaction, has risen from 4,750,000 to 9,500,000; and the Caucasian provinces, so rich in minerals, and so fertile, have sprung in the most remarkable way from 4,500,000 in 1851 to 9,750,000, in 1897.