MICHIGAN.

The State of Michigan is 9,745 square miles larger than the State of New York; 13,700 larger than Pennsylvania; 17,855 larger than Ohio; 22,565 larger than Indiana; and 2,265 larger than Illinois. The entire area of the six New England States is 7,550 square miles larger than that of Michigan.

When the State was admitted into the Union, less than 50 years ago, it ranked twenty-third among the States in the order of population. It is now the ninth. It has a coast line of 1,600 miles-more than half the distance between New York and Liverpool-around which vessels of 2,000 tons may sail without losing sight of its territory.

The largest body of fresh water in the world forms its northern boundary; the second largest its western; except these two, there are no lakes in Europe, Asia, or America, larger than that which washes its eastern borders; and it has ports on two others. Lying in the embrace of these immense seas, its climate has no equal in the moderation of its temperature in any State or territory situated on the same degrees of latitude east of the Rocky Mountains.

Most of the southern peninsula of the State lies between the same lines of latitude as the State of New York. The shore line of its upper peninsula on Lake Superior is mostly south of the latitude of Quebec. No part of Michigan is as far north as Paris.

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It has four thousand three hundred and thirty-two miles of railroad. county seats out of sixty-seven in the lower peninsula have railroad connections; nine others are lake ports; there are only seven which have no outlet either by rail or water, and none of these is more than twenty miles from a railroad. In the upper

peninsula there is only one, and in the lower peninsula there are only eight counties, which are not reached by railroad connections already in operation or in process of construction.

The farmers of Michigan have also the assurance of permanent competition in the rates of transportation to eastern and seaboard markets not only by various rival lines of railroad but by natural and artificial waterways. Every dollar saved in reaching consumers is added to the gains of the producer. The reports of the United States Department of Agriculture show that in a series of six years, previous to and including 1880, the average cash value per acre of eight leading productions of the

farm, taken together, in ten principal farming States of the West was greater in Michigan than in any other State.

In the order of production Michigan stands first among the States in the growth and manufacture of lumber, first in salt, first in copper, first in charcoal pig iron, certainly second if not first in iron ore, first in its fresh-water fisheries, fourth in wheat, and fourth in wool. It has the largest iron mine and the largest copper mine in the world. Seven-tenths of all the wheat raised in the country is grown in nine States, and only three excel Michigan in the volume of this crop. In the last census year it produced more wheat to the acre than any State in the Union except Colorado, whose total yield was less than a million and a half of bushels. It is also one of the best fruit-producing States in the Union. All its principal products are staples, for which there must be a constant and growing demand.

The State is practically free from debt. Its public buildings are paid for. It is prohibited by its constitution from borrowing money in excess of $50,000, except in time of war. The entire local indebtedness of all its cities, villages, towns, counties, and school districts is less than ten millions of dollars. Its taxes are low, and onethird of them all is applied to educational purposes.

The school system of Michigan makes education free to all. The primary schools, the Agricultural College, and the University are open without charge for tuition to rich and poor alike. Even in nominations to the Government army and navy schools at West Point and Annapolis it has become an established custom to leave the periodical vacancies open to competitive examination. Young men of every nationality, creed,

and condition have precisely the same right to public benefits and equal chances in the race for success.

With all the advantages of a healthy climate, a fertile soil, easy access to home and foreign markets, extraordinary facilities of transportation, a settled society, a generous school system, established institutions, freedom from debt, and a low rate of taxation, there are in the State several millions of acres of unoccupied farming lands, suitable to almost every variety of husbandry, some of them open to settlement under United States and State homestead laws, and all of them within reach of moderate means.

THE STATE-GROWTH, POPULATION, AND WEALTH.

As shown by the geographer of the tenth census, the area of Michigan is 58,915 square miles, 605 square miles more than the area of England and Wales. When it was admitted into the Union, in 1837, its population was 174,467, and at the next federal census, taken in 1840, out of twenty-seven States then belonging to the republic it ranked in the number of its inhabitants the twenty-third.

OBSTACLES TO EARLY DEVELOPMENT.

The early development of the territory which forms the State was slow, and in the face of depressing influences. Ignorant and shiftless surveyors, avoiding the labors, and possibly the hazards, of personal explorations, had given false reports of its topography and its resources. Calumnies thus originated, dating as far back as 1815, survived in tradition until a comparatively recent period. Kindred reports concerning the insalubrity of the climate helped to impede the progress of the State. When railroads began to absorb the carrying trade of the country they naturally sought eastern and western connections, uniting the valley of the Mississippi with the Atlantic, and such facilities as the State possessed carried the current of travel through its territory rather than into the recesses of its interior. The great trunk lines have always been united in a common policy to secure the greatest amount of travel to the farthest possible points. Their agents, in the eastern States and abroad, however widely they may diverge in other respects, combine in labors to send those who are seeking western homes beyond Chicago.

ITS VALUE DISCOVERED.

It is only within a very few years that the northern counties of the lower peninsula have been known and understood, except by a few enterprising men, even among Michigan people. The extension of the lumber interests, seeking fresh material for the mills, led to their first thorough exploration, and it was not until those interests had acquired enormous magnitude that the now undoubted fact was realized that, great as had been their profits, the discoveries they had made and the great wilderness they had partially cleared promised more to agriculture than it had yielded to the axe. Immense tracts of hard-wood timber were found containing no pine, and it was found, too, that large portions of our northern territory which produce the best pine produce also the best crops. There are pine barrens, bearing an inferior and scraggy wood, which the fastidious lumberman utterly neglects, and which are good neither for lumber nor for any thing else. But these occupy only limited areas in what are known as the pine regions of the State, and cover only a comparatively small portion of its territory. Most of the great trees which constitute the pride of our lumber forests, and have made Michigan pine famous at home and abroad, grow largely among beeches and hard maple and other valuable wood, which only flourish on soils capable of yielding good crops. A few of these noble pines, standing among scores of hard timber, give character to the discoveries of the "land-looker" for the saw-mills, while in no wise detracting from the value of the soil on which they grow. Of course there are different degrees of value in these lands, as in all others, and the settler will exercise the same discretion in his choice as he does in determining

other accessories to a home. But there are thousands of acres in Michigan from. which pine trees have been cut, as well as many other thousands which have never borne pine, into the soil of which no ploughshare has ever penetrated, which will well repay the labors of the husbandman, and the fee simple of which can be bought for less than a year's rental of many of the lands of Europe.

ROAD BUILDING.

The policy of the State in constructing public wagon roads in advance of the settlements out of land cessions made by the General Government for purposes of reclamation has been wise and liberal, and has aided largely in opening up the northern counties. Generous land grants were made several years ago by congressional enactment to promote the building of railroads to the Straits of Mackinac, but for a long time some of these grants only retarded settlement by withholding lands from sale, while little progress was made in the work they were designed to advance. This delay is now ended. A line has been for some time in operation connecting Grand and Little Traverse bays with all the great thoroughfares of the country, and it will this year be extended to the Straits, while the Mackinac division of the Michigan Central has reached that point since the first edition of this pamphlet was printed. A glance at the map which accompanies this publication will reveal the importance of these lines to the territory they intersect as well as to the State at large, and the magnitude of the great net-work of communications with which they form connections. Across the Straits, and separated only by five miles of ferriage, is the eastern terminus of the recently completed Detroit, Mackinac and Marquette Railroad, which traverses the upper peninsula to points where links will be formed with the great regions of the northwest. A more detailed description of the railroad system of the State is given elsewhere.

AN UNSTIMULATED GROWTH.

No organized effort has been made by the State to promote general immigration. Whatever means have been employed to invite population from abroad have been isolated and fragmentary. The growth of the State has been entirely natural and unstimulated. The result has been to make its people peculiarly homogeneous in character. New elements have been assimilated with marked success and rapidity. The natural resources and attractions of the State, however, have continued to draw people hitherward from other States and from Europe, until the population of fortyfour years ago has increased nearly ten-fold. The territory which entered the Union in 1837 with 174,467 inhabitants of both sexes and all ages, sent to its defense less than thirty years later more than 90,000 soldiers. The State which stood twentythird in rank in 1840 had advanced to the ninth in 1880. A table, based upon the returns of the United States census in each succeeding decade, tells the whole story: Table Showing the Population of Michigan at each Federal Enumeration since the Admission of the State in 1837, with the Progressive Increase and Rank.

THE STATES IT HAS OVERTAKEN.

In this stately march of forty years, Michigan has moved steadily past the older States of Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Connecticut, New Jersey, Maryland, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana and Tennessee. In 1860 it was outranked slightly by Wisconsin, and in 1870 by Iowa, but the census of 1880 showed that neither of those great and thriving States was then its equal in population. No State equals it now that did not, forty years ago, contain 80 per cent more in the number of its inhabitants.

The distribution of the population of the State in 1880 over the several counties thereof is shown in the table which is printed on the face of the map at the beginning of this pamphlet.

WHERE THEY CAME FROM.

Of the total number of inhabitants of Michigan at the enumeration of 1880, there were of native birth 1,248,429, and of foreign birth 388,508. The compilation of the returns of that census have not yet progressed far enough to exhibit their nativity of detail, and in the absence of that information the result of the preceding decennial inquiries may properly be reproduced. Of a total population of 1,184,059, in 1870, there were of native birth 916,049, and of foreign birth 268,010. The nativities represented were as follows:

THE FORMATION OF STATE CHARACTER, AND WHO FORMED IT.

The formative period in the character of the people of this State as a political community, and of their institutions, legislation and habits of action, was the decade between 1830 and 1840. It was during that time that they emerged from a territorial pupilage to assume the duties and responsibilities of an independent State. It was then they formed their first constitution, adopted their axioms and founded their traditions. The first convention which met to organize their fundamental laws was