In terms of social life, this increase in wage workers meant, in the first place, a rapid growth of city populations. In 1860, the vast majority of the people were agriculturists; in 1890, 36.1 per cent of the population lived in towns of over 2500; in 1900, 40.5 per cent; in 1910, 46.3 per cent. In the forty years between the beginning of the Civil War and the close of the century, Chicago had grown from 109,260 to 1,698,575; Greater New York from 1,174,779 to 3,437,202; San Francisco from 56,802 to 342,782. In the next place, the demand for labor stimulated immigration from Europe. It is true there was a decline during the Civil War, and the panic of 1873 checked the tide when it began to flow, but by 1880 it had nearly touched the half-a-million mark, and by 1883 it reached the astounding figure of 788,992. Almost all of this immigration was from Germany, Ireland, Great Britain, and Scandinavian countries, less than one in twenty of the total number coming from Austria-Hungary, Italy, and Poland in 1880. On the Pacific coast, railway building and industrial enterprise, in the great dearth of labor, resorted to the Orient for large supplies of Chinese coolies. This industrial development meant the transformation of vast masses of the people into a proletariat, with all the term implies: an immense population housed in tenements and rented dwellings, the organization of the class into trades-unions, labor parties, and other groups; poverty and degradation on a large scale; strikes, lockouts, and social warfare; the employment of large numbers of women and children in factories; the demand for all kinds of legislation mitigating the evils of the capitalist process; and finally attacks upon the very basis of the industrial system itself. This inevitable concomitant of the mechanical revolution, the industrial proletariat, began to make itself felt as a decided political and economic factor in the decade that followed the War. Between 1860 and 1870, the railway engineers, firemen, conductors, bricklayers, and cigar makers had formed unions. In the campaign of 1872 a party of Labor Reformers appeared; and a few years later the Knights of Labor, a grand consolidated union of all trades and grades of workers, came into existence as an active force, conducting an agitation for labor bureaus, an eight hour day, abolition of contract labor systems, and other reforms, and at the same time engineering strikes.