The thirteenth census (1910) shows that in spite of the steady gain in the country districts of the United States as a whole, thousands of rural townships have continued to lose population. These shrinking communities are found everywhere except in the newest agricultural regions of the West and in the black belt of the South. The older the communities the earlier this tendency to rural depletion became serious. The trouble began in New England, but now the rural problem is moving west. Until the last census New England was the only section of the country to show this loss as a whole; but the 1910 figures just reported give a net rural loss for the first time in the group of states known as the "east north central." Yet in both cases, the net rural loss for the section was less than 1%. Taking 2,500 as the dividing line, the last census reports that in every state in the country the urban population has increased since 1900, but in six states the rural population has diminished. In two states, Montana and Wyoming, the country has outstripped the city; but in general, the country over, the cities grew from 1900 to 1910 three times as fast as the rural sections. While the country communities of the United States have grown 11.2% the cities and towns above 2,500 have increased 34.8%. In the prosperous state of Iowa, the only state reporting an absolute loss, the rural sections lost nearly 120,000. Rural Indiana lost 83,127, or 5.1%; rural Missouri lost 68,716, or 3.5%; rural villages in New Hampshire show a net loss of 10,108, or 5.4%; and rural Vermont has suffered a further loss of 8,222, or 4.2%, though the state as a whole made the largest gain for forty years. These latest facts from the census are valuable for correcting false notions of rural depletion. It is unfair to count up the number of rural townships in a state which have failed to grow and report that state rurally decadent. For example, a very large majority of the Illinois townships with less than 2,500 people failed to hold their own the past decade,--1,113 out of 1,592. But in many cases the loss was merely nominal; consequently we find, in spite of the tremendous drain to Chicago, the rural population of the state as a whole made a slight gain. This case is typical. Thousands of rural villages have lost population; yet other thousands have gained enough to offset these losses in all but the six states mentioned. _Losses in Country Towns_