Detailed study of particular sections of the country discloses a continuous shifting of population which indicates changes in the economic life of the people. In northern New England, the numbers increased slowly. Both Maine and New Hampshire lost from 1860 to 1870; nearly half of Maine's counties and nearly two-thirds of Vermont's lost population between 1880 and 1890; the people were abandoning the rural districts to flock to the cities or migrate to the West. Shipbuilding fell off in Maine; the dairy interests languished in Vermont, less wheat was being planted and the farmers, no longer growing wool, were selling their flocks. Most of the growth was to be found in the industrial counties. The traditional New England thrift, however, was not lost with the migration of the people, for savings bank deposits were increasing, and the state of Vermont was free from debt in 1880, and all its counties in 1890. The South, between 1870 and 1890, increased in numbers a little less rapidly than the country as a whole. On the Atlantic Coast the greatest relative expansion was in Florida; in the western South, in Texas. The increase was almost wholly native, as immigration did not flow into that section. The great expansion of the Middle West, from Ohio to Kansas, was based upon the public land policy of the federal government. Substantially all this region had once been in the possession of the United States, which had early adopted the system of laying out townships six miles on a side, with subdivisions one mile square, (containing 640 acres), called sections. An important feature of the policy had been the encouragement of education and of transportation through the gift of large grants of the public land. Moreover, settlement had been stimulated by the disposal of land to purchasers at extremely liberal figures. In 1862 the famous Homestead Act had inaugurated a still more generous policy. Under this law the citizen might settle upon a quarter-section and receive a title after five years of actual occupation, with no charge other than a slight fee. Millions of acres were taken up in this way both by natives and by immigrants. 1,300,000 people poured into Illinois between 1870 and 1890; over 1,000,000 into Kansas, and nearly that number into Nebraska; in the Dakotas a young man of college age in 1890 might have remembered almost the entire significant portion of the history of his state and have been one of the oldest inhabitants. The frontier of settlement advanced from the western edge of Missouri into mid-Kansas, and almost met the growing population of the Far West, whose economic possibilities had already attracted attention. The discovery of gold-dust in a mill-race in California had drawn the "Forty-niners" to ... lands of gold That lay toward the sun.