But by the mid-eighteenth century, something was changing. Ben Franklin was the first to notice it. In 1749 he organized a census of Philadelphia and began to collect population numbers on Boston, New Jersey, and Massachusetts. What he saw was startling. Not only was the colonial population growing, it was doubling once every twenty-five years. If that continued, Franklin predicted (with more than a little giddiness), in a century colonial North America would contain more Englishmen than Britain itself.
