Demographic history of Scotland towns had populations of over 10,000, with the capital, Edinburgh, the largest with 57,000 inhabitants. The Highland and Lowland Clearances led to the depopulation of rural areas, but overall the population of Scotland grew rapidly in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. By 1801 it had reached 1,608,420 and it grew to 2,889,000 in 1851 and 4,472,000 in 1901. By the beginning of the twentieth century, one in three lived in the four cities of Glasgow, Edinburgh, Dundee and Aberdeen. Glasgow emerged as the largest city, with a population of 762,000 by 1901, making it "the Second City of the
Water supply and sanitation in Scotland Water Authority, the West of Scotland Water Authority, and the East of Scotland Water Authority, to prepare them for privatisation. In 1994, the Strathclyde water referendum, an unofficial referendum organised by Strathclyde Regional Council, the largest of the regional councils by population, was held, in which voters voted overwhelmingly against the privatisation proposals. There was also a more general "Save Scotland’s Water" campaign, and in the face of public opposition, the water industry in Scotland remained in the public sector. In 2002 the Scottish Parliament passed the Water Industry (Scotland) Act 2002 merging the three providers into a single one,