346 FRANCIS AMASA WALKER. 



United States ; in 1871 he was appointed Commissioner of Indian Affairs ; 

 in 1872 he was made Professor of Political Economy and History in the 

 Sheffield Scientific School of Yale College; in 1876 he was Chief of the 

 Bureau of Awards for the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia ; in 1878 

 he was sent as a Commissioner for the United States to the International 

 Monetary Conference at Paris ; in 1879 he was appointed Superintendent 

 of the Tenth Census of the United States; in 1881 he was made President 

 of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; in 1882 he was elected 

 President of the American Statistical Association; in 1885 he was elected 

 first President of the American Economic Association; in 1891 he was 

 elected Vice-President of the National Academy of Sciences ; in 1893 

 he was President-adjunct of the International Statistical Institute, at its 

 session in Chicago. 



General Walker's successive apjwintments as Superintendent of the 

 Census of 1870 and of that of 1880 were the direct result of the enerory 

 and skill with which, during the mouths of his service in the Bureau of 

 Statistics, he had effected the reorganization of that office and its work. 

 The opportunities given to him as a statistician, by having charge of these 

 two censuses, were of a remarkable kind. The census of 1870, being the 

 first taken after the Civil "War, was for that reason by far the most inter- 

 esting and important since 1790. It was to show the social and economic 

 changes wrought by four years of prodigal expenditure both of life and of 

 resources, and by the unparalleled revolution in the industrial organiza- 

 tion of the former slave States. It was also to ascertain and record the 

 conditions under which the nation entered upon anew and wonderful stage 

 of its material growth. The census of 1880 was the unique occasion for 

 what General Walker designed as a " grand monumental exhibit of the 

 resources, the industries, and the social state of the American people,' 

 made approximately at the close of a century of national independence. 



The Census of 1870, to the great regret of all who had any scientific 

 interest in the sul)ject, was left by Congress to be taken under the provis- 

 ions of the Census Act of 1850, by persons neither selected nor con- 

 trolled by the Census Office. In the still disturbed condition of some 

 of the Southern States, the work was thus thrown into the hands of men 

 notoriously unfit for such employment, and the returns, especially of the 

 black population, were vitiated at their source. In his Report of 1872, 

 and in his Introduction to the " Compendium of the Census of 1880," Gen- 

 eral "Walker described in strong lansuaije the difficulties which thus beset 

 the work in 1870 ; and again in the Publications of the American Statis- 

 tical Association for December, 1890, writing upon the " Statistics of the 



