SOCIAL STATISTICS OF CITIES, 607 



mounts as one likes a liorse. So useful a beast is estimable, but 

 the most indulgent observation fails to find a ground for affection, 

 Europeans, at all events, who have to do with camels, seem to 

 think it were as easy to lavish one's love on a luggage-van. He 

 is a morose, discontented, grumbling brute, a servant of man, it is 

 true, as is the water that turns a mill-wheel, the fire that boils a 

 kettle, or the steam that stirs the X->iston of a cylinder. He does 

 not come to a call like other beasts, but has to be fetched and 

 driven from browsing. There are but few words made for his 

 private ear, such as belong to horses, dogs, and oxen. An elephant 

 has a separate word of command for sitting down with front legs, 

 with hind legs, or with all together, and he moves at a word. A 

 camel has but one, and that must be underlined with a tug at his 

 nose-rope ere he will stoop. But he has a large share in that 

 great public property of curses whose loss would enrich the world. 

 Camel trappings are not so gaudy in India as in Egypt or 

 Morocco, where riding animals are bedizened in scarlet and yel- 

 low. They are in a different key of color, belonging to a school 

 of pastoral ornament in soberly colored wools, beads, and small 

 white shells, which appears to begin (or end) in the Balkans and 

 stretches eastward through central Asia into India, especially 

 among the Biloch and other camel folk on our northwest frontier. 

 Camel housings may be the beginning of the nomad industry of 

 carpet-weaving. It is, perhaps, not too fanciful to trace on the 

 worsted neck-band the original unit or starting-point of the car- 

 pets and " saddle-bags " which have given lessons to English 

 upholsterers. 



SOCIAL STATISTICS OF CITIES. 



LESSONS FROM THE CENSUS. V. 



By CARROLL D. WRIGHT. A.M., 



UNITED STATES COMMISSIONER OF LABOR. 



THE social statistics of our great cities are being put into con- 

 crete form by Mr. Harry Tiffany, Chief of the Division of 

 Social Statistics of Cities of the Eleventh Census, under the able 

 direction of Dr. John S. Billings, U. S. Army, expert special agent 

 of the census office. So far the returns on some important leading 

 features comprise about fifty of the principal cities. These facts 

 relate to streets, street-lighting, water-works, sewers, and the 

 police and fire departments. All these, however, are among those 

 features of municipal conditions which are constantly in the 

 minds of men and agitating them as to expenses and the value 

 which they secure in return for taxes paid. 



The distribution of population in the fifty cities on which re- 



