LESSONS FROM THE CENSUS. 81 



even than a statistician without business qualifications ; but the 

 organization demands skillful men at the head of divisions and 

 skillfid and trained statisticians as assistants. Every superin- 

 tendent endeavors to draw into his service a certain number prop- 

 erly qualified, statistically speaking, for the service required ; but 

 everything must be drawn together hurriedly — a great bureau, 

 the largest in the Federal Government, created in a brief period, 

 and the work carried on with the greatest rapidity. With the 

 vast expansion of census inquiries, in connection with the neces- 

 sarily speedy organization, it is absurd, without regard to the 

 qualifications of the head of the office, to expect valuable results 

 for the money expended. It is not in the power of any superin- 

 tendent, no matter what his experience, no matter what his quali- 

 fications may be, to take a very satisfactory census under the con- 

 ditions involved in our Federal system. The attempt is made to 

 create a vast official machine, and then to at once collect material 

 involving in its collection answers to thousands of inquiries by a 

 force of nearly fifty thousand men in the field and an office force 

 of five thousand, the whole work to be completed within a year or 

 two, and the data to be collected under a system of compensation 

 which does not allow, or certainly does not induce, accurate work. 

 The result is that the Census Office is, within a few months after 

 the date set for enumeration, literally " snowed under " with raw 

 material collected by crude and, in a large majority of cases, in- 

 efficient forces, to be digested and compiled for printing by an- 

 other force nearly as crude as the field forces. It is not in the 

 power of human capacity to carry out scientifically the work of 

 the Federal census. It never has been done ; it never can be done 

 until the system is changed. This does not involve any criticism 

 as to the growth of the system nor of the men who have so ably 

 administered it. The point I make is that the census system has 

 grown to be unwieldy in natural ways, and that it is time to cor- 

 rect it, and the very first step toward correction lies in the direc- 

 tion of the establishment of a permanent Census Office, under 

 which there ought to be a constant force of trained and experi- 

 enced statistical clerks, and the collection of facts distributed over 

 the ten years instead of being crowded into a few months. This 

 change of itself would correct many of the faults of the present 

 system. The facts relating to population and agriculture might 

 be collected in the fall of the census year^ when the new agricult- 

 ural crops would be considered instead of the old, as under the 

 present system, and then the data relating- to manufactures and 

 all the other features necessarily involved in the census could be 

 taken up year after year and carried each to a successful conclu- 

 sion. This would involve the employment constantly of a much 

 reduced office force, and a field force, except for the enumeration 



VOL. XL. *? 



