Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 15.djvu/648

 634 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

ing of its interest from the start upon vital statistics. The origin of our society at the capital of New England is another evidence of the connection I am suggesting, for New England during more than half a century and until recent years has been the main American nursery of vital statistics. Demography is the oldest branch of statistics; it has developed to a comparatively exact and scientific system; its methods have been subjected to long and searching criticism; its results are more unquestionable, if not more important, than those reached in any other branch. Hence it is the natural and appropriate gateway through which to approach the larger field, and the theme may be narrowed for the present to the outlook for American vital statistics.

The influence of the frontier as a capital fact, perhaps the capital fact, in our national history is now recognized and accepted. The well-nigh insuperable obstacles to securing regis- tration, even of deaths and much more of births and of mar- riages, in a population living under frontier conditions, or even in the settlements thinly spread over the face of the country for many hundreds of miles east of the frontier, have prevented the rise of an effective American demand for good systems of regis- tration. This is illustrated by the difficulty in tracing the ances- try of the most distinguished American of the nineteenth century, Abraham Lincoln. His biographers tell us, "There are hundreds of families in the West bearing historic names and probably descended from well-known houses in the older states or in Eng- land which, by passing through one or two generations of ancestors who could not read or write, have lost their continuity with the past as effectually as if a deluge had intervened."^ The limitations suggested by this quotation have been even more effective as a bar to the development of public records of deaths, births, or marriages. Canada and South Africa likewise have had little success in transplanting vital statistics from the mother country to the colony, and if the experience of Australia and New Zealand has been different, this must be ascribed in the main to the massing of the population of those colonies in large cities. We may even ask what evidence there is that the regis-


 * Nicolay and Hay, Abraham Lincoln, I, i.