Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 3.djvu/94

 80 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

ufacturing industry, whether owned, hired, or borrowed. This it is claimed was not accomplished in th.e census of 1880. The futility of any attempt to obtain the amount of manufacturing capital is not only intimated by Mr. Atkinson, but declared by General Walker in his remarks of the Ninth Census which he repeated in the Census of 1880:

The census returns of capital invested in manufactures are entirely untrustworthy and delusive. The inquiry is one of which it is not too much to say that it ought never to be embraced in the schedules of the census, not merely for the reason that the results are, and must remain wholly worthless, the inquiry occupying upon the schedules the place of some technical questions which might be made to yield information of great value, but also because the inquiry in respect to capital creates more prejudice and arouses more opposition to the progress of the enumeration than all the other questions of the manufacturing schedule united. It is in fact the one question which manufacturers resent as needlessly obtrusive, while at the same time it is per- haps the one question in relation to their business which manufacturers, certainly the majority of them, could not answer to their own satisfaction if disposed.

As capital can only increase from earnings, statistics which indicate an enormous increase of capital invested and a compar- atively insignificant profit on such investment, as do those of the eleventh census, are evidently, like those of the tenth census, "mere rubbish," which it is worse than a waste of the public treasure to publish. Notwithstanding the incomparability of the statistics of capital of the tenth and eleventh censuses, we find in the latter census elaborate comparative tables showing by localities and industries the amount of capital required to produce $100 of product in the two periods. Not only do we find these comparisons, that cannot fail to mislead, but attempts to compute the profits of manufacturing capital from statistics that accord- ing to Mr. Atkinson and General Walker must be wholly worth- less.

On page 166, part 3, of the manufacturing statistics are presented miscellaneous expenses of the cotton-goods industry, embracing information reported at no previous census, with the remarks ;