Page:On an annual census.djvu/3



commerce and in manufactures, as in every large company, there is an annual stock-taking, and upon that stock-taking a report and declaration of the results is made to the shareholders. But what is the state of the political administration, which has only attained to a stock-taking of the living people, of the healthy and the weakly, on whom the power and the prosperity of the country depend, which is only attempted every ten years, and is only completed in three years, leaving the numbers meanwhile to be got at by estimates, necessarily erroneous, often widely erroneous? An annual census of the more numerous animal stock has been lately striven for and obtained, and is annually worked out by the Agricultural Department of the Board of Trade. It is some forty-five millions of the agricultural stock, whilst, according to the last decennial enumeration, the population of England and Wales was in round numbers twenty-seven millions seven hundred thousand. Other nations, as France and the United States, have halved the inconvenience of the stock-taking of the human population, and some persons now propose to halve it here by a quinquennial census.

What in civil life and administration would be a quinquennial stock-taking and report? But I have the support of the greatest statists and administrators in Europe that an annual census is practicable, and that it is important for the improvement of public administration. I had the honour of being selected, along with the late Dr. Farr, as the representative of statistical science in England, in an official Congress, together with Quetelet, the leader of statistical science in Europe, and representatives from France, Germany, Italy, and Holland. There were about a dozen members of this Congress who held