Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 40.djvu/90

80 districts and increasing the number of enumerators, as is the present tendency. An enumerator, working for a few days, acquires speed and accuracy as a matter of experience, and his second week's work is of vastly greater value than his first few days' service. It might be well, therefore, to so subdivide the country into enumeration districts that each enumerator would have at least four or five thousand people to enumerate, instead of an average of two thousand, as under the present method. If the districts were enlarged, the number of supervisors should be greatly increased. The present law provides for one hundred and seventy-five supervisors; that of 1880 provided for one hundred and fifty. It would seem to be a prudent measure to provide for at least one thousand supervisors, which body, with a reduced number of enumerators, could take greater pains with all parts of the enumeration; and if supervisors could be selected with special reference to their fitness and enumerators could be tested by the use of a preliminary schedule relating to their own families and perhaps one or two neighboring families, results would be secured which would defy criticism. With such changes there should come a change of date for the enumeration. The count of the people is now made as of the 1st of June—under the present law, the first Monday in June. The changes in the habits of the people necessitate a change of date. More and more every year people leave the town for the country, and this change occurs about the time of the enumeration. The date should be changed to a period of the year when the population is more thoroughly fixed or more thoroughly housed in permanent homes. Could the date be carried forward to the autumn, a great gain would be made in the accuracy of the enumeration—not perhaps in the total for the whole country, but in the total for each State and city. Certainly the results would be far more satisfactory to all concerned, even though the change in the total population of the United States did not exceed a few thousand. Each State wants its own: political and social reasons demand that this should be so.

Perhaps the very worst form of the present system is the temporary nature of the service. As the census year comes in sight each decade, a Census Office is created by law, the organization to be taken entirely from new material, from the head to the foot. Of course, the aim always is in securing a superintendent to select some one who has had more or less experience or is supposed to be more or less competent in census work; but then comes the greater difficulty, the selection of the forces. A good business man at the head of the Census Office—one of excellent administrative and executive abilities, without knowledge of statistics—would handle a census, in all probability, as well as or better