Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 40.djvu/91

Rh even than a statistician without business qualifications; but the organization demands skillful men at the head of divisions and skillful and trained statisticians as assistants. Every superintendent endeavors to draw into his service a certain number properly 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 necessarily 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 superintendent, no matter what his experience, no matter what his qualifications may be, to take a very satisfactory census under the conditions 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, inefficient forces, to be digested and compiled for printing by another 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 correct it, and the very first step toward correction lies in the direction of the establishment of a permanent Census Office, under which there ought to be a constant force of trained and experienced 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 agricultural 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 conclusion. This would involve the employment constantly of a much reduced office force, and a field force, except for the enumeration