Page:The Economic Journal Volume 1.djvu/66

 46 was supposed to visit each family in his district and fill out the answers to the questions. The law allowed the distribution of schedules in advance, to be filled out by the head of the household amd afterwards collected by the enumerator, but population is so scattered in the United States that little use was made of this method. Enumerators were allowed thirty days, in cities only two weeks, to complete their work; the schedules were then sent to the supervisors, by them inspected (?) and forwarded to the Census Office at Whashington. These details are useful in enabling us to form some notion of the probable accuracy of the original returns on which rest all the subsequent figures in regard to population. And the primary consideration here is in regard to the questions contained on the population schedule:—Are they such as the enumerator of ordinary intelligence, dealing with the average person, can hope to get answered? or are they of such a character as either to be incomprehensible or to awaken resentment or suspicion? Our judgment upon this point must be the basis for any critical valuation of the United States census, and it is so important that I can do nothing more useful than to print the full list of questions on the population schedule with some explanation of the reason for each, and some comment on the probable value of the information it would elicit. The questions are as follows—Questions A, B, C, D, and E being at the head, and the numbered ones running down the left-hand side of a sheet fifteen inches long and eleven inches wide, the rest of the space being ruled into columns, one for each member of the family.

Aside from the number of these questions, which makes the work of the enumerator very heavy, there are specific objections to some of them, although it must be confessed that the heart yearns for the knowledge which the correct answer to them would give. Taking them in order, question 2 is useless for any practical purpose because a great many persons will answer it in the affirmative under the vague impression that it will lead to a pension or something of that sort. It is not unlikely that when we come to examine the returns we shall find a new curiosity in statistics, namely, a too great willingness to answer in the affirmative, the reverse of that disinclination to answer at all which the fear of taxation has so often aroused. In question 4 the extension of the colour division to quadroon and octoroon seems to me entirely futile, because the persons interested (belonging to the old slave class or their descendants) will never be able to say how much white blood flows in their veins, and to determine the question by