Page:The Economic Journal Volume 1.djvu/70

 50 in the most productive ages of manhood and womanhood. The second explanation of the Office is that the census of 1870 was grossly defective (especially in the Southern states), so that the rate of increase from 1870 to 1880 was not real. General Walker, the superintendent of the census of 1870 and also of 1880, has acknowledged that this is true. The South was in a disturbed condition during the year 1870, and the census was taken under the old system of employing the marshals of the federal courts as enumerators, and they, during the reconstruction period, were often strangers in the land, and generally incompetent for their duties as census officers. In order to remedy this supposed defect in the figures for 1870, the Census Office takes the rate of increase from 1860 to 1880 and applies it in order to find the true population in 1870. Thereby it reaches a table of the following sort:—

This certainly makes a delightfully logical table, for it may at once be admitted that the rate of growth in the United States is decreasing even in the face of an increasing immigration. But the difficulty is with the supposititious figure for 1870. It certainly seems very improbable that the rate of increase during the decade 1860 to 1870, a time of war and small immigration, could have been greater than during the succeeding decade. General Walker has recently re-examined the deficiency among the blacks at the census of 1870, and makes it between three and four hundred thousand for the whole country, while the Census Office makes it 512,163 for the Southern states alone, besides a deficiency of 747,915 among the whites of those states. Final judgment on this question must be deferred until we have further details in regard to the population.

(2). Special and Supplementary Inquiries.—There are certain inquiries which are intrusted to the ordinary enumerator, but which lie outside of the population schedule or are supplementary to it, The heavily burdened enumerator, in addition to a number