Page:The Economic Journal Volume 1.djvu/72

 52 schedule for Manufactures, although the most important industries and the most important factory towns are put in the hands of special agents, and the ordinary enumerator has nothing to do with them. The third is the Mortality schedule. Where the enumerator learns that a member of a family has died during the year preceding the 1st of June, 1890, he enters the name in a special schedule with details in respect to age, disease, etc. Where trustworthy local records of deaths exist, as in the states of New York and New Jersey and in 170 large cities, copies of these records are procured and the enumerators for those districts relieved of the work. In addition, 80,000 registers were sent to physicians with the request that they enter all deaths occurring in their practice during the census year. Of these about 14,000 have been returned, and will be used to supplement and correct the enumerators' returns. The births are to be estimated by adding to the number of persons less than one year of age at the time of the enumeration those who were born and died during the census year. Of course vital statistics obtained by such methods must be imperfect and crude; but this whole matter is forced on the census by the fact that we have no uniform registration of births, deaths, and marriages in the United States, and owing to our federal form of government are not likely to have. It is the best we can do.

Before leaving the ordinary enumerator, it will be pertinent to ask whether he can be at all trusted to do this vast and complicated work which the census has placed on his shoulders. The safety for the census lies in the country enumerator who has a chance for a month's employment, and the fact that he is paid according to the amount of work he does. For each living inhabitant he receives two cents, for each death reported two cents, for each surviving soldier five cents, for each defective person or criminal five cents, for each farm fifteen cents, and for each manufacturing establishment twenty cents. In sparsely settled districts higher rates are allowed for living inhabitants, farms, and manufacturing establishments; and in exceptional cases where owing to sparseness of population or difficulties of travel an enumerator could not earn fair pay, a per diem allowance is authorised sometimes as high as six dollars a day. Suppose the rural enumerator comes to a farm where there are six or eight persons to be recorded besides the farm itself, and very likely a death, or a surviving soldier, or a diseased or defective person. He can easily earn from twenty—five to forty cents on that one farm, and it is to his interest to get as many items as possible, for his loss occurs in travelling from one farm to the next. In a