Page:U.S. Department of the Interior Annual Report 1871.djvu/21

Rh the completion of the work upon the three quarto volumes will be accomplished during the winter. I would recommend that authority be given for the preparation and publication of an octavo volume which shall contain the most important results of the census within each department of inquiry in a form convenient for popular use; and that of this volume a large edition be issued of which 2,000 copies at least shall be by law reserved not to be distributed until the occurrence of the next decennial enumeration.

I would particularly ask attention to the facts and considerations presented by the Superintendent which appear to require extensive and radical changes in the census law.

The act of May 23 1850 was of necessity in most of its parts a tentative measure. Even were the conditions of the country and the requirements of statistical science substantially the same at the present time as at the date of that enactment it would be unreasonable to assume that the experience of three censuses taken under that law had not shown occasion for many and important changes both in the machinery of the census and in its schedules. But in the twenty-one years that have elapsed since the enactment of the census law of 1850 the occupations of the people have become so greatly diversified that the present industrial schedules fail to reach some of the most vital interests of the country and are plainly insufficient adequately to represent many of those which they assume to embrace. Within the same period the area over which the agencies of the census are to be extended has been practically trebled and has been made to include vast territories under conditions of settlement and of industry such as did not require to be provided for when the present law was enacted. By the creation of the system of internal revenue and the enactment of the election law the officers to whom the act of 1850 commits the supervision of the census work have been charged with duties so numerous and engrossing as to render it impossible for them to give to the census the time and attention absolutely necessary to its proper completion. Moreover the whole scale of prices and of wages throughout the country has been so advanced as to render the rates of compensation both for marshals and assistant marshals as fixed by the act of 1850 generally inadequate while yet the experience of the recent census has shown that this defect is neither to be justly nor economically remedied by any provision for a uniform per centum increase of compensation but only by a thorough readjustment of the entire scheme. In the field of social investigation again opened up by the act of 1850 the experience of the last year has shown that the schedules propose many inquiries for which the country is not yet prepared.and at the same time omit to notice many subjects appropriate to the ceusus in respect to which information is urgently required in the interest alike of science and of good legislation. The last and most impressive reason I have to present for a general revision of the census law is that the act of 1850, while charging