The Wellington enterprise. [volume] (Wellington, Ohio) 1867-188?, 1881-10-19
NUMBER 5.
The First English Census.

! Il Is exactly eighty years since the Ens
glish nation first resolved to number IL
self. The idea had been suggested be-
fore, for example in 1853, but fearful
and wonderful had been the objections.
Remember what happened to King
.David,n ssThink of the money IL would
cost" "Think of the power it would
give to local magnates and Government
officials - "Would it not betray to our
enemies how feeble folk we areRn SIS
it not mean imitation of the FrenchP"
so reasoned our forefathers even in
1888, when it was an archbishop's son
who moved for "an account of the total
number of the people" No doubt he
was wrong, but nowadays we can hard
hurled at him and his friends in the
House of Commons. 81 did not be-
Iieve," said the chief opponent, "that
there had been any set of men, or, in
deed, any individual of the human spe-
scies, 50 presumptuous and SO abandoned
as to make the proposal which we have
just heard;" and he went to suggest
that the proposers must have had some
thing to gain by it. ssBritons never
shall be slaves! If an enumerator comes
to you, give him the horsepond. We
are not to spend our money and give
up our freedom to decide a wager at
Whites on the question of the increase
or the decrease of our number" The
luckless bill, after being barely ac-
cepted by the Commons, was thrown
out by the ripper wisdom of the Lords.
David was not to number Israel till
David 8 subjects had thoroughly wearied
themselves out in guessing what their
numbers were. Their wisest heads
were bandying the most opposite facts
and arguments against each other, some
holding with DIR. Price and the poet
Goldsmith that wealth had accumulated
and men decayed; others with Sir Fred
erick Eden and Mr.. Nautilus that both
the wealth and the men had increased.
The truth was that, while there was
every presumption in favor of the bright
side. there were no statistics either suf-
ficiently full or sufficiently accurate to
decide the point with complete certain
ty. This was done by the first census
of 1901, or Ito make the furthest con-
cession to extreme scrupulosity) by the
first and second 1S1D compared with
one another. They put an end to .spo-
htical arithmetic" by simply super
seding its somewhat airy calculations.
Oddly enough, however, there is sense
in which we were starved into q
census as there is q sense in
which by the Irish famine we were
starved into free trade. When Mr..
Abbott, at the end of 1900, introduced
his bill for the general enumeration of
the people of Great Britain (without
Ireland, in the first census) one of his
strongest reasons was the advantage it
would be to the Government, in those
days of unprecedented scarcity. to know
for how many people they would need
to proyide-in other words, how soon or
how late they need open the ports to
foreign corn. To judge by the notices
in the journals of the day this argument
was among the most cogent, though, Of
course, by that time the other benefits
of correct statistics were not overlooked.
The enumeration was thereupon made,
the bill having passed without any OPP
position. The information yielded In
1901 seems to us meagre enough now.
1t was characteristic of the times that
the only classification of occupations
was into agricultural, manufacturing
and others. Pail Mall Gazette.