The Wichita daily eagle. [volume] (Wichita, Kan.) 1890-1906, 1900-03-30
FORTY SIX MEN
Required to Take the Census
of Sedgwick County.
WORK is DIFFICULT
How Schedules Look-Three
Applicants to Each Place.


| Se0w1ck county Will soon nave 1orty-S1X
enumerators in the work of taking the
census, which work is to begin in a week
or two and the number applying is at
least three times as many as the num-
Der of places to be filed. However. not
proved to do the work. which must be
completed rapidly and also accurately.
The applications must be made by candi-
dates, who are required to fill out a trial
| sheet with this application, and these are
forwarded to the department for inspec-
| ton and approval or rejection. There are
several hundred to DE appointed in thS
seventh district, and the work of select
| ing competent men is arduous. There are
about fifty thousand in all in the United
States, and in the country districts more
| time is given to get started than any
where else. The questions asked are nu-
| merous. and the work difficult, but the
pay is liberal for the short time required.
Everything must be accurate and con-
firmed
Farmers, as class, do not keep their
accounts as well as manufacturers, and
the returns from farmers may OCCASION
ally include serious errors, which a train
ed eye will at once detect. Hence the
farm schedule must be examined and such
errors corrected before the tables can be
made up from them with safety. If a
farmer reports that his land sown to
wheat was ten acres and the yield 1000
bushels, it sclear that an average yield
of 400 bushels to the acre is incredible
and must be rejected or corrected in ac-
cordance with the probabilities. Some
times the truth can be made out by an
expert from comparison with entries in
other parts of the schedules; sometimes
correspondence must be opened to settle
the doubt. All this ranks under the gen
eral head of verifying the schedules, and
all the time possible to the work of veri-
schedules. To accomplish this in the time
allowed, the work of several hundred
clerks will be required. and they must
have hard and fast rules to guide them.
For example, they might be told: When
the wheat reports show a product Of over
forty bushels to the acre they are sus-
picious and must be laid aside for an ex-
pert to pass upon. But any such rules
must vary with the section of the coun-
try. A yield of twenty bushels in one
section might be more questionable than
yield of forty bushels in another. Hence
the division must fix in advance what is
the range of REPORTS in each part of the
country and for each crop that may be
accepted as probable on their face and
,1irip C;o1 To
get the limits of probability for this pur-
pose for each county in the United States,
that is, the maximum and minimum yield
and the maximum and minimum price
which may be accepted without vertical
ton, is the object of an extensive corre-
spondence now being carried on by the
bureau. Three simple schedules have been
prepared and printed on different colored
paper in order that they may be readily
distinguished one from the other. One Of
them covers ordinary garden vegetable a
second covers fruits, and the third the
great staple field crops. Each asks about
the units of measure employed and the
net price realized and the two more i'm
portant schedules, those for staple field
products and for vegetables. ask for the
AAS <1llN lOW6Sl ylSIu VI 6dCH CIOp per
acre. These schedules are being mailed
to prominent farmers all over the coun-
try and in many instances returns have
already been received. When the returns
scheme will be made from them Of what
is to be accepted as correct in each case
and what is to be probed farther. The
only aim of the Office is to get what was
really the intention fthe farmer in an
swering the questions. If the presumption
is strongly against his meaning what the
schedule says, the office will try to learn
by correspondence from the supervisor or
the enumerator, or the farmer himself
what the real facts were.