Democratic Sentinel, Volume 2, Number 14, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 17 May 1878 — THE NEXT CENSUS. [ARTICLE]

THE NEXT CENSUS.

What It Will Probably Show. [From the Cleveland Herald.] Preliminary steps have been taken in the Senate looking to the passage of a law for taking the census of 1880. If no new law is passed, the work will be done under the old law of 1850, which is defective im many respects, and does not provide for collecting as wide a range of statistics as is embraced in the French and Belgian census reports, which are much the most perfect known. Its schedules are notably incomplete under the heads of manufactures, religion, pauperism and crime. In 1868 a special committee of the House, under the chairmanship of Gen. Garfield, prepared, as the result of three months’ careful research, an excellent bill. It passed the House, but the Senate allowed it to die, so there was nothing to do but to go on under the old law. Fortunately the superintendence of the census was put into the hands of Gen. Francis A. Walker, who brought to the task great zeal and intelligence and a full appreciation of the value of statistics. Although seriously hampered by the defective law, he produced a work that was an immense improvement on all the previous oensus reports. It is to him that we owe the series of shaded charts of nativity, density of population, wealth, intelligence, mortality, agricultural products, etc., which give at a glance information that without tnem would have to be obtained by hours of research from hundreds of tables of statistics. Gen. Walker will undoubtedly superintend the next census, and it is evident that the Senate committee intends to avail itself of his knowledge and experience in the prepa ration of its bill. The new census will not be as gratifying to our pride as a nation as were those wbioh recorded the progress of previous decennial periods. We may expect that the ratio of increase of population will show a marked falling off; that there will be a comparatively small increase in mining, manufactures, and railway mileage, and that tho growth of towns and cities aiad of the far Western States and Territories will prove to have been not at all extraordinary. The great; r part of the present decennial period has been one of prostration or at least of quiescence in business, and it has been attended by no such phenomena of expansion as marked the ten preceding years. The country has not been standing still, but it has greatly moderated its pace.