Daily Kennebec Journal

CHECKING OFF ITS PEOPLE.
Census of Great Britain and Ireland
to Be Taken April 2, Sunday.

Once more the fiat has gone forth
for the numbering of the king's sub-
jects, on Sunday, April 2. The neces-
sary census acts--one for Great Brit-
ain, the other for Ireland--have been
published: and after resting from its
labors for nearly ten years the great
census taking machinery has begun
to work again, and will know no rest
from its labors for considerably more
than a year.
More than a century ago it was no
easy work to count the king's sub-
jects, when there were fewer than
nine million persons in England. Now
that the population has grown four-
fold, and today is, as nearly as pos-
sible thirty-six million, its vastness
requires no pointing out.
Already the whole country is flood-
ed with tens of thousands of circulars
and letters--to the local authorities,
enjoining them to see that the naming
and numbering of every street is in
"apple pie order" before the fateful
date of the census, so that the work
of the enumerators may be made as
simple as possible; and to the thou-
sands of superintendent registrars, re-
quiring them to arrange in good time
for the services of a vast army of enu-
merators, whose number for Great
Britain alone will exceed forty thou-
sand. All this naturally leads to a
deluge of correspondence--letters by
tens of thousands, each of which must
be carefully considered and answered.
A more intricate and difficult work is
the division of the country into the
enumeration districts, so that no part
of it, however minute, may be exclud-
ed from the survey, and so that each
district shall be within the compass
of one man's labor for a day. It is
found in practice that in towns a dis-
trict comprising about two hundred
houses is large enough for one enu-
merator to tackle; while in the coun-
try district involving a fifteen-mile
walk is the measure of his powers.
and into tens of thousands of such
sections the whole area of the coun-
try must be mapped out.
Orders have already been given for
the preparation of the almost count-
less schedules which in a few weeks
time will be scattered broadcast over
the land.
Later these millions of schedules will
be sent to every point of the compass
to the superintendent registrars, who
in turn will distribute them among
the heads of their subdistricts, to be
kept until the week before the census
day. Then they will be handed to the
forty thousand or more enumerators,
each of whom will distribute them in
his special district, noting the delivery
of each schedule in a book provided
for the purpose.
On April 3 all the schedules will be
collected with their many questions
duly answered: if any assistance is
required in filling up the form the
enumerator's duty is to give it. But
his work by no means ends here. al-
though he will probably have well
earned his money by this time. He
must further copy the entries in the
schedules into his enumeration book
and make an abstract of them in a
form showing the total number of per-
sons, males and females, the number
of houses, and so on.
This task completed, the superin-
tendent registrars dispatch their thou-
sands of bundles of material to the
Pimlico headquarters, where a large-
ly augmented staff of clerks wrestles
with them, gradually evolving from
seeming chaos those wonderful tables
of statistics which proclaim to the
world all it wants to know about
King George's subjects at home.
London Tit-Bits.