THE CENSUS

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume LXXXIII, Issue 19840, 14 May 1927, Page 20 (Supplement)

THE CENSUS

NOT A UNIVERSAL PRACTICE UNKNOWN IN MANY LANDS. Census taking is/generally accepted as a universal practice in Western lands, yet a considerable part of the world has never had its population enumerated. Recently the first census of Angora, the capital of Turkey, was completed, and preparation for a mo- , dern census of all of Turkey is under way. The remaining lands of the globe where this practice does not obtain are Persia, Afghanistan, the Indo-Chinese peninsula, half of Africa, parts of South America and most of China. The census as we know it to-day is 241 years old, but enumerations of the population for varying purposes wore [fairly common among the ancients. The Jews kept a careful record of then fighting men, and during the Babylonian captivity the numbers of each tribo were regularly tabulated. Persia had a scheme whereby the people were counted to determine the provincial resources, thus fixing the amount of royal tribute to be exacted. Under Amasis, Egypt kept bn occupational register of its inhabitants, a system later introduced by Solon in Greece. What one may accept as the earliest of modern censuses was the periodical counting by families and individuals of the population of New France (Canada) in 1665. Five years later, Colbert, in France, ordered the extensions to the rural districts of a system of registering the domestic happenings of the neighbourhood. A regular record of population and its fluctuations was initiated in Sweden in 1686, when the keeping of death and birth rolls in the parishes was made mandatory, the annual lists being trans mitted to a central office. But as a special undertaking in the field of statistics the census was not begun in Sweden until 1749. h Finland followed suit the next year, and within twenty years Norway was also in line. Some of the smaller Italian principalities, Spain and Portugal began counting their peoples about the end of the eighteenth century; but such attempts were not on a national scale.

A proposal to have a census in England in 1753 was bitterly attacked because it was thought that it was "subversive of the last remains of English liberty” and might result in "some public misfortune or epidemical distemper.” Despite this opposition the House of Commons passed the bill, but it was rejected by the Lords. Not until 1800 was the force of public opinion sufficiently changed to make possible an English census. During the middle of the nineteenth century the census was gradually extended to every corner of the British Empire.

The earliest census in South-eastern Europe was an enumeration conducted by the’ Hungarian clergy in 1754.Thury years later the Church sponsored a census ir Austria. Most of the countries of Europe date their current series of censuses from the period between 1825 and 1860. Russia, in 1897, was the last European nation to take a census. What were known as "revisions of the population” had been conducted periodically since 1721 by the’ Czar’s Government for fiscal and police purposes; but lack of central supervision prevents their being considered true censuses. Notwithstanding Sweden’s claim to primacy in census taking, there are extant records of early parish censuses in the American colonies about 1749. The census in the United States dates from 1790 and is the result of a constitutional provision that settled a quarrel in the Constitutional Conven tion of 1787. The small States insisted on equal representation in the Federal Government, while the large States demanded that their size be considered. The matter was settled by devising a Legislature with representation in the lower house dependent on population—which was to be determined by a census taken every ten years.