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No one present on that night was to be omitted, and no person absent was to be included, except policemen and others on night duty, miners and potters, and whoever else habitually worked in the night; travellers were enumerated at the hotels at which they might stop on the following morning. Bargemen, tramps, and gipsies were numbered in their boats, tents, and encampments, to the great annoyance of some of them; one tribe of gipsies taking a great deal of fruitless trouble to escape the general scrutiny. Houses, as well as inhabitants, were reckoned up, and an exact account taken of all that were uninhabited or building.

When the enumerators had transcribed the householders' schedules into the enumeration book with which each was supplied, and completed the various summaries and estimates, for which one week was allowed, they forwarded them, together with the voluntary returns relating to schools, churches, &c., to the respective registrars; and here the enumerators' labours ended. The census returns were now in the hands of 3,220 registrars, or dividers of districts. The business of these registrars was to give a careful and systematic examination and revision of the documents laid before them, and then to prepare a summary to be transmitted with the enumeration books themselves to the superintendent registrar for a further revision. A fortnight was allowed for this work, at the end of which the functions of the registrars ceased. The summaries and enumeration books were now in the hands of 624 superintendent-registrars, who, after further investigation, transmitted them to the Census Office, not exempt even then from a final scrutiny before the commencement of the abstract, which reduces the nearly 40,000 enumeration books into three thick portentous folios, the marrow of which Mr. Cheshire has endeavoured to condense into a shilling pamphlet. The efforts by which the Report endeavours to make us comprehend the numbers and vast aggregates with which it has to deal, and which it would fain press on the imagination of its readers, are in exact accordance with the whole tenour of the volumes. Counting has given us this prodigious amount of details; counting must make us realize them. Multitude and space have hitherto defied, or else suffered from, exact measurement; the poet hopes to excite us by the indefinite and the vague. Not so the statistician, who clings to his art, and has faith in no other. It is thus Mr. Cheshire makes us see the army of enumerators.

'An idea may be formed of the extent of this army of enumerators, and of the labour of engaging their services on the same day, when it is mentioned that it would take seven hours and three quarters for the whole body, in single file, to pass a given point, at quick march; and it would

illustrates by the fact, that the whole vast yields of California and Australia, melted down into a solid mass of gold, would only fill a tolerable-sized room. So he proposes a method of imaging forth our population more likely to impress our fancy.

'Now, if all the people of Great Britain had to pass through London in procession, four abreast, and every facility was afforded for their free and uninterrupted passage, during twelve hours daily, Sundays excepted, it would take nearly three months for the whole population of Great Britain to file through, at quick march, four deep. To count them singly, at the rate of one a second, would take a year and a half, assuming that the same number of hours daily were occupied, and that Sundays also were excepted.' -Cheshire, p. 17.

This exception of Sundays in the visionary reckoning, seems to give it a reality almost alarming, as if the task was already set us, with its long working-days of labour, and brief Sabbaths of repose. But passing from these efforts to bring the general mind to embrace the magnitude and vast importance of the subject of population, it will be well to proceed at once to the various topics which the Report treats of, and which turns the mere barren counting of numbers into a most valuable source of information on all the principal points connected with the present state and future prospects of our nation. We need not dwell upon the objects of the census and the machinery employed,' and the number of the people' has already been given, together with the outline of the proposed plan for the second, and as yet unpublished part of the census. The first great division of this vast aggregate brings out the uniform excess of females over males in the living population, along with the excess of male births over female. The probable reasons for this difference are reserved for future discussion; the facts are these:

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The number of the male population of Great Britain was 10,386,048of the female population 10,735,919: the females exceeded the males by 349,871; and the males at home were 10,223,558; consequently the females exceeded by 512,361 the males in Great Britain. To every 100,000 females the males were 96,741 ; including 1,538 males abroad, the exclusion of whom leaves 95,203 males at home. The excess of females over males was nearly the same, proportionally, in 1801 and 1851: thus, in 1801, to every 100,000 males there were 103,353 females; in 1851 the females were 103,369 to the same number of males. The proportion in both periods was nearly 30 males to 31 females. The excess of females over males at each Census is thus shown:

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'To 100,000 males at home, in 1851, the females were 105,012; or there were twenty males at home to twenty-one females.

place in 102 days, would represent the increase of the people of Great Britain in half a century.

In the course of the analysis of this mass of people, it has been already stated that they will be subdivided into males and females: and it will be seen that at home there are 102 hundred thousand men and boys, 107 hundred thousand women and girls; and that the females exceed the males in the great and imaginary procession by five hundred thousand. They will then be arranged in the order of age; the few aged persons of 90, followed byt nose of 85, 80, 75, 70, in quinquennial sections down to 20, 15, 10, 5, and children in their mothers' arms. Again, they will be classed in sections as bachelors, spinsters, husbands, wives, widowers, widows. And, first classed according to place of residence, they will be subsequently grouped under the counties and countries in which they were born. Their final arrangement will be in Professions, or groups engaged in similar occupations; princes, peers, commoners, officers of Government, and municipal authorities; soldiers, seamen, clergymen, lawyers, physicians and surgeons; authors, artists, scientific men, teachers; merchants bankers, brokers, and shopkeepers; carriers by railways, roads, canals, rivers, seas; landlords, farmers, agricultural labourers, woodmen, gardeners, fishermen, grooms and huntsmen; the numerous classes engaged in art and mechanical productions-makers of arms, machines, carriages, ships, houses: the thousands working and dealing in Animal mattersfurs, hair, wool, silk; in matters derived from the Vegetable Kingdomvegetable food, drinks, stimulants; wood, hemp, flax, cotton, paper: the workers and dealers in Minerals-the colliers, quarriers, potters, glassworkers, jewellers, smiths in gold, silver, copper, tin and zinc-plumbers, braziers, iron-miners, and an endless throng of workers in iron and steel. There will also be the thousands of labourers without any definite occupation; scholars, and children at home of undetermined occupation. And finally, will follow paupers, prisoners, lunatics, and vagrants, who form a fraction of the population. It will then be evident from this survey

which will extend over the thousands in more than a thousand different professions, subdivided into innumerable bands-that as the greatest Exhibition of modern times only displayed a small part of the produce of their labours, so the visitors only represented a fraction of the multitudinous population of these islands, which the Census Enumerators found so variously occupied on the sea, on rivers, on the coasts, in the valleys, on the hills; in cities, towns, villages, and solitary houses over all the face of the cultivated land.'-Census Report, pp. xxv.-xxvii.

Does not every reader, we would ask, having his fancy tasked to conceive a multitude, feel a sense of disappointment, on hearing that the whole British population could stand in a space of seven square miles? that gazing from the brow of a hill in clear weather, this little mirror of the human eye could hold and reflect them all, at a glance, within its narrow bound. Our imagination has been taught to picture greater crowds than these, and passes on to that multitude, whom no man can number, composed of all nations, and to that more terrible and still vaster assemblage-that great census of the human family, and that one numbering-day, when all the tribes of the earth shall be reckoned once for all, when angels shall be the enumerators, and none shall escape the scrutiny. But it is admitted, that 'to mass quantity is to conceal bulk,' which Mr. Cheshire

illustrates by the fact, that the whole vast yields of California and Australia, melted down into a solid mass of gold, would only fill a tolerable-sized room. So he proposes a method of imaging forth our population more likely to impress our fancy.

'Now, if all the people of Great Britain had to pass through London in procession, four abreast, and every facility was afforded for their free and uninterrupted passage, during twelve hours daily, Sundays excepted, it would take nearly three months for the whole population of Great Britain to file through, at quick march, four deep. To count them singly, at the rate of one a second, would take a year and a half, assuming that the same number of hours daily were occupied, and that Sundays also were excepted.' -Cheshire, p. 17.

This exception of Sundays in the visionary reckoning, seems to give it a reality almost alarming, as if the task was already set us, with its long working-days of labour, and brief Sabbaths of repose. But passing from these efforts to bring the general mind to embrace the magnitude and vast importance of the subject of population, it will be well to proceed at once to the various topics which the Report treats of, and which turns the mere barren counting of numbers into a most valuable source of information on all the principal points connected with the present state and future prospects of our nation. We need not dwell upon the objects of the census and the machinery employed,' and the number of the people' has already been given, together with the outline of the proposed plan for the second, and as yet unpublished part of the census. The first great division of this vast aggregate brings out the uniform excess of females over males in the living population, along with the excess of male births over female. The probable reasons for this difference are reserved for future discussion; the facts are these:

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The number of the male population of Great Britain was 10,386,048— of the female population 10,735,919: the females exceeded the males by 349,871; and the males at home were 10,223,558; consequently the females exceeded by 512,361 the males in Great Britain. To every 100,000 females the males were 96,741 ; including 1,538 males abroad, the exclusion of whom leaves 95,203 males at home. The excess of females over males was nearly the same, proportionally, in 1801 and 1851: thus, in 1801, to every 100,000 males there were 103,353 females; in 1851 the females were 103,369 to the same number of males. The proportion in both periods was nearly 30 males to 31 females. The excess of females over males at each Census is thus shown:

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'To 100,000 males at home, in 1851, the females were 105,012; or there were twenty males at home to twenty-one females.

'Of the children born alive in England and Wales during the thirteen years, 1839-51, 3,634,235 were males, and 3,465,629 females; consequently 104,865 boys were born to every 100,000 girls born; while to every 100,000 females living, there were 96,741 males living. How much the change in the proportions, and the subsequent disparity of the numbers in the two sexes, is due to emigration, or to a difference in degree of the dangers and diseases to which they are respectively exposed, will be most advantageously discussed, when the numbers of males and females living at different periods of life are compared.

The disparity in the proportions of the sexes at home is greatest in Scotland-110 Females to 100 Males; least in England and Wales-104 Females to 100 Males.'-Census Report, pp. xxvii. xxviii.

These figures have been arranged by Mr. Cheshire into the following table :

'TABLE I.-Population of Great Britain in 1851.

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The uniformity of this difference is shown in a second tableTABLE II.-Population of Great Britain as enumerated at each Census, from 1801 to 1851, inclusive.

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We have pronounced statistics as generally an inattractive. science; yet they often seem to bear a curious relation to the most popular of all propensities-gossip. It is the scale and magnitude of the inquiries which constitute the difference. What any isolated family may have for dinner is a mean subject of curiosity -to know the precise fare of thousands is the business and duty of statesmen; how such a lady of our acquaintance flirts and trifles is whispered cautiously, and with some sense of shame-what Queen Elizabeth said and did to her lovers, and what she meant by her wayward treatment of them, has occupied grave historical

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