se towns would have been happiest which could exhibit
not only a marked decline in numbers, but the greater number of old
people. Beautiful St. Paul would have held a thanksgiving service, and
invited the Minneapolis enumerators to the feast, Kansas City and St.
Louis and San Francisco, and a hundred other places, would not have
desired a recount, except, perhaps, for overestimate; they would not have
said that thousands were away at the sea or in the mountains, but, on the
contrary, that thousands who did not belong there, attracted by the
salubrity of the climate, and the desire to injure the town's reputation,
had crowded in there in census time. The newspapers, instead of calling
on people to send in the names of the unenumerated, would have rejoiced
at the small returns, as they would have done if the census had been for
the purpose of levying the federal tax upon each place according to its
population. Chicago--well, perhaps the Prophet of the Steppes would have
made an exception of Chicago, and been cynically delighted to push it on
its way of increase, aggregation, and ruin.

But instead of this, the strain of anxiety was universal and
heart-rending. So much depended upon swelling the figures. The tension
would have been relieved if our faces were all set towards extinction,
and the speedy evacuation of this unsatisfactory globe. The writer met
recently, in the Colorado desert of Arizona, a forlorn census-taker who
had been six weeks in the saddle, roaming over the alkali plains in order
to gratify the vanity of Uncle Sam. He had lost his reckoning, and did
not know the day of the week or of the month. In all the vast territory,
away up to the Utah line, over which he had wandered, he met human beings
(excluding "Indians and others not taxed ") so rarely that he was in
danger of being locoed. He was almost in despair when, two days before,
he had a windfall, which raised his general average in the form of a
woman with twenty-six children, and he was rejoicing that he should be
able to turn in one hundred and fifty people. Alas, the revenue the
government will derive from these half-nomads will never pay the cost of
enumerating them.

And, alas again, whatever good showing we may make, we shall wish it were
larger; the more people we have the more we shall want. In this direction
there is no end, any more than there is to life. If extinction, and not
life and growth, is the better rule, what a costly mistake we h