tive classes and of
causes of death, suffered from numerous errors and defects. Public
discussion of them contributed to secure radical modifications of scope
and method at the census of 1850. Before the census law was passed, a
census board, consisting of three members of the president's cabinet,
was appointed to draft plans for the inquiry, and the essential features
of its report prepared after consultation with a number of leading
statisticians were embodied in the law.

The census of 1850 was taken on six schedules, one for free inhabitants,
one for slaves, one for deaths during the preceding year, one for
agriculture, one for manufactures and one for social statistics. The
last asked for returns regarding valuation, taxation, educational and
religious statistics, pauperism, crime and the prevailing rates of wages
in each municipal division. It was also the first American census to
give a line of the schedule to each person, death or establishment
enumerated, and thus to make the returns in the individual form
indispensable for a detailed classification and compilation. The results
of this census were tabulated with care and skill, and a preliminary
analysis gave the salient results and in some cases compared them with
European figures.

The census of 1860 followed the model of its predecessor with slight
changes. When the time for the next census approached it was felt that
new legislation was needed, and a committee of the House of
Representatives, with James A. Garfield, afterwards president of the
United States, at its head, made a careful and thorough study of the
situation and reported an excellent bill, which passed the House, but
was defeated by untoward influences in the Senate. In consequence the
census of 1870 was taken with the outgrown machinery established twenty
years earlier, a law characterized by Francis A. Walker, the
superintendent of the census, who administered it, as "clumsy,
antiquated and barbarous." It suffered also from the fact that large
parts of the country had not recovered from the ruin wrought by four
years of civil war. In consequence this census marks the lowest ebb of
American census work. Tie accuracy of the results is generally denied by
competent experts. The serious errors were errors of omission, were
probably confined in the main to the Southern states, and were
especially frequent among the negroes.

Since 1870 the development of census work in the United States has bee