Project Gutenberg's The Boy With the U.S. Census, by Francis Rolt-Wheeler

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Title: The Boy With the U.S. Census

Author: Francis Rolt-Wheeler

Release Date: August 15, 2004 [EBook #13181]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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[Illustration: THE STATUE OF LIBERTY. The welcome of New York, the
gateway of the New World, to all races and peoples of the earth.
(_Courtesy of U.S. Immigration Station, Ellis Island._)]

THE BOY WITH THE U.S. CENSUS

BY FRANCIS ROLT-WHEELER

[Illustration: The Boy With the U.S. Census]

With Thirty-eight Illustrations, principally from
Bureaus of the United States Government

November, 1911

To My Son Roger's Friend

HAMILTON DAY

PREFACE

Life in America to-day is adventurous and thrilling to the core. Border
warfare of the most primitive type still is waged in mountain
fastnesses, the darkest pages in the annals of crime now are being
written, piracy has but changed its scene of operations from the sea to
the land, smugglers ply a busy trade, and from their factory prisons a
hundred thousand children cry aloud for rescue. The flame of Crusade
sweeps over the land and the call for volunteers is abroad.

In hazardous scout duty into these fields of danger the Census Bureau
leads. The Census is the sword that shatters secrecy, the key that opens
trebly-guarded doors; the Enumerator is vested with the Nation's
greatest right--the Right To Know--and on his findings all battle-lines
depend. "When through Atlantic and Pacific gateways, Slavic, Italic, and
Mongol hordes threaten the persistence of an American America, his is
the task to show the absorption of widely diverse peoples, to chronicle
the advances of civilization, or point the perils of illiterate and
alien-tongue communities. To show how this great Census work is done,
to reveal the mysteries its figures half-disclose, to point the paths to
heroism in the United States to-day, and to bind closer the kinship
between all peoples of the earth who have become "Americans" is the aim
and purpos