now have a regular periodical enumeration of the people. None of them, however, incorporate in their national censuses much beyond a brief schedule of inquiries relating to the people.
A distinguished French writer on statistics, Moreau de Jonnès, has pronounced the following eulogium on the founders of the American government:
The United States presents in its history a phenomenum which has no parallel. It is that of a people who instituted the statistics of their country on the very day when they founded their government, and who regulated in the same instrument the census of the citizens, their civil and political rights and the destinies of the country.
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To obtain the statistics of population is, in the United States, a civil duty that appeared so important to the assembly over which Washington presided, and of which Madison, Livingston, and Franklin were members, that it pronounced penalties against the inhabitant or the magistrate who neglected it.
The constitution contains the germ of the modern census. The census itself has been a growth. While, however, the constitution contained the germ of the census in its modern proportions, the men who framed it and who were first called upon to carry its provisions into effect comprehended the necessity of immediately expanding the germ, and they at once set the pace for official inquiry, which pace not only has not slackened during the present century, but has been accelerated even to a speed which has sometimes been criticised.
In studying the nature, the value and the extent of the contributions of the Federal Government to social science, one turns naturally to the efforts of the first Secretary of the Treasury, Alexander Hamilton. Hamilton knew the needs of the country; he knew the dearth of information; he knew that the necessities of the country could not be thoroughly understood and systems adopted for the development of industry without information relating to existing conditions. His associates, not only in the administrative but in the legislative branches of the government, understood this also, and as these men constituted the first prac-
