96 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY
and i860 would have furnished more valuable matter for publi- cation than the many pages of comparison of incomparable sta- tistics with which the census volumes are rilled.
Mr. White's statement in his letter to Secretary Smith explain- ing his retirement from the census gives an idea of the degree of accuracy attained in the present census. In this letter Mr. \Vaite sa
You may not be able to understand the pressure that this man x will bring to bear upon my successor unless I give you one instance from my painful experi- ence. Not long since my superior, after endeavoring in vain to persuade me to furnish final estimates of the wealth in certain states at an early day (although I had not yet received some of the indispensable data then being tabulated in the census office) said : " Mr. Waite, if you should miss the mark by a thou- sand millions it would be all right. What we want is figures for publication."
Replying under date of May 3, 1894, to a communication in which the writer of this article had called his attention to the manner in which the public was being misled by statistics pre- sented in bulletins of the present census, Colonel Wright said : "You are aware of course that all of the tabulation of the elev- enth census was practically completed before I took charge of it. If there are glaring errors in it, I am unable to help it because I could not retake the census. My duty is simply to bring the results out in as creditable a way as possible. I am in no way responsible for the plans of the census or the collection of sta- tistics.".
Yet Colonel Wright may after all have mistaken his duty. If it was impossible so to revise the statistics of the census that they might serve to enlighten instead of to mislead, and if he had no power to send them to the garbage heap, it was surely within his authority to make them less harmful. Instead of even warning the public as to the misleading character of the statistics of the eleventh census, Colonel Wright, not only in the article criticised in the writer's former paper, but on various occasions, notably in an article in the Forum (May 1895), has given to them the weight of his great reputation. In the latter article he
1 Mr. Porter.
