The increase in these four sub-divisions is respectively one, thirteen, forty-three, thirtyfive per cent. There seems to be a point at which population in the old counties stops, and it is probably reached when there are as many people farming the land as can profitably do so by their own labour, and ¦ without employing capital in under-draining, subsoil ploughing, or artificial manures. In the present state of the continent, with new lands still within easy reach, it possibly pays the farmer better to send his sons away to seek them than to strive to increase his crops by applying science and capital to the old farm. That it does so has evidently become the prevailing belief. Nothing could be more useful to the country than to reason out this point, for if it is better to apply capital and labour to old farms than to new ones, the great surplus of Ontario had better be employed, at a low rate of interest, to help the proprietors to underdrain their land, in the way that government funds are employed in Britain. If, on the contrary, it is better to open out the new Middlesex, though not actually on the lakes, belongs naturally to this group. lands to the north and north-west, the actual policy of helping to build railroads into the interior is correct. The same features obtain in Quebec. The list is long, but the point is so important that, at the risk of being tedious, we here also subdivide the counties as follows:-1. The group of counties on the South Shore between Quebec and Montreal and the oldsettled counties around the latter city. 2. The counties on the north shore of the Ottawa and St. Lawrence, all of which have back ranges. 3. The new English counties of the townships. 4. The counties on the south shore, east of Quebec, all of which have new lands in the back concessions. 1. Old settled counties on the south shore, between Quebec and Montreal, and around Montreal: The old counties thus appear to have suffered a decrease of nearly seven per cent.; the other groups have increased respectively eight, sixteen and seventeen per cent. 2. North Shore counties, having "back ranges" of new lands:— Gaspé Bonaventure. 1861. 1871. 15,791 38,597 Champlain II, 100 20,008 Portneuf. 21,291 .. Quebec* 27,893 Montmorenci 11,136 II, 124 22,052 22,569 17,493 5,487 238,374 3. Counties in the Townships, comparatively new and chiefly peopled by English speaking folk :— This result is far more surprising than the stationary condition of the old settled districts of Ontario. Among these French counties are some which were cultivated generations before Ontario was, and have been steadily increasing census after census, without the aid of immigration and simply by natural increase, at the rate of about two per cent. per annum, besides sending off swarms of young men to take up farms elsewhere. Why should they now first exhibit a decline? Why is the decline so uniform? We have heard that during the war, the French Canadians sent a numerous contingent to the armies of the North, but even if they furnished 40,000 men, as has been asserted-a number which must be grossly exaggerated40,000 could be all killed off and the loss be hardly felt from a population of such fecundity as that of Quebec, where every village, almost every house, looks like a rabbit warren, for young. A similar remark might be made about the French Canadian factory hands employed in the New England States. Have the farming lands been too much subdivided ?-and is a clearing out process commencing naturally, like that which was carried out forcibly in the Scottish Highlands, where in order to get the best returns, the landlords made the cotters leave their small farms and seek new ones in another country? If it has—and if the limit of population has been reached, * The writer cannot understand this; there is pos- that can by the system of farming in vogue sibly a new subdivision, of which he is not aware. + Suffer from the de jure comparison. Arthabaska, though a French county, seems to belong to this group. So also does Drummond which is also in great part French. in Quebec and Ontario be well supported, it is quite clear whither the surplus population of both Provinces must flow. It will go northward only by degrees, though when it does pass the Laurentian ridges, and get established on the clay soils north of them, it may fill up another tier of counties yet. It will not go southward. It will keep, if not on the same parallel of latitude, as near to it as possible; emigration movements always do. It will keep on the zone of similar vegetation. It may, for aught, we know, have already largely swelled the population of Minnesota, Wisconsin and part of Michigan. Some of it may have been seduced to Illinois and Iowa, but the Canadian seldom stays there long. It will, if facilities are provided, rather remain under the old institutions, and we shall find that when a railway is constructed it will seek the North Western Territories-and probably get as far westward as it can on the Assiniboine and the south Saskatchewan to escape the extreme cold of the Red River country. Another consideration, if possible, more vital than the above, also forces itself upon the mind. Although much disputed, the weight of testimony leads to the belief that in the United States the purely American families tend steadily towards extinction. Numerous are the childless homes across the border, and numerous the families in which but one or two children are born or survive. It has been the hope of the writer that this infertility or this curious cropping up of the Malthusian laws under circumstances in which it was not foreseen they would apply, which was first observed in the Southern States, and is not so clearly traced into the Central and Northern, would not occur on this side of the St. Lawrence. The example of the French in Quebec, multiplying throughout a couple of centuries, seemed to encourage such a hope. But must it be given up for the Anglo-Canadian? Must it be given up even as regards the population of the whole Dominion? Is our progress to be fundamentally depend decessors on this continent, doomed to ultimate extinction? If the per centage omitted be greater than that estimated at the commencement of this article this census is an imposture; if less it is a revelation. If it be true that the population has only increased twelve per cent. during the past decade, or only one per cent. a year, many an aspiration for political independence must be checked, many a hopeful anticipation as to our national progress moderated. For, at this rate, instead of becoming in a few years a respectable rival to the United States, aiding by our friendly rivalry the cause of true freedom on this continent, we must remain a mere pigmy beside a giant, and it will be fifty instead of a dozen years before we can safely go out of leading strings. If it be true that we have but three and a half millions now, instead of over four, as we expected, and have become a comparatively stationary instead of a rapidly progressive country, the principal hope for the Dominion must be in the wild lands and new territories of the North West; and, until they become able to contribute to the cost of government, many a financial budget must be carefully pruned, and we must anxiously consider whether we have not been incurring debts and rushing into engagements at too rapid a rate for safety. So important is this, that it would appear desirable, if the 51st section* of the Union Act will admit of it, to "(I.) Quebec shall have the fixed number of 65 members. "2. There shall be assigned to each of the other ent upon immigration? Without a steady Provinces such a number of members as will bear influx from Europe or Asia, are we like the old temple and mound builders, our pre the same proportion to the number of its population (ascertained at such census) as the number 65 bear declare the census incomplete until a general check has been applied, and to take this check census of the numbers only by a schedule combining the de facto and the de jure plans, under the charge of special commissioners for each Province. If Mr. Wood, the late Treasurer of Ontario, Dr. Taché, the present Deputy Head of the Census Bureau, Mr. Costley for Nova Scotia, and some good man for New Brunswick could be appointed to give joint supervision to this check, the work would be done expeditiously and cheaply, and the country would be satisfied; whereas, without it there will be political agitations, commercial and financial uncertainty, and a tendency to relapse from the healthy national bearing we have been hopefully assuming into the old, dead, inglorious, Colonial listlessness. Unless such a course be taken Canada will not believe that the census figures accurately state the population. The officials set their belief against the general opinion of the country, and no doubt honestly; but what can the officials know? They depend, to the number of the population of Quebec, so ascertained. "3. In the computation of the number of members for a Province, a fractional part not exceeding one half of the whole number requisite for entitling the Province to a member shall be disregarded; but a fractional part exceeding one half of that number shall be equivalent to the whole number. "4. On any such re-adjustment the number of members for a Province shall not be reduced unless the proportion which the number of the population of the Province bore to the number of the aggregate population of Canada at the then last preceding readjustment of the number of members for the Province, is ascertained at the then latest census to be diminished by one-twentieth part or upwards. 5. Such re-adjustment shall not take effect until the termination of the then existing Parliament." Thus, each lot of 18,315 souls entitles Ontario, New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia to a member. Ontario will have 88 instead of 82, and 9,122 to spare. Thirty-five more would have given her an extra representative. New Brunswick will have 16 instead of 15; Nova Scotia 21 instead of 19. of course, upon subordinates, and what subordinate will confess to being guilty of sins of omission or commission? An enumerator may, when too late, remember having left out this family, that manufacturing establishment, but he will not tell of it. On the other hand, almost every one of us knows of some persons omitted from the census; some boarding-house, hotel, public office, or factory passed by, and thus a sort of public consciousness that the total is unfairly low has grown up among the people. We have heard but little of it yet, but we predict that when the subject comes to be discussed in the Legislature, there will be found a most singular unanimity in mistrusting the statements made, and a deep-seated feeling which will lead to acrimonious debates. A radical fault underlies the whole system of census taking in America: those in charge of it attempt too much. We indulge in the expensive luxury of enumeration but once in every ten years, and from the very nature of things the people who conduct the operations are new to it, each recurring decade. For, by nothing short of a miracle, can the same official be in charge of two successive census; most of the subordinate officers, clerks, commissioners, enumerators, must have changed positions, if not died, in such an interval; and duties, which of all others require most training and most special study, are thus of necessity placed [in the hands of unskilled, untried and hastily appointed persons. At the other end, the like difficulties occur. It does not fall to many of us to fill up census papers at all similarly. The boy of to-day may, in this social atmosphere, be the father of a family in 1881; the clerk will certainly be a merchant; the artizan, perhaps, an independent manufacturer. If any of us then remember, ten years hence, how we have supplied the information lately asked of us, that recollection will probably be useless; we shall again make mistakes and commit errors of omission. Nor is the decennial system at all calcu lated to remove the prejudices which men of all stations feel against revealing their private affairs. An annual assault upon them might be successful in the end, but a slight stirring of the mud every ten years only, invariably shows them as inveterate as ever. The usual rule in statistical enquiries is to obtain details, because details can be grouped into general heads, whereas general heads cannot be expanded, but in the tak ing of the census this excellent maxim is stretched too far; special circumstances mark at a given place the limits of the practicable. By attempting too much detail the whole work is rendered costly where it might be cheap, difficult where it might be easy, cumbrous where it should be simple, tardy where it should be rapid, and above all unreliable where it ought to be accurate. We need not go far to establish the truth of the above. Mr. Hutton, in his report on the Canadian census of 1851, speaks feelingly of the "gross negligence" of the enumerators. The census of 1861 has long been known to be a "monument of incapacity." Even a statistical chain cannot be much stronger than its weakest links. And a singular example of the futility of endeavouring to get by a census, anywhere, accurate particulars of anything beyond the number of the population, is given in the foolish attempt made in the United States to ascertain the months in which most deaths occurred. While the exact and accurate State registrations show September to be the most deadly, the United States enumerators made it May; and the reason is that the census was taken on the first of June, that people best remembered the deaths of the preceding month, but forgot them more and more as the months receded. Grouping the year into quarters, the census made the deaths most numerous in the quarter when they really were least frequent, and fewest when they really were most numerous. * Again, though nothing is steadier than the annual rate of mortality, the census of 1850 only made 16 per cent of the deaths of a year occur under one year of age; while that of 1860 increased the proportion to 20 per cent. So well indeed is the inaccuracy of the subsidiary results of the census known to the initiated, that no actuary thinks of consulting American census tables to obtain vital statistics, no statesman bases revenue calculations on the information respecting manufactures the census pretends to give. To conclude, when we abandon the attempt to do by means of a census what should be done by means of an effective system of registration, and give over asking about births, deaths, ages and perhaps religions, we shall be more likely to have a reliable statement of the numbers and occupations of our people, and, if wanted, of their national descent. Not until we delegate to commissioners, or specially qualified officials, periodical investigations into the state of our mining, manufacturing or agricultural industries, shall we have reliable accounts of these. The union of the whole into one decennial enquiry, miscalled a census, periodically fires the ambition of a Minister, and then destroys his reputation-and gives to our Bureau a labour which we regret to believe as futile as we know it to be arduous. * The numbers stated in the census, 1860, were 40,741 for May, and only 27,546 for the preceding June! The percentage in each quarter, compared with the State registry, is as follows |