Americans are a counting nation. They like figureslarge figures such as the gross national product, industrial production, consumer spending, consumption of energy, even measures of economic activity in such arcane areas as the production of brooms, brushes, and pickles. Especially do our people like to count themselves. This has been going on for a long time, serially in every year ending in zero since 1790. There is more to this than a mere quirk of national character. Statistics as an instrument for ensuring political equality are imbedded in the United States Constitution, which requires that political power be apportioned according to population. That is the primary historical and legal reason why we count ourselves every decade with a margin of error that has been thinned down to 2.5 per cent and is expected to fall still lower in 1980.

Since the beginning of recorded history, kings and potentates have numbered their subjects in order to tax them or to find out how many potential warriors their realms contained. There are indications of population counts in ancient Japan, China, Egypt, and in Babylonia; also in Greece, and among the Romans who gave us the word “census.” Hebrew enumerations are mentioned in the Bible. Monks were the principal custodians of vital statistics in the Middle Ages. In England’s American colonies, ministers, sextons, and elders kept church records which provided the heavenly demographic record of the elect and the damned. An increase in population was taken in New England as a sign of God’s favor toward the Congregational Church. Though no official government enumeration of the colonies as a whole was ever undertaken. But thirty-eight censuses of individual colonies were taken, most often when the Privy Council or the Board of Trade needed demographic facts for the governance of British America. The value of the information that was compiled varied greatly. The colonial governors, when commanded to initiate and supervise the task, could be energetic, or independent, lazy, overworked, or inclined to tell London what it wanted to hear. Local officials who did the actual work displayed little enthusiasm for so onerous an exertion which was, moreover, not part of their legally defined duties. The people, suspecting that the inquiries had something to do with taxes, were evasive and uncooperative.

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