actual penury. I hoped, on the contrary, to be of assistance to them in publicly exposing the lack of justice in a system that transforms national educators into proletarians of instruction. But when I read the letter from a teacher" published by you in your first article of the 20th of February, I believed myself in error, and feared that I had unintentionally wounded my friends engaged in primary instruction.

What says your first correspondent? That "a happy household can be maintained in the provinces on eighteen hundred francs (three hundred and sixty dollars) a year." Granted; but there must be no children; the wife must be a good housekeeper (that is to say, at once cook, laundress, milliner, mantuamaker, etc.), and must never go out. In short, life must be confined to the strictly necessary. To desire nothing more is the secret of happiness proposed for that modest functionary, the teacher.

I was going to reply to you, my dear sir, that eighteen hundred francs is not an average figure for teachers; that four fifths, that is to say one hundred and twenty thousand of them, earn between eight hundred and fifteen hundred francs; and that, consequently, by the very admissions of your correspondent, these one hundred and twenty thousand teachers, not having attained the admirable limit of eighteen hundred francs, are very near to being proletarians. . . I was going to tell you many other things when, in the Annales of February 27th, I read the brave and accurate letter of your second correspondent, to which I hesitate to add anything, with your admission that you had received many others like it. I must thank you for publishing that letter. . . .

I repeat: Whoever cannot support himself and his family upon the earnings of his profession is a proletarian. I insist upon that. Now, with a salary of fifteen hundred francs (three hundred dollars) a teacher, who has almost always some family demands,-old parents, sisters, wife, children, some professional expenses of dress and living-cannot support himself. He must find some additional means to eke out his daily bread. . . .

And now, my dear sir, I wish to consider your own declarations. You have written very prettily, as well as profoundly, as follows: "What makes the intellectual proletarian is not the modesty of his salary; it is the feeling he has of the disproportion between this salary and the hopes he has long cherished,a most painful feeling. . . . The great and perhaps only condition of happiness is to consent to be frankly what one is." And you add: "Brothers, we must live; and to live is to love, to desire. The essential is to know how to limit our desires

and to conform them to our means." Beautiful words, that illustrate and revive the saying of Voltaire, "Let us cultivate our garden!" Yes; but to cultivate his garden one must have a spade and a garden. I see indeed that the teachers have received a spade; I do not see that any one has yet given them the garden.

One can, one should limit his desires and conform them to his means,-when those means reach a minimum sufficient for living without being always straitened in the essentials of existence. . . . One can, one should consent to be frankly what he is, when his profession does not force him to appear better than it permits him to be. . . . One cannot, one should not have ambitions or vanities above his earnings; but the earnings must be adequate to the daily demands, and that is not the case with most of our teachers. .

I know, too, that you add, with terrible good humor, "One can (unless in cases of extreme penury and distress) be relatively happy in every situation, provided that one encourages only desires in conformity with that situation." No doubt, and I know rag-pickers of Montmartre, and cobblers of Montrouge, who are happier than a President of the Republic. There is a degree of social inferiority when, free from responsibilities, one can be happy in a tub, or a cask, or a place in the sun, like Diogenes the Dog. But the teacher is neither the rag-picker nor the cobbler; he is not permitted to emulate a cynic philosopher; he is an official, who must be well dressed, well shod, and sufficiently well nourished to face twelve hours of labor daily. The teacher is a gentleman, or a lady, under all circumstances. Observe then, my dear sir, your condition for happiness, modest as it may seem to you, is chimerical for the teacher, because his earnings do not permit him to have desires in conformity to his situation. The whole problem is there.

"I speak knowingly," you tell us; "the happiest year of my youth was the year that I passed in the depths of Brittany at Lesneven, as professor in an insignificant college, with a salary of ninety-five francs per month. Never have I worked with better appetite or more gaily." I willingly believe you. A Sarcey has always in his brain all the treasures of earth, provided, however, that he has enough to eat, my dear sir? And there is the terrible question. In 1850, ninety-five francs were about equivalent to two hundred francs to-day. Reflect that since your youth money has lost forty per cent of its value, that living costs much more in proportion, and that boarding houses, even in Brittany, have greatly raised their charges. . . . And the teacher is not a Sarcey; he is not a philosopher carrying with him his riches, his assurance of happiness in

poverty, until he chooses to emerge from it. He is a modest fellow, superior, perhaps, in nothing, neither in virtue, nor wisdom, nor science, asking only to live modestly, respectably, laboriously, usefully, with a minimum salary of at least two thousand francs per year, with honors and a pension at the end of his active career.

RELATION OF THE STATE TO POPULATION.
THE CENSUS.

JOHN W. HARSHBERGER, PH.D., UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA,
PHILADELPHIA, PA.

THE

HE question arises, Has any record of the taking of a census come down to us from pre-Christian times? Very scanty and unreliable information can be gathered from profane writers, and outside of the extant Roman and Greek works, the Bible gives the most perfect account of early times.

And the Lord spake unto Moses, saying, In the wilderness of Sinai, in the tabernacle of the congregation, on the first day of the second month, in the second year after they were come out of the land of Egypt;

Take ye the sum of all the congregation of the children of Israel, after their families, by the house of their fathers, with the number of their names, every male by their polls;

From twenty years old and upward, all that are able to go forth to war in Israel; thou and Aaron shall number together their armies.

We see, then, that at the early date of the Exodus (1659 B. C., Menepstah ruler in Egypt) quite an elaborate census. was taken by the Jews. In Second Samuel we have record of an enumeration taken by King David:

For the king said to Joab, the captain of the host, which was with him, Go through all the tribes of Israel, from Dan even to Beersheba, and number ye the people, that I may know the number of the people. . . .

So when they had gone through all the land, they came to Jerusalem at the end of nine months and twenty days.

And Joab gave up the sum of the people unto the king: and there were in Israel eight hundred thousand valiant men

that drew sword; and the men of Judah were five hundred thousand men.

And David's heart smote him after that he had numbered the people.

The account of the pestilence that followed David's disobedience, without a doubt discouraged a census being taken alike by the Jews and Christians in later times. It was many centuries before any man came forward bold enough to state his conviction that it was not only not sinful, but a duty to register births and deaths, and to make all possible endeavor correctly to number the people.

It was left for the Romans as a political, military and fiscal expedient to introduce into their civil customs the estimation of population. The institution of this enumeration is attributed to Servius Tullius, 555 B. C. The supervision of the count was at first placed in the hands of the consuls, who saw that the count was properly made. Five classes of freeholders were denominated. The persons comprising the proletarii, a class mentioned in the law, paid no taxes, had no vote and were excluded from military duty. The Senate now detached the duty of taking the census from the consular office and assigned the same to two new officers called censors, who were chosen from the patricians only. It was thus sought to keep the political power of the State within the exclusive control of the nobility, now assuming the character of an oligarchy.

In dignity, the new officer ranked next to the consuls. To the censor was committed the registry of the tribes, and this in turn regulated the military service and political status of every citizen. When vacancies occurred in the Senate, or in the ranks of the equites, it was the duty of the censor to fill the same by appointment, and his power extended even to striking off the names of senators and knights from the list of their respective orders. With the growth of the office other duties, such as the supervision of the finances, the distribution of the lands, the management of the public works, the collecting of indirect taxes and the oversight of the public and private lives of the citizens were added to the office, greatly augmenting its importance in the State. For ninety-four years B. C., 445-351, the censorship was held exclusively by patricians, and was of

course so managed as to uphold the exclusive privileges of that aristocratic order. Not until 351 was the office opened to the plebeians. The censors held their office for five years, and thus in time the period covering a census was known as a lustrum, on account of sacrifices and celebrations made at that date.

The emperor in the later days of the Roman Empire assumed censorial powers, and with the titular dignity of morum præfectus. While thus between the period of greatest consular influence in the State and the absorption of most governmental powers in the Cæsars, the Roman census proper lost accuracy and validity with the lapse of time, owing largely, it is probable, to the exemption of citizens from land tax, with a view to which, in great measure, it had been originated, a species of official enumeration sprang up with reference to the provinces which nearly approached the modern forms of statistical inquiry. This census was conducted by the proconsul. In it the number of freemen, slaves, women, children, cattle, houses, buildings, amount of acreage, 'tillage, pasturage, woodland, the number of vines, olives and fruit trees were determined. "It was," says Mr. Merivale, "from the precise information. contained in these official registers that Augustus, toward the close of his reign, drew up the complete survey of the Roman Empire, which he placed in the hands of the vestal virgins to be delivered to his successor after death. With the dissolution of the Roman Empire, the census as a statistical agency disappears from history. During the Middle Ages the word was at times used, but in application almost exclusively to the record of the landed property or the assessment of taxes." "Charlemagne, in 780 A. D., undertook an economic survey of his vast dominions, appointing commissioners whose duty it was to report upon the condition of the people, the soil and the produce of the several provinces." The Doomsday Book of England, compiled by command of William the Conqueror in 1081, contains the quantity of land within each county of the kingdom, the name of each Norman and Saxon proprietor, and the number of slaves and cattle belonging to each. Several other statistical works of an uncertain value appeared in the long interval between the last Roman census and the seventeenth century of