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meetings annually in turn at their respective States, where they were received with distinction by their respective Governments. At the Congress held at The Hague I proposed that a census should be taken annually, and as much as possible in one form in all the States. This proposition was strongly supported by Professor Engel of Prussia. They were men who well understood that for facts of importance the recordations should be prompt to secure them for practical working. I was expected to develop the subject more fully at another Congress. But I was prevented attending the other Congresses, and I was remonstrated with seriously by the other members, who were fully prepared for the consideration of the subject, as a most important one. But Quetelet died; and the Congress itself, in that form of selected permanent heads of departments, was interrupted by the tempest of war, and has not been renewed in that State form. The old method of taking the census decennially has prevailed; it is worked in England by one hundred patronage-appointed clerks, at an expense of £100,000, and occupies three years, resulting in a greatly changed population, and much error. My view was that the census, instead of being worked by a hundred extra clerks for three years in London, should be accomplished annually locally by some six hundred and fifty superintendent Registrars, assisted by the Local Health Officer on the sanitary points requiring recordation, including the Poor-law officers, as respects the pauper population. The payment made of £100,000 might be transferred in its proportion to the local officers for the extra work of the Annual Report. The eligible course would be to select for the extra service that local officer, the exercise of whose functions occasions his visits to every house in the district. Should it be the rate-collector, who might leave with his rate-collection forms a slip of a census form to be filled up in part by the householder, and in part by the officer himself on inquiry? But rate-collectors are not popular, and their inquiries are evaded. Should it be the postman, who visits most of the houses, and if not all, may visit all, and who may provide for the local post-office a more complete directory of persons and names than at present exists? Or might it now be the agent of the new local authority, the School Boards, who visits
