What the Statistician Contributes to the Problem We have long been describing ourselves as a nation of 100,000,000 time our official NopslaGon: as it 105,000,000 people; yet all this
had been determined at the census -of 1910, was something more than 91,000,000.
Evidently the present—census enumerators have succeeded in substantiating the unofficial estimates of the press and our public men. The corrected count shows that, in ten years, the Ameri-sean nation has increased by nearly 14,600,060 souls.
view of the forces which have controlled American life in the last ten years this growth is fairly astonishing. Those forces are of a nature which decrease population, rather than increase it, and this has been their effect in nearly every civilized world except the United States. For at least five of these ten years immigration almost, entirely ceased. For two of them a large part of our young and vigorous population was engaged, not in and raising families, but in preparing for war and in actually waging it. In this same period the influenza epidemic, one of the most destructive in our history, swept the entire nation and took a heavy toll of life. Yet these several disintegrating—influences did not succeed in stopping our growth: all they accomplished was to produce a slight diminution in its rate.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.