CENSUS. In modern usage, primarily denotes the periodical survey of the number and condition of the people—more fully described as "census of population" where necessary to distinguish it from the census of production, census of agriculture and similar institutions.
Numberings of the people and national stocktakings are known to have been conducted from very ancient times. The Old Testament records the enumeration at the Exodus of the fighting strength of the Children of Israel and of the non-military Levites, and the famous enumeration of fighting men, conducted by Joab at the command of David, on which the divine wrath was visited. Records survive of a complete cadastral survey and census of Babylonia comprising agriculture, stock and produce, which appears to have been carried out for fiscal purposes in the third millennium B.C., and in the Persian empire, in China and in Egypt similar surveys are known to have taken place for the assessment of fiscal, military or labour liabilities. A most notable example was the Roman census, from which the modern institu tion derives its name: under this system the members and property of every family were enumerated quinquennially for the purpose of determining their civil status and corresponding liabilities. Dating from pre-republican Rome, the Roman census was extended by Augustus in 5 B.C. to the Roman empire and thus covered the whole of the civilized world of those times. The Roman census perished in the wreck of the Roman empire. Feudalism may have rendered the revival of census-taking, even when practicable, less necessary ; and superstition may have con tributed to its abeyance. The Christian Church remembered the punishment of Israel; and even in the British House of Commons in 1753 it was possible for the f ear to be expressed that a numbering of the people would be followed by "some great public misfortune or epidemical distemper." It is, of course natural that objections to taxation or military service should assume the cloak of religious scruple; but there must have been more than this. It is impossible not to infer that in the Old Testament story and in the purificatory sacrifice concluding the Roman census f olk memory lingered of a primitive taboo. And these speculations receive interesting support from the announcement, in connection with the Kenya census of 1926, that the authorities anticipated trouble with certain tribes among whom there was a strict taboo against counting either themselves, their wives or their cattle.
Thus, apart from undertakings such as Charlemagne's Breviary and the English Domesday Book (an inquest upon geld assess ments) there was a long interval in census history until the mid I 7th century, when a periodical census of the modern type was instituted in La Nouvelle France (Quebec) and Acadie (Nova Scotia). Enumerations of population took place in several of the German States from 1742 onwards, in Sweden in 1748, Denmark in 1769 and Spain in 1787. In Great Britain, after proposals had been made and defeated in 17S3, the census was definitely estab lished in 18o1. From these and similar beginnings in other countries the institution of the census rapidly gained a permanent place in the organization of nearly all modern States, the most recent convert being Turkey in 1927. It will be seen that the precursors of the modern census were almost wholly executive operations discharging essential functions of government such as military recruitment and taxation. But in the long interval which preceded the revival these functions cut for themselves other channels of administration ; and when inquests and surveys upon a national scale were again resumed it was with a very different object, viz., to supply knowledge for the guidance of public policy and to "substitute certainty for conjecture" upon the vexed questions of fact which are vital to political action and foresight.
