orders--depopulate as they may elsewhere--is eagerly coveted and
regularly measured by all the nations. Since 1790, when we set them
the example, they have one by one adopted the rule of numbering heads
every five, six or ten years, recognizing latterly as well, more and
more, the importance of numbering other things, until men, women and
children have come to be embedded in a medley of steam-engines,
pigs, newspapers, schools, churches and bolts of calico. For twenty
centuries this taking of stock by governments had been an obsolete
practice, until revived by the framers of the American Constitution
and made a vital part of that instrument. The right of the most--and
not of the richest, the best, the bravest, the cleverest, or the
oldest in blood--to rule being formally recognized and set down on
paper, it became necessary to ascertain at stated intervals who were
the most. The lords of the soil, instead of being inducted into power
on the death of their parents with great pother of ointment, Te Deum,
heraldry, drum and trumpet, were chosen every ten years by a corps of
humble knights of the pencil and schedule.

To these disposers of empire, the enhancement and complication of
whose toil has been a labor of love with each decennial Congress, we
owe the knowledge that eighty years, out of the hundred, brought the
people of the Union up from a tally of 3,929,214 in 1790 to 38,558,371
in 1870, and that down to the beginning of the last decade the rate of
increment adhered closely to 35 per cent. On that basis of growth the
latest return falls nearly four millions short. One of the causes of
this is "too obvious" (and too disagreeable) "to mention;" but it
is inadequate. The sharp demarcation of the western frontier by the
grasshopper and the hygrometer is another, which will continue to
operate until, by irrigation, tree-planting or some other device, a
new climate can be manufactured for the Plains. The teeming West, that
of old needed only to be tickled with a hoe to laugh with a harvest,
has disappeared. At least what is left of it has lost the power of
suction that was wont to reach across the ocean, pull Ballys and Dorfs
up by the roots and transplant them bodily to the Muskingum and
the Des Moines. A third cause, operating more especially within
the current decade, is attributable to another mode in which that
attractive power has been exerted--the absorption from the European
purse for the construction of railways