MARGINAL COMMENT
By HAROLD
NICOLSON EVEN though ten whole days have passed since I was enumerated, I am still stunned by that census form. Certain questions continue to circle like hawks in my head. I am left wondering, for instance, what proportion of the forms were incorrectly filled up. There must have been some heads of households who lied deliberately ; others must have been too senile and confused to grasp the nature of the enquiries ; and there must have been some skittish people who thought that the occasion - called for the exercise of merriment, chaff and innocent deception. In certain districts, moreover, the enumera- tors may have been incompetent or. absent-minded or have omitted whole areas of their district owing to ignorance, lassitude or personal prejudice. There must, at this moment, be several honourable and upright heads of households who have not been counted at all ; they must feel that they are not numbered among the multiple elect. If. moreover, after having received an expen- sive and prolonged education, after having for twenty years of my life been a civil servant and for ten further years a Member of the House of Commons, I found it necessary to read the form through three times before I cot ld claim any real mastery of its contents, how could the ordinary worker of this country be expected to understand the purport of the questions addressed to him? I am well aware that it is extremely difficult to draft these forms in such a manner as to render them both comprehen- sive and comprehensible. The brains of many cultivated men and women must have been concentrated for many weeks upon the formulation of those rubrics. I remember that when I myself endeavoured for two days to simplify the language of the pass- port application form, I was .obliged to confess myself defeated. " But," my colleague pointed out to me, " your draft does not cover the case of a British subject born on a ship flying the Argentine flag." All the same, I contend that to the majority of the citizens of this island the census questions must have appeared difficult to understand.
* * * * I am quite certain, for instance, that the column asking whether you were educating or being educated must have been filled up by many thousands of people who were in no sense teachers and who had by many decades passed the school-leaving age. Such people must hive assumed that the purport of the question was to discover what proportion of the population were " educated " and what proportion were not: in writing the word " yes " in the space provided, the head of the household was making it evident that he belonged to the latter category. I myself first wrote " yes " in this column and then scratched it out. I was fascinated, and shall for, ong remain fascinated, by the choice of the ques- tions asked. Obviously the counting of the people was a wonderful opportunity to extract information of value to all those interested in social welfare. Equally, obviously, the ques- tions addressed to a free people must not be of such intimacy or indiscretion as to arouse any fervent revolt: the census would not have proved a successful administrative venture if there had been forty-two million Sir Ernest Benns. Yet if those who drafted the form had to choose their questions carefully, and to reject many topics of fascinating significance, why did they narrow down their enquiry to what, to my mind, appeared points of minor interest? I am quite sure, of course, that I am wrong in this complaint, and that the Registrar-General selected for his iron ration of questions those very points that were most needed by the Ministries of Health, Education and Town and Country. Planning. I am prepared, although with great reluctance, to believe that information on such subjects as health, diet, leisure, hobbies or private reading can be obtained from other sources. But why all this fuss about the kitchen sink? * * * * _ There.are other.population problems that I find perplexing. v■ by is it that the experts lament at one moment that we are under-populated and at the next moment that we are over- populated? Mussolini in the sunshine of his power used to in- dulge in this paradox without a qualm. On Tuesday he would make a speech at Gaeta begging the mothers of Italy to produce more babies and on Wednesday he would make another speech at Pesaro to the effect that, owing to the iniquity of Mr. Anthony Eden and the malice of the goddess of fortune, Italy had not enough soil to support her ever-increasing population. I quite see that France, with her beautifully balanced economy, may regret a decline in the number of babies born annually, but I do not see why we, with our inability to feed more than sonic 22,000,000. should experience similar disappointment if the birth- rate declines. It may be quite true that in the days when man- power represented military, and therefore national, strength, it was necessary to have as much cannon food as one could pro- duce. But surely the wars of the future will be won, not by the numbers of your infantry, but by your capacity to produce machines ; Belgium, for instance, will become more formidable as a military factor than Russia or China. And yet, decade after decade, we continue to remain uncertain whether it is a good thing or a bad thing that a large number of babies should each year be born. Believing that the aim of good government should be the greatest happiness of the greatest number, I feel it important that people should not become too numerous.
It is evident moreover that, there are certain facts to be derived from these census forms that will prove of the greatest- utility to inquisitive people like myself. I want to know, for instance, how far Sir Alexander Carr-Saunders is right in his prophecies and how far he is wrong. It is now thirty years since he wrote The Population Problem, and this census should at least indicate whether the trends he predicted arc shaping themselves as he foresaw. Is England really to become an island composed of a small minority of young people toiling day and night in order to support a majority of dotards? Are the peoples with a low standard of living to multiply so horribly that they will within a century run out of food? Is it a fact, as Mr. Martin recently informed the Royal Statistical Society, that man in this country is biologically inferior to woman ; and shall we have a population composed almost wholly of grandmothers with here and there an engine-driver or an agricultural labourer to represent the almost extinct species of human male? Will the population of the world, which remained—comparatively stable until 1840 and doubled itself in the century that followed, con- tinue this terrifying process of duplication? What will happen when the millions of Asia really outgrow their own food supply? We are told that the world at this moment is living on its capital, in the sense that we shall shortly use up the existing deposits of oil, coal and iron, and that we are already depriving our,soil of its riches and preparing for our descendants one vast dust- bowl. The optimists assure us that science will cope with all these difficulties ; plastics will lake the place of steel and the engineers will render the Sahara as fertile as the Ukraine. But what happens, I ask them, to Iowa when the Middle East shifts to Timbuctoo?
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The forms so tenderly collected by the enumerators on April 8th will be unable to answer all these questions. At the present moment they are being punched with cunning little holes ; they will then be inserted into the great calculating machine ; the monster will then, with but a slight intestinal whirr, be able to inform the waiting world how many British citizens share their sinks with other British citizens. The experts will also be able to deduce whether there will be more grandmothers than grandfathers in 1999 and who will pay for the old-age pensions. The forms will have done their stuff.
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