EXPERIENCES OF AN ENUMERATOR.
[TO TEE EDITOR OP TEA " S2ECTATOR:9
Sin,— One experience of mine as an enumerator may be useful to the authorities. It has been that large numbers of forms give the actual dependants twice over. Thus a man gives three children under fifteen and one child over fifteen ; and then gives in addition four persons entirely dependent on him (meaning the same three young children, plus his wife), and one person partially dependent on him (meaning the child over fifteen who is earning something). The authorities would credit him with ten dependants (including the wife, whom they assume he omits) ; whereas the true number is five. The mistake was, as a rule at any rate, unintentional. May I venture to say that it was a mistake to make a later rule, not apparent on the form, that a wife was not to be put down as a dependant P In a working district, where the men are usually out when the enumerator calls, it is not by any means easy to verify numbers; and in any case the rule involved much questioning and checking. I suspected inten- tional error when I found three partners in a firm putting each other down as "partially dependent" on them. These worthy people belonged to the ordinary retail business class, and ought to have known what was meant. In each case I knocked off two dependants." I noted a surprising amount of realiza- tion of the seriousness of the war, and also of the impossi- bility of having honourably avoided it, among the women of the working classes. (The men were rarely at home.) Various hard-worked women were doing unpaid washing for soldiers or hospital. And I should say that indifference or desire to evade responsibility is to be found far more commonly among the well-to-do lower-middle classes than among the workers on the one hand, and the gentry on the other, between whom they (socially speaking) lie. A quaint answer under the heading "If born abroad and not British, state nationality," was " Somerset " ; an echo of the old meaning of " foreigners " which one thought railways bad done
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