Digest of the English . Census of 1871. By James Lewis.
(Stanford.) —Mr. Lewis, who fills a post in the Registrar-General's Department, has collected into a volume of manageable size and reasonable price the sub- stance of the two folio volumes which contain the Official Returns. An in-
toresting preface on the Census organisation, on the leading facts relative to the population of England. and Wales which that Census was the means of collecting, on the civil and ecclesiastical divisions of the country, ecc., precede the actual figures. These last seem to have been arranged in a very useful and convenient form. It is to be noticed that of the eighteen towns selected for the weekly returns of the Registrar-General, beginning with London (3,251,260) and ending with Wolverhampton (68,291), not one has diminished in population since the Census of 1861; and that of about fifty others, beginning with Brighton (90,011) and ending with Cambridge (30,078), there has been a decrease in Daven- port, Dudley, Coventry, Stockport, Macclesfield, and Ashton-under- Lyme This decrease is in some of these cases very slight, and it may be owing to the removal of the population to suburban localities. In Coventry, whore the numbers have diminished from 40,396 to 37,670, the decrease is probably significant of diminished prosperity. Whether the same is true of Ashton-under-Lyne we do not know. If this town has suffered, it has not made itself heard as Coventry has. The greatest rate of increase in the first eighteen is at Leicester, which has grown at a rate of 40 per cent.,—from 60,050 to 93,220. St. Helen's, in Lancashire, in the second class, stands, however.fizcile princeps in growth, number- ing 45,131 in 1871 against the 18,393 of ten years before. Such a ratio is of course more easily attained the smaller the place. It is interesting and satisfactory to observe that the houseless population is diminishing, the figures of the last four returns having been respectively 20,348, 15,761, 11,414, 10,383. It is to be observed, however, that tho earliest of these returns was made up for Juno, when the number of the home- less was swollen by not a few voluntary emigrants from cities. Tho Channel Islands, we sod, are happy or unhappy, as the case may be, in the unusual predominance of women ; they are in the proportion of 100 to 80. The total cost of the census, if the grant of £120,000 be fully spent, but not exceeded, will have been five farthings per head.
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