ALL SOULS : 1871
By E. L. WOODWARD
IHAPPENED to be looking at the report of the census commissioners for the year 1871. I turned up very quickly the figures I wanted, and then, in a rash moment, I began to look idly through the pages. The census com- missioners of 1871 were Ancient Mariners ; thr_.y held me with their glittering eyes. Far on into the midnight hours I read their well-rounded periods, and studied their tables of statistics. There is something knobbly and knotty about these population figures. You read of the number of men, women and children in Manchester, and, at once you see the mid-Victorian streets, the latest fashions in the shop windows, the latest news in the journals ; the fashions are odd today, the news is forgotten, but for a few seconds you have lived outside your own age, and found your way back into the past. It is not easy to say why certain roads are directly open to the past, while others remain closed. I have lived for a good many years in and about a fifteenth- century building. There is only -one room. in it which annuls the long intervening times ; and yet, a few days ago, when I held in my hand -some thin grasses which had flowered in the Oxfordshire river meadows about the year 1437, I could not turn to any other thoughts or any other work, for the trouble of this springtime five hundred years ago.
The mowers and the swish of their scythes. Mane sicut kerba transeat : mane floreat, et transeat vespere decidat, induret, et arescat. What are these census returns but the record of a single fact about the generations of men. . : " Thou carriest them away as with a flood ; they are as a sleep . . . they are like grass which groweth up. In the morning it flourisheth and groweth up : in the evening . .
The census commissioners thought otherwise. They stood amazed before this multitude of men. They quoted Livy ; they refitted Malthu.s. They gave to Her Majesty's Principal Secretary of State for the Hoine Department a confident and resounding tale of the immensity and greatness of the British Empire. No detail in this Empire escaped them. They explained that in Gibraltar there Were thirty- one clergymen and forty-nine goatherds, and, in Malta, seventeen ballet dancers, one dancing-master, four 'phle- botomists, one embalmer of birds, one Greek schismatic Papa, and one Presbyterian minister. They noticed that Heligoland, with a population of 1913, supported ekven publicans, and that the Baptists of Canada included 11,4.45 Tankers. They gave the prize for gentility to the Turks and Caicos Islands, where, among a population of 4,723, "there were no lesS than 7,272 " children of Tender 'Age " and 1,125 " persons of no occupation, or -no 'occupation stated, including Ladies.. q1 the _ Upper Class."- . British Honduras, near by, contained in its broad acres only 36 Gentlevidnien; while- in Barbados Gentlewomen were distin- guished from wives of planters ; wives of planters were kept apart from wives of clerks, and the 58 wives of soldiers formed a society to themselves. St. Christopher, with 28,169 souls, employed 545 laundresses ; Nevis, on the other hand, with 11,735 people, reports only 124 washer- women and laundresses.
The distribution of the fine arts is no less haphazard, and hard to explain on purely Marxist principles. Why, for example, should the Prince of Wales' Island, known to us as Penang, harbour 178 " actors, musicians, artists, &c. " ? Turn to Africa. Sierra Leone had not a good reputation; yet it contained more members of the Countess of Huntingdon's Connexion than Pagans, whereas Gambia, haExlly less undesir- able, had to,000 Mohammedans and Pagans and only one Huntingdonian. Singapore might well employ eighty-two coffin makers and twenty-one undertakers and tomb builders, but why should there have been a living in Hong-kong, alone among the Crown Colonies, for six sellers of tooth- powder ? India was a mass of names and figures, crowding the bazaars, and bending over poor fields ; so many souls that one could not distinguish man from man. The European population was more manageable ; one knew the type. You could see them all, all except one European gipsy. How did this gipsy find his way to the Ganges, and, as the Belfast city father said about the proposal for a gondola on a municipal lake—why not two gondolas, and let Nature take its course ? Why not two gipsies ? I dare not look at the census of 1881, 1891, 1901, in case this solitary gipsy should have let his race die out.
I surveyed this far-flung Empire, with every item neatly listed, I turned home again, and lost myself among curious Occupations. The two mole-catchers of east and west, the two Professors (" branch undefined "), the two Cobourg top makers, the three honey-dealers, the four Madropore manufacturers, the five croquet apparatus manu- facturers, the fourteen landladies (" not otherwise described "), the eight handcuff-makers, the twenty-seven artists' and sculptors' models, the forty-eight Valentine makers, the twenty-two Bathing Machine Proprietors or Attendants, the ninety-nine Betting men or Turfites (what had happened to the hundredth—a repentant sinner, or a welsher ?), the hundred and thirty-one " Others connected with the Fine Arts," the three hundred and seven catsmeat dealers.
I found a curious variety among the occupations of women ; coffin-makers, leech-importers, fishing-rod and tackle makers, cartridge and gunpowder makers. Even more surprising, 255 women authors or journalists, and 694 women photo- graphers, and eleven women fossil-diggers. I looked for the men and women who took their own line, who ploughed a solitary furrow, and chose out an occupation in which they had no rivals, at least in their own sex. The list was small. Most people, men and women alike, followed the crowd. The list was also a little disconcerting. There seemed no common bond uniting these lonely workers. I had better give the table in full. It ran as follows :
Total of Occupation. both sexes. Males. Females.
H.M. the Queen .. Bumboat Woman ..
Designer of Fashions .. Director of Nurses (Miss
Nightingale's) .. I I Lithographic Stone Importer I I Razor Strop Paste Maker.. I Steeple Jack I Vegetable Ornanient Cutter I I
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