Census India 1931: Introduction
This article is an extract from CENSUS OF INDIA, 1931 Report by J. H. HUTTON, C.I.E., D.Sc., F.A.S.B., Corresponding Member of the Anthropologische Gesselschaft of Vienna. Delhi: Manager of Publications 1933 (Hutton was the Census Commissioner for India) Indpaedia is an archive. It neither agrees nor disagrees |
Introduction
At the very outset of this Report I find it incumbent on me to depart from precedent and to begin with acknowledgments, first of all, as is fit, to the people of India themselves whose good sense, good citizenship and general co-operation made the taking of the census possible, but most of all perhaps to that great body of some two million unpaid enumerators by whom the census was actually taken and without whom it could not have been taken, many of whom were out of pocket by the taking and many of whom carried out their work under circumstances of opposition, interference and general unpopularity. The greatest credit is due to them, and that, and a sanad of printed paper, is the only reward that most of them have had. The taking of the pecennial census in India involves the co-operation of more than one-sixth of the world's population over an area of nearly two million square miles in a combined response to organised enquiry, and the expense would be prohibitive if all the services rendered were paid. Moreover enumerators' duties were often as onerous physically as. they frequently were morally. While city enumerators had generally to take larger blocks than usual since enumerators were harder to come by, those in rural areas often had to cover long distances ; in Baluchistan the average enumerator had a block of 836 square miles (in the tribal areas 1,460) in which to find his fifty houses, as a ' village ' was often a moving encampment of two or three tents with an average area of 36 square miles tq itself.
Acknowledgments are due likewise to the other links in the chain of organisation. Supervisors, Charge Superintendents, District Census Officers, District Magistrates are all part of the necessary machinery and no whit less essential than the enumerator, and in their case the census came as an extra—a piece of gratuitous and troublesome overtime work added 1r-their usual duties in many places already onerous and trying above the or Mary by reason of political agitation. For this census like that of 1921 had the misfortune to coincide with a wave of non-co-operation, and the march of Mr. Gandhi and his contrabandistas to invest the salt-pans of Dharasana synchronized with the opening of census operations. The blessing which he gave to the census at the last minute in 1921 was this time wanting, and, though he himself is not known to have issued any advice to boycott the census, it seemed good to some other Congress leaders to do so, as, although they do not seem to have regarded a census as objectionable in itself, the opportunity for harassing government seemed too good to be missed, and January 11th, 1931, was notified by the Congress Committee to be observed as Census Boycott Sunday. This boycott was not, however, taken up with any real enthusiasm and, except in the Gujarat cities of Ahmadabad, Broach and Surat and some smaller municipalities like Ghatkopar and Villaparle, had very little ultimate effect on the taking of the census ; but the petty annoyances, resignations and interferences with the preparations for final enumeration very greatly increased the work, the responsibilities and the anxieties of-local officers in charge of census work, including as they did not only revenue officers of all grades and village schoolmasters but police, magistrates, paid and honorary, railway officials, forest officers, port officers, ministerial officers in government offices, municipal officers and many others. On the other hand no less trouble was caused in some places by an excess of the zeal on the part of all parties to register as many adherents as possible in view of the possibility of a communal franchise based on the census returns.
This was particularly the case in the Punjab, where the exterior castes, badgered first by one party the- by another to return themselves as Sikhs, Hindus or Muslims as the case might be, labelled themselves Ad Dharmi, or adherents of the original religion, and so added to the number of religions returned in the census schedules. So high did feeling run over the return of religion in the Punjab that disputes as to whether a man was Ad Dharmi or Sikh led to a number of affrays and at least to one homicide. Politics were also troublesome in the borders of Orissa where a pan-Oriya propaganda, carried on to an extent calculated to frustrate its own purposes, engendered a corresponding counter-propaganda, all detrimental to census taking. Special measures were needed in Madras and much additional work caused to the Superintendent of that province and in a less degree also to the Superintendents of Bengal, Bihar and Orissa and the Central Provinces. Other provinces experienced the usual difficulties that attend census taking in India. In one the Bhils for instance would not have their houses numbered on superstitious grounds, while in Burma householders objected on artistic grounds. In the Shan States the thirteenth and last survivor of a pre-annexation raid happened to occupy the thirteenth house in a block. As the enumerator inconsiderately refused to rearrange the numbers, he decided that he was up indeed, went forth into the jungle and committed harakiri. In less law-abiding places the disposition was rather towards disembowelling the enumerator than the enumerated, while the effacing of census numbers was a minor difficulty that was particularly troublesome in 1931. Here and there wild beasts interfered instead of wild men, and the Administrator of Bastar State, when inspecting census work on the night itself, was attacked by a tiger, which sprang on to the bonnet of his car, but finding the pace and the radiator too hot for him failed to make an end either of the inspector or his inspection.
Difficulties notwithstanding, the census was taken at the appointed time and a complete return was received from all places except Ahmadabad in Gujarat. The returns for some other towns in Gujarat, e.g., Broach and Surat, were probably defective, but, as received from the municipalities concerned, were ostensibly correct. In the case of Ahmadabad the census was not completed and the number actually enumerated was estimated to be some seventy-five to seventy-six thousand short of the real total ; according to the census since taken by the Ahmadabad Municipality itself the deficiency was nearly the double of my. estimate.
In Burma a rebellion broke out between the preliminary and the final enumeration. It interfered with the latter in at least one district but with the former hardly at all. In the Census Abstract published for Parliament I based my estimates of the error caused in the census enumeration by Congress activities on the very carefully estimated error worked out by the Census Superintendent of Bombay for that province which came to • 04 per cent.; this I doubl.P.1 for the whole of India arriving at a maximum deficiency of • 085 per cent. in the Indian figures. If the Ahmadabad Municipality return be accepted and the deficiency be re-calcalated accordingly the error still works out at only • 1 per cent. for the total population of India. This of course refers to any deficiency caused by the clash of politics with the census. Other inaccuracies, whatever the amount, are likely to be fairly constant from census to census ; the errtrri in the numerical count, has been put at a maximum of one per mille and is probably less. The Census Commissioner in 1921 estimated the percentage of error in recording sex and religion at about one per cent.; I doubt myself if it is nearly as high as this, but otherwise his estimates probably hold good of this census also. Owing to the Sarda Act however there has been a definite decrease of accuracy in the record of civil condition, and I estimate the error in this respect to be not less than . 5 per cent. and probably higher. Fortunately it seems possible to allocate with safety at least the greater part of this error to deliberately inaccurate returns of ' unmarried ' instead of ' married ' for girls married during 1931 in contravention of the age-limits imposed by the Marriage Restraint Act. Error in classification after the return has been made is quite a different thing from error in record and it is extremely difficult to form any estimate of its extent.
The entries in the schedules are copied on to slips, omitting the block, circle and charge numbers and of course the personal names, and are then sorted into sets of labelled pigeon-holes and counted for the figures which constitute the tables. Different colours are used for different religions and each slip is stamped or printed with a symbol to denote sex. These symbols in 1931 were amplified by hand to signify civil condition. It was found quicker to add to the symbol than to have previously marked symbols from which the correct one had to be selected, a course which involved a choice of according to sex and civil condition for each individual slip. Probably also tile practice of altering by hand involves less error than that of selection when the tendency will be for the copyist, who must turn out a minimum number of slips and is paid in part at any rate by outturn, to fill up the wrong slip rather than to waste time by changing it when wrongly selected. In any case there is room for error in slip copying and for error again in sorting, though careful supervision at both stages may keep it down to a very small margin. A certain difailty and anomaly was also introduced into tabulation by the fact that the Burma figures were tabulated on a different system from that followed in India proper. The method of tabulating by religion has never been found very suitable in Burma and on this occasion was abandoned for tabulation by race in the interests of that province, but at the cost of some inconsistencies in the presentation of the India figures.
This digression on error has led me aside before making my acknowledgments to the census officers of provinces and states, of whom a list will be found in Chapter I. It seemed to me that their work as a whole was admirable. Several had special difficulties Captain Mallam in the North-West Frontier Province, Mr. Turner in the United Provinces, Mr. Porter in Bengal and Mr. Shoobert the Central Provinces all experienced difficulties in organising their enumeration on account of political agitation ; and Khan Sahib Ahmad Hasan Khan in the Punjab had his trouble when the actual enumeration took place ; even in Delhi his enumerators found their house numbers obliterated and their movements obstructed. Mr. Dracup in Bombay had to contend with the most difficult and troublesome situations of all on account of the anti-census campaign in Gujarat. Bombay has a bad reputation for breaking the health of her Census Superintendents. The first Superintendent in 1911 broke down after the enumeration was over and the early death of the 1921 Superintendent must be imputed at any rate in part to the strain of that census. Mr. Dracup managed to carry on till the compilation was almost finished and his reports begun (for the Bombay post involved writing two additional reports, one for the Western India States Agency, the other for the Bombay Cities), but his health could not stand it ; Ire suffered the chagrin of being beaten on the post, and had to make over his material to Mr. Sorley. More provinces than usual were handicapped by similar changes.
In Bihar and Orissa Mr. Scotland's health broke down very early in the operations and his work was taken over by Mr. Lacey who had a very uphill task indeed to get his census to synchronize, as he came in at a critical stage which found him unfamiliar with the early part of the work and. at which the preparations for enumeration had fallen sadly into arrears as the inevitable result of Mr. Scotland's ill-health. In the North-West Frontier Province Captain Mallam lasted like Mr. Dracup till his report was part written ; at the earlier stages he was more than once taken away from his census work for administrative ends and. but for these diversions would probably have finished single-handed ; as it was, Mr. Dundas had like Mr. Sorle y the difficult task of writing a report on a census of which he had seen nothing but the materials collected in the course of operations in which he had taken no part at all Mr. Shoobert in the Central Provinces and Berar was likewise hampered by being abstracted from his census work for administrative necessities for an inconveniently long period at en early stage of the operations and was delayed by illness towards their close. Rai Bahadur Anant Ram in Kashmir had the disadvantage of not having been in charge of the census from the start of operations and Khan Bahadur Gul Muhammad Khan in Baluchistan was taken away before he had finished to be Wazir-i-Azam of Kalat State and had to write his report while perforining the onerous duties of his vizierate. Colonel Cole with Rajputana, and Ajmer-Merwara, Mr. Porter with bengal and the City of Calcutta and Khan Sahib Ahmad Hasan Khan with the Punjab and Delhi all had two Reports to write instead of one. Special difficulties were experienced in Madras and in a lesser degree in Assam and also in Bihar and Orissa and more or less in all provinces as a result of the change in system, which actually took place in 1921 but the full effects of which were not experienced until this census, by which all costs were made debitable to the Central Governments. The local expenses of enumeration, including the travelling allowances of all local officers doing census work in addition to their ordinary duties, and including stationery, stamps and so forth required in mofussil operations, had all been charged hitherto to the expenses of general administration, much the most convenient and economical way of dealing with small items extremely difficult to disentangle from others where no separate organisation existed ; and owing to their being merged in general administration no separate record of the expenditure was extant. In 1931 the operations were carried out precisely as before and the methods used by local officers at previous censuses were used again.
It was not till afterwards that it was discovered that serious liabilities had been incurred in the matter of travelling allowances to meet which no provision had been made in budgetting. District Officers had little enough time to spare for the census in any case, and the general tendency was in many cases to take the position that this was a central charge, let the central authorities see to it. Moreover, many of the claims were submitted at a date which though admissible for ordinary audit purposes was so long after the journeys had taken place that any check of the claim was made extremely difficult.
Mr. Yeatts in Madras received no fewer than '26,000 unanticipated bills for travelling allowances amounting in all to approximately Rs. 3,00,000, many of them claims received during 1932 for journeys undertaken in 1931. Many of these bills contained claims relating to a whole charge or even taluk, and the actual number of personal claims involved was greatly in excess, of course, of the mere total of bills. By subjecting each bill to the strictest personal scrutiny in the light of the actual expenses probably incurred Mr. Yeatts was able to reduce the total actually paid to Rs. 1,30,000, but it was only by ruthlessly cutting down the claims to the amount by which claimants were likely to have been actually out of pocket, a course of action only made possible by the fact that Mr. Yeatts himself had never drawn more than his actual out of pocket expenses when touring, whatever the rules allowed him to draw above that. Both he and Mr. Mullan in Assam' must have incurred no little odium in the course of their pruning of travelling allowance bills for the extent and nature of which they were in no way to blame, as they had not even been in a position to prepare their own budgets, since the provincial budgets for the year of enumeration were all prepared by local governments before superintendents took over charge, and there was in any case no separate record of the very considerable sums spent in this way from provincial revenues in 1921.
It was another of the misfortunes of the 1931 census that it coincided with a fall in revenue and a period of economic depression which made the most rigorous economy necessary and which left me no choice but .to cut all expenditure as fine as possible and to goad my Census Superintendents unremittingly in an attempt to finish sooner and spend less. Their responses were loyal and whole hearted, and in almost every province the actual cost of the census per head censused has been appreciably reduced, if those items be excluded which never appeared in the accounts of 1921.
These items not only included the travelling allowance of local officers, previously debited to general administration and ' the provincial revenues, as well as stamps, stationery and other items used in district offices and similarly debited, but also included all pay of officers whether Provincial or Imperial who were deputed to the Census Department, as well as their leave pay earned during their census service, passage contributions and so forth. In some cases the budget of this census has even been debited with the leave pay of officers who served the department in 1921 or earlier but not in 1931 at all. Wages had all increased since 1921 and the cost of printing to the, census has been enormously enhanced, in some cases by two hundred per cent. or more, as the result of a change in the method of costing. Under the old method the overhead charges were not debited at all to the census when the printing was done, as most of it is, in Government presses. It will be seen at once therefore that a very large part of the increase in the gross cost of the census, approximately Rs. 48,76,000 in 1931 against Rs. 40,00,000 in 1921, is an increase on paper only. As nearly as can be reckoned the actual net expenditure incurred for the 1931 census which is comparable with the expenditure on that of 1921, excluding items not then charged to the census budget, amounts to Rs. 40,13.000, and when this is reduced to the cost per thousand of persons censused, which is the only fair standard of comparison, the 1931 census comes quite creditably through the test having cost only Rs. 12 8 per thousand persons censused as compared to Rs. 14 per thousand in 1921. The cost of the census of England and Wales in 1921 was £9-5-6 per thousand (about Rs. 124 of Indian money) " exclusive of the expenditure on printing, stationery, maps, etc.", the exclusion of which from the costs of the Indian census would reduce the cost per thousand to Rs. 13 . 3, while the census of Northern Ireland in 1926 cost over £15-6-4 per thousand inclusive of printing, etc., that is Rs. 202 per thousand as compared to India's Rs. 14 inclusive.
The census of India therefore is not only by far the most extensive census operation in the world but, besides being one of the quickest, it is probably the cheapest. Even so the cost is no inconsiderable item at a time when the difficulty of restricting expenditure to the limits imposed by dwindling revenue is so difficult that many countries decided to dispense entirely with the census due in 1931 ,; and it was therefore necessary to exercise a very parsimonious economy, and I owe to all Census Superintendents and likewise to their administrative, office and compiling staff not only my acknowledgments for their ungrudging co-operation but also my apologies for driving them at a pace which has admitted of closing down the department some seven months earlier than usual, and for cutting down their estimates to the finest possible margin compatible with reasonable efficiency. The work of a provincial census officer in India, ail done against time, against expenditure, and without holidays, is far from the pleasant occupation which its interest would make it were the need for speed and economy less exacting.
In spite of this there has been no falling off in the quality of the reports which well maintain the high standard set by past series. The Andamans and Nicobars Report reflects Mr. Bonington's lifelong acquaintance with the forests of those islands and their shy, little-known inhabitants ; Colonel Cole brought to the Rajputana volume a knowledge of the Rajputs and their clans acquired not only regimentally but in the course of several years as Recruiting Officer for Rajput battalions ; he also showed a commendable despatch and but for his press would have finished even earlier than he did. The other authors of British India Reports ar,? all executive officers in the Imperial or Provincial services and the outlook of tie settlement officer is conspicuous among them throughout the series, from Pr. Mullan's lively volume on Assam (also one of the first to be published) to Mr. Turner's exceptionally full and detailed report on the United Provinces.
Their several qualities may frequently be inferred from the excerpts given freely in this volume, and where all have reached a high standard it would seem invidious to discriminate. The reports of Messrs. Bonington, Shoobcrt and Lacey all contain interesting ethnographical material ; Mr. Yeatts' particularly well written volume is noticeable for his treatment of infirmities, and Mr. Porter's for a new attack upon the population problem and for an interesting account of the processes of certain decaying rural industries. In Burma and in Bombay Messrs. Bennison and Sorley have brought to the census the experience gained in the study of social and economic questions, and Khan Sahib Ahmad Hasan Khan has o pened the volume on Delhi, new to the series, with a conspectus of the capital's historic past. Among the States and Agencies the Rajputana volume has already been mentioned, as also Messrs. Dracup and Sorley's on the Western India States, another new additicn to the series, while Mr. Venkatachar has filled in somewhat of a hiatus in the census accounts of the peninsula with his exceptionally interesting report on Central India.
The States that contribute separate volumes pay independently for their own operations and the total cost of their census. Owing to this fact I was fortunate enough to be spared the unpleasant task of reducing budgets, but the exigencies of the India work compelled me in some cases to keep hurrying their Census Commissioners during the compilation stage, and my acknowledgments are due to the latter no less than to the Census Superintendents in British India for their efforts to comply with an impatience which they may well have regarded as untimely, and which must certainly have been inconvenient at any rate to Rai Bahadur Anant Earn in Kashmir, who had to finish off his census at a time of political and economic disturbance with a depleted and inadequate staff. Of the other states' Census Commissioners Mr. Ghulam Ahmed Khan in Hyderabad and Mr. Rang Lal in Gwalior have approached their subject from the administrative points of view like most of the Census Superintendents in British India, Mr. Khan incidentally adding to our knowledge of the Chenchus, while Mr. Venkatesa Iyengar in Mysore has given another detailed account of processes of declining industries. Mr. Sankara Menon in Cochin has written a thoughtful report as an educationist, a calling unrepresented in the British series. In Travancore Dr. Pillai has to his credit an admirably produced report embodying not only a brief economic survey of the state but a good deal of fresh information as to the vanishing tribes and disappearing industries of a state which is so advanced that he was able to make a useful experiment in compilation by the employment, as in Cochin, of women as sorters and slip-copyists, and very 'efficient they proved. The outstanding report among the states is again that of Mr. Mukerjea on Baroda who is to be congratulated not only on his admirable presentation of material but on the extreme rapidity with which he produced so comprehensive a volume. His previous experience in 1921 has been put to the best account and I have myself taken advantage of it, particularly in the arrangement of fertility figures. He is also responsible for an innovation in enumeration by billets individuels which may very ,well bear much fruit, at the next census of India.
To Mr. Trousdell and Mr. Golder of the Government of India Press in Simla I owe both acknowledgments for their patience and despatch, and apologies for the inconvenience caused by repeated calls for fresh p roofs of altered tables, while I have to thank Mr. Carter of the Government of Ina Press in Delhi as well as Mr. Golder for much very useful advice and assistance. To Colonel A. J. H. Russell, then Public Health Commissioner, I owe the diagrams of vital statistics and information on several points in Chapter VII. To several others, to more indeed than I can mention here, I owe acknowledgments of some kind for advice, information or criticism. Mr. L. S. Vaidyanathan of the Oriental Government Security Life Assurance Company, Bombay, who has contributed the most comprehensive actuarial examination of the Indian age returns yet attempted and the •life tables based on them, Dr. B. S. Guha of the Anthropological Branch of the Zoological Survey (If India, who carried out for this census a detailed anthropometrical survey of certain castes and tribes and who has contributed his valuable analysis of their physical characteristics to the volume of ethnographical appendices, Colonel R. B. Seymour Sewell, Director of the same Department, Rai Bahadur Ramaprasad Chanda and Mr. E. J. H. Mackay, both of the Arch aeological Survey, have all helped me with information and friendly criticism and to Dr. Guha again I owe the drawings of the Bayana, Sialkot and Nal crania that appear in Chapter XII. Mr. Yeatts has added to my obligation to him by his assistance in proof reading.
My final but far from least weighty acknowledgments are due first to my own office, to whose ungrudging co-operation is due the early completion of the report, particularly to the Superintendent Mr. A. R. Chitnis, to whose statistical experience and careful scrutiny of figures must be attributed whatever degree of accuracy their presentation here can claim, to the head compiler, Mr. F. E. Wright and his second Mr. Mulherkar, who are primarily responsible for the compilation of Part II ; and then to my predecessors, to Sir Edward Gait in particular, whose work in previous decades has done so much to simplify mine in this. The conception of the social maps was due to a scheme for a population map of India evolved by Colonel Tandy in 1921 and here modified and adapted to suit small scale maps and a high density of population ; the idea of the linguistic maps and the record of bilingualism first occurred to me in the course of correspondence with Colonel T. C. Hodson, now Wyse Professor of Anthropology in Cambridge. The German anthropologist, Baron von Eickstedt, suggested a series of maps which would show the population of each village by caste and religion in coloured points of varying shape and size. The system is an admirable one which would if applied to India give a m r,st valuable and interesting record, but the cost of producing series of maps on the large scale necessary to show every village with its inhabitants by castes or tribes ,was in itself obviously prohibitive, apart from the time and labour involved in compiling the statistics of caste by villages.
A word of apology is due on the contents of this report. The opportunities of a census of India come if at all but once to most of us, and I am only too_conscious of opportunity neglected, for I have left undone that which I ought to have done and I have done much less than I should like to have done. Res angusta civitatis is my defence ; I should be the first to admit it inadequate, but the imperative necessity for a rigid economy made any departure from and still more any enlargement of the known and familiar paths dangerous as well as extremely difficult. As it was, some of the material actually collected in the enumeration schedules had to be left uncopied and unsorted as a measure of retrenchment, and the industrial statistics of 1921 were not attempted ; a tally of horsepower, handlooms and mechanical shuttles is hardly a legitimate part of a population census in any case, and the statistics can be just as -well collected at another time by the Department of Industries and Labour by means of the circulation of forms unsynchronised with the census schedules. An attempt to collect a return of the educated unemployed on separate schedules was a fiasco, as though large numbers of the schedules were issued very few were received back ; the reasons given are various but apathy was probably the prevailing one. Such as they are, both the reasons for the failure and the figures obtained will be found recorded in Chapter IX.
The returns of age" are probably more accurate than eve; before, thanks to the method of treating the figures advocated by Mr. H. G. W. Meikle, as a result of his actuarial examination of the 1921 returns, and adopted for the first time in 1931. On the other hand the figures of urban population in Gujarat and of civil condition must be admitted to be below the previous standard of accuracy, a degeneration due in the one case to Congress activities and in the other primarily to the indirect influence of the Sarda Act, but also perhaps in some degree to the very same change in the method of sorting and compiling which has so much improved the return of age unqualified by other factors. In any case the treatment of sociological features of the population of India is much prejudiced by the absence of any general or compulsory registration of births, deaths or marriages ; an absence which would go far to nullify social legislation such as that implied in the Sarda Act itself, and to which attention was drawn by the Age of Consent Committee.
The difficulties of introducing compulsory registration are no doubt great, but it is not easy to see how social legislation can be really effective without it. Nevertheless some attempt has been made at this census to collect figures for the fertility of females of different social standing and of various occupations in the hope of throwing some much needed light on the rate of reproduction in India. These are censorious days and there were not wanting articles in newspapers of the baser sort to suggest that the figures of fertility were being collected with a view to defaming the people of India. It is possible therefore that critics may be found who will conceive that they detect in Chapters III to VI, or elsewhere in this report, the cloven slots of a considered cloacinity. It is of course impossible to discuss the growth of population without any reference to its health. Those determined to see ill motives will be deterred by no denials, but to those who are not I would offer an assurance (which I hope is not needed) that nothing has been set down in malice. In the first five chapters, except for a page or two on the population problem, I have allowed myself to depart as little as possible from the statistics to be examined (no haunts for Apollo here) ; in Chapter VI the social movements and legislation of the decade have called for a short digression before returning to the figures in Chapters VII, VIII and IX.
In the last three Chapters I have frankly permitted myself, after examining the relative figures, to venture aside to a more speculative treatment of race and religion. What was for long the orthodox view of the history of race and culture in India was brilliantly propounded by Sir Herbert Risley in the Census Report of 1901; the work that has been done since makes it probable that there has been a far greater degree of continuity in the pre-history of India than was then supposed, and certain that India was not characterised, as Sir Herbert believed, by racial or cultural isolation. Much work has to be done before any views on these subjects can claim finality, but certain hypotheses may fairly be advanced on the material accumulated since that census. With the exceptions mentioned I have stayed by my statistics, a valley of dry bones it may be, very far from Helicon, and I no Ezekiel to clothe them with flesh, content if I have played the part of Joab to hope that I may at least escape the unhappy recompense meted out to that early numberer of peoples. At any rate 1 have made no naughty omission of Levi and Benjamin on purpose, and if some of the tale have gone untold they must be few indeed when the increase alone since 1921 numbers nearly thirty four millions. For the Father of History is proved right again. VI56)1, SE irXijOos, he said near twenty-four hundred years ago, 7rXc7_crr_v _CT 71"CiVT(01/ TeOL 7f1 )(LEES r8FiEV civep(;nrcov and this census has justified him indeed, for it can be mice more stated with some confidence that ' of all the nations that we know it is India has the largest population '.
