THE STATUE OF LIBERTY. The welcome of New York, thegateway of the New World, to all races and peoples of the earth.(Courtesy of U.S. Immigration Station, Ellis Island.)
THE BOY WITH THE U.S. CENSUS
BY FRANCIS ROLT-WHEELER
November, 1911
To My Son Roger's Friend
HAMILTON DAY
PREFACE
Life in America to-day is adventurous and thrilling to the core. Borderwarfare of the most primitive type still is waged in mountainfastnesses, the darkest pages in the annals of crime now are beingwritten, piracy has but changed its scene of operations from the sea tothe land, smugglers ply a busy trade, and from their factory prisons ahundred thousand children cry aloud for rescue. The flame of Crusadesweeps over the land and the call for volunteers is abroad.
In hazardous scout duty into these fields of danger the Census Bureauleads. The Census is the sword that shatters secrecy, the key that openstrebly-guarded doors; the Enumerator is vested with the Nation'sgreatest right—the Right To Know—and on his findings all battle-linesdepend. "When through Atlantic and Pacific gateways, Slavic, Italic, andMongol hordes threaten the persistence of an American America, his isthe task to show the absorption of widely diverse peoples, to chroniclethe advances of civilization, or point the perils of illiterate andalien-tongue communities. To show how this great Census work is done,to reveal the mysteries its figures half-disclose, to point the paths toheroism in the United States to-day, and to bind closer the kinshipbetween all peoples of the earth who have become "Americans" is the aimand purpose of
THE AUTHOR.