time the census was taken; the actual number
of souls in Great Britain on the night of
the thirty-first being twenty million nine
hundred and fifty-nine thousand four hundred
and seventy-seven.

Of British subjects in foreign parts, not soldiers
or sailors, there were twenty thousand
three hundred and fifty-seven in France;
three thousand eight hundred and twenty-eight
in Russia; six hundred and eleven in
Turkey in Europe; thirty-three in Persia;
and six hundred and forty-nine in China. These
numbers were obtained from returns furnished
by the Foreign office; but, of course, no exact
information could be looked for of the actual
number of travellers on the continent, in the
colonies, and in the United States. Sixty-five
thousand two hundred and thirty-three
aliens or foreigners also landed in England
in eighteen hundred and fifty-one, against
twenty-two thousand three hundred and one,
in eighteen hundred and fifty.

Curiously enough, I have been unable to
find, either in the report or in its copious
analytical index, any reference to the number
of foreigners absolutely domiciled among us.

Of this population of over twenty one
millions there were, of males, ten millions
three hundred and eighty-six thousand and
forty-eight; of females, ten millions seven
hundred and thirty-five thousand nine hundred
and nineteen; the females exceeding
the males by three hundred and forty-nine
thousand, eight hundred and seventy-one.
The disparity between the sexes was greatest
in Scotland, where absenteeism is so much in
vogue, and where the resident gentlemen were
obliged to cede to the commanding influence of
the ladies, being at a discount of ten per cent.

Finally, while we are upon the round
numbers, it may be stated that, if we go on
"at this rate," the population is expected
to double itself in fifty-two and 1/300 years!
And it is also calculated that if the entire
population were gathered together in one
mass, each person being allowed one square
yard to stand upon, they would cover a space
of seven square miles.

On this great numeration night there were
one hundred and ninety-five thousand eight
hundred and fifty-six persons in barracks,
prisons, workhouses, lunatic asylums, hospitals,
and charitable institutions; twenty-one
thousand four hundred and ninety-nine in
barges and vessels engaged in inland navigation;
and forty-three thousand one hundred
and seventy-three in seagoing vessels lying
in port. In these last, Jack's delight, his
lovely Nan, was present to the extent of two
thousand and eight females on board.

The number of houseless persons returned
was eighteen thousand two hundred
and forty-nine, of whom nine thousand nine
hundred and seventy-two were in barns, and
eight thousand two hundred and seventy-seven
in the open air. These homeless
wanderers were, as far as could be computed,
gypsies, beggars, strollers, vagrants, tramps,
outcasts, and criminals. In one instance a
tribe of gipsies struck their tents, and passed
from one parish to another, to avoid being
enumerated. This reminds us somewhat of the
anecdote of the Irishman's pig, which frisked
about so frantically that his master could'nt
count him. Considering the occurrence in a
more serious point of view we seem to descry
some remnant of old oriental manners and
antipathies piercing through this disinclination
of the mysterious Zingari to be counted.
The enumerator of eighteen hundred and
fifty-one appears to stand in the faintest
remotest shadow of the days when David
the King numbered Israel, and Joab counted
the people from Beersheba even unto Dan,
and a census was thought to be an abominable
thing. Whether the gipsies were actuated by
any of the prejudices of the Israelites is
problematical: perhaps they associated the census
vaguely but disagreeably with a determination
to bring them under the sway of the
parish beadle or the county police, both
powers exclusively obnoxious to the
Rommany chals—the Caloros, as Mr. Borrow
informs us they call themselves.

It is obvious that nothing but a broadly
presumptive estimate could be taken of the
nondomiciled population in eighteen hundred
and fifty-one. What destitute wretches were
manifest, were counted; but how many
hundreds—may I without exaggeration say
thousands—must have remained unrecorded
in the enumerators' schedules. Houseless
poverty, with unfed sides, and looped and
windowed raggedness, there must have been
cowering in the black tenebræ of dark entries, in
the dank shadows of railway arches, and
under the dry arches of bridges; under the lee
of tilted carts and timber stacks; rolled up like
hedgehogs before the deadly warmth of brick
and lime kilns; crouching behind ambuscades
of lath and plaster on the bare joists of
unfinished houses; huddled up stealthily in or
under baskets in the London markets with
potatoes for a pillow and a tarpaulin for a
counterpane; snatching a surreptitious,
quaking, waking, shivering sleep—a sleep
disturbed by nightmares of stern policemen with
strident voices and loudly creaking boots, of
violent market-gardeners with pails of water,
of the testy market-beadle with his cane.
Were these enumerated? the poverty-stricken
rogues forlorn, who clambered into
haystacks and coal-barges and empty wagons,
and dilapidated post-chaises drawn together
in wheelwrights' yards, and in silent places
where tall ladders raised their spectral forms
in the moonlight; the masses of wretched
rags that should have been children, lying
huddled together round, a-top of each other,
gathering a scanty warmth by close contiguity:
the miserable heaps of utter worn-out poverty
oast upon remote doorsteps, motionless as
sleeping dogs, and which but for the larger
size and the battered bonnets, might have