But instead of this, the strain of anxiety was universal and heart-rending.  So much depended upon swelling the figures.  The tension would have been relieved if our faces were all set towards extinction, and the speedy evacuation of this unsatisfactory globe.  The writer met recently, in the Colorado desert of Arizona, a forlorn census-taker who had been six weeks in the saddle, roaming over the alkali plains in order to gratify the vanity of Uncle Sam.  He had lost his reckoning, and did not know the day of the week or of the month.  In all the vast territory, away up to the Utah line, over which he had wandered, he met human beings (excluding “Indians and others not taxed “) so rarely that he was in danger of being locoed.  He was almost in despair when, two days before, he had a windfall, which raised his general average in the form of a woman with twenty-six children, and he was rejoicing that he should be able to turn in one hundred and fifty people.  Alas, the revenue the government will derive from these half-nomads will never pay the cost of enumerating them.

And, alas again, whatever good showing we may make, we shall wish it were larger; the more people we have the more we shall want.  In this direction there is no end, any more than there is to life.  If extinction, and not life and growth, is the better rule, what a costly mistake we have been making!