NATIONAL REGISTER.

Taranaki Daily News, 20 November 1915, Page 8

NATIONAL REGISTER.

SUCCESS ASSURED. LOW PERCENTAGE OF BAD SCHEDULES. Work on the National Register is in full swing nowadays. The Government Statistician has a huge staff working at sorting- and classifying and summarising tlie schedules, and the information in them, every day and evening, but the task is a very big one, and it will yet he three or four weeks before he will have his statistics compiled. There was some doubt weeks ago as to whether the thing had been done carefully enough, whether enough care had been taken to see that every man required by law to do so had returned it schedule. But Mr. Fraser estimates that he has received 280,000 cards, which is not far short of the maximum number expected. The Government was faced with this question: Was the register worth an expenditure of from £20,000 to £30,000? I'or this expenditure the Government could have taken a complete census, with absolute safeguards against evasion, i»ut some of the schedules would have cost several pounds each. The Government decided that the register was not worth thi s large sum, and entrusted the task of collection by & cheaper, if less thprough, method to the Post Office. The success attained by the Post Office is as meritorious as it may be surprising. The Government Statistician estimates that less than 2 per cent, of the schedules are deficient in essential pay. ticulars. Some of these will be corrected by reference to the sender and even the 2 per cent, are not quite valueless. Most of the mistakes are the mistakes of careless, stupid, or illiterate people. The person who filled in his schedule with the name von Hindenburg. or filled in descriptions of appallingly large familities of dependent invalids, or wrote on it "An open letter to Square Deal Baton Bill" in carefully disguised mis-spelled writing, is so rare that lie is inconsiderable in the big total. And he may yet be discovered and called to account for his "joke." . The steps taken to trace schedules are by no means ineffective.