The Growth of Population in Canada

IT may not be generally known that the credit of taking the first census of modern times belongs to Canada. The year was 1665, the census that of the colony of New France. Still earlier records of settlement at Port Royal (1605) and Quebec (1608) are extant; but the Census of 1665 was a systematic nominal enumeration of the people, taken on the de jure principle, on a fixed date, showing age, sex, occupation, and conjugal and family condition. A supplementary enquiry in 1667 included the areas under cultivation and the numbers of sheep and cattle. When it is recalled that in Europe the first census dates only from the Eighteenth Century (those of France and England from the first year of the Nineteenth), and that in the United States as well the census begins only with 1790, the achievement of the primitive St. Lawrence colony in instituting what is today one of the principal instruments of government may call for more than passing appreciation

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