CENSUS ACT, THE, the statute of 1772 that closed the Reapportionment Quarrels (q.v.) by establishing a decennial enumeration of the whole Commonwealth, Home and Western Provinces alike, with the seats of both the Senate and the Assembly of the Tribes reapportioned automatically upon the completion of each count, without further vote of either house being required to give the new apportionment effect. It is, so far as this contributor's own researches into the constitutional history of other nations have been able to establish, the first instance in which any legislature bound its own future composition to a mechanical formula rather than to the periodic renegotiation every other assembly of the age relied upon, and it has been amended in its particulars — the qualifying age, the treatment of the plantation provinces' bound labour before 1836, the method of counting the Western territories not yet erected into full provinces — rather more often than its central mechanism, which has not been touched since its original passage.
The census itself has been taken nine times since 1772, in 1780 and every tenth year following, the returns growing from a first count of some seven millions to the hundred and forty-nine millions returned in 1910, a growth this contributor's own tables find remarkably steady in its rate across a century and more that included a war costing four hundred thousand lives and a decade of naval blockade besides. The mechanism has occasionally produced results its own framers can scarcely have anticipated — the Western Provinces' Assembly delegation now outnumbers that of the Home Provinces by a margin that would have startled the Committee of the Plantations of 1772 rather more than it startles the Committee's present membership, who have grown up under an arithmetic their grandfathers still found remarkable enough to remark upon.
Its chief historical service, this contributor would submit, lies less in any single reapportionment than in what it removed permanently from the Commonwealth's political calendar: a dispute over the counting of heads that had run hot for the better part of a decade before 1772 has not recurred, in any comparable form, in the century and more since, the whole question having been handed over to the census clerk rather than left to the Senate's own periodic temper. Few statutes of this Commonwealth's history have done so much, this contributor is inclined to think, by doing so little more than counting. (E. H. V.)