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198
iii. CONSTITUTION AND ADMINISTRATION Of SWEDEN.
In the series: Bidrag till Sveriges officiella statistik, each branch has
its own letter. The different divisions are: A) Population. B) Justice. C) Mining.
D) Manufactures. E) Shipping. F) Commerce. G) Prisons. H) Quinquennial reports
of the Governors. I) Telegraphs and Telephones. K) Hygiene and Hospitals.
L) Railways. M) Post-Officé. N) Agriculture. 0) Land Surveying. P) Public
Instruction. Q) State domains. R) Elections. S) Public Works. T) Pilots and
Lighthouses. U) Poor-law Administration and Local Finance. V) Spirits and
Beet-root sugar. X) Salaries and Pensions in the administration. Y) Savings-banks.
— Sections A, H, N, R, U, and X are issued by the Central Bureau of Statistics,
as well as that part of section Y which treats of private savings-banks.
Not included in the series: Bidrag till Sveriges officiella statistik, are the
statistics relating to Banks, Insurance, Sick-Relief Funds, Prices, etc., as well
as the preliminary monthly reports on the imports and exports of the realm,
and, finally, Social statistics, which latter section is issued by the Board of
Trade. — By the Central Bureau of Statistics a Journal of Statistics is issued,
which, amongst other matters, embraces an annual résumé, corresponding to the
Statistical »Yearbooks» of other countries.
The Swedish Central Bnreau of Statistics is the oldest official
department of its kind in the world, as it dates back to the year 1756,
when it was founded under the title of the Statistical Tables’
Commission. The task of this Commission, however, only embraced the
statistics of population. Its present title the department received in
1858, since which time its field of labour has gradually widened (see
above). Its present, organization dates from 1879. The head of the
department, — titled Chief Director — is the sole deciding authority.
The work is divided between three sections, each with its »First
Actuary» as chief; there are, besides, a librarian and an archivist.
The total expenses of the bureau (house-rent is not paid) usually
amount to about 80,000 kronor per annum.
The Central Bureau of Statistics continues to issue the Swedish Vital Statistics,
that occupy so famous and so honourable a place in the history of this science. The
Swedish ecclesiastical law of as early a date as 1686, enjoined the clergy to keep
regular registers of the population of their parishes as well as lists of the births,
marriages, and deaths. Consequently, when in 1749 (after certain preliminary
attempts ranging back as far as 1721) the scientific treatment of these statistics
began, there existed thus a routine of sixty years to start from. This explains the
otherwise inexplicable fact that Swedish statistics of population was »born adult».
The registers kept by the clergy form, even nowadays, almost the only source of
these statistics. The important change in their arrangement was, however, made
since 1860 that the primary reports from the parishes do not any more appear
in the form of completed tables, but as nominative registers, the centralization
and elaboration of which are the work of the Central Bureau of Statistics.
Census in Sweden (and in its låte daughter-land Finland) is also based
upon the registers of the clergy, instead of being entrusted, as elsewhere, to
whole armies of specially appointed reckoners who on the census-day spread all
over the country. The Swedish method has often struck foreign specialists as a
very strange one, and persons who have not had the opportunity of getting
acquainted with the admirable carefulness and accuracy of the Swedish
administration, have often doubted the value of the method. This has been the case,
for instance, with the eminent German statistician G. von Mayr, in his great
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