These commercial changes and social revolutions were continued with increasing intensity during the next decade. The great famine in Ireland sent us swarms of laborers. The Mexican war brought us California, and the discovery of gold there marked the beginning of a new era in our material condition. It was under the influence of these stimulating events that the seventh census was undertaken. To make such preparations that it should, to some extent, embody the spirit of the time and furnish us with a correct statement of our condition under the new impulses and burdens of the nation, an act was passed March 3, 1849, creating a census board, whose duty it should be to prepare, and cause to be printed, forms and schedules for the enumeration of the population, and also for collecting "such information as to mines, agriculture, commerce, manufactures, education and other topics as will exhibit a full view of the pursuits, industry, education and resources of the country; _provided_, the number of said inquiries, exclusive of enumeration, shall not exceed one hundred." On the same day the Department of the Interior was established, and all matters relating to the census were transferred to that department. The census board reported "an act for taking the seventh and subsequent censuses of the United States," which became a law May 23, 1850, and under that law the censuses of 1850, 1860 and 1870 were taken. However far that law was an improvement upon either of those under which the preceding censuses were taken, it is now wholly inadequate--so much so, indeed, that the superintendent of the ninth census (1870) declared, "It is not possible for one who has had such painful occasion as the present superintendent to observe the workings of the census law of 1870 to characterize it otherwise than as clumsy, antiquated and barbarous. The machinery it provides is as unfit for use in the census of the United States in this day of advanced statistical science as the smooth-bore muzzle-loading 'queen's arm' of the Revolution would be for service against the repeating rifle of the present time." It includes many inquiries which are practically worthless, and excludes many vitally necessary to an understanding of our social and industrial condition. Thus the questions, "Has this season produced average crops?" "What crops are short?" "What are the average wages of a female domestic per week, without board?" "How much road-tax did you pay, and how?" may be of some interest, if regarded as conundrums, but are practically of as little value as the color of one's hair or the average number of hours one sleeps; while, as matters of fact, the answers to them have been so unsatisfactory that no attempt has ever been made to classify them, and in the census of 1870 they were discarded altogether, though still forming part of the law. Nor is the method required for ascertaining the facts relating to manufactures of any greater value.