Expanding Government Bureaucracy

To build an orderly national community required a more active role for the state, and bureaucracies expanded in these years as government authority reached further into everyday life. Censuses became routine and provided the state with personal details of citizens’ lives such as age, occupation, residence, marital status, and number of children. Governments then used these data for everything from setting quotas for military conscription to predicting the need for new prisons. Reformers like Florence Nightingale, who gathered medical, public health, and other statistics to support sanitary reform, believed that such quantitative information would help a government base decisions on facts rather than on influence peddling or ill-informed hunches, and thus reduce corruption and inefficiency.

To bring about their vision of social order, many governments also expanded the regulation of prostitution. Venereal disease, especially syphilis, was common, and like typhoid fever, it infected individuals and whole families. Officials blamed prostitutes, not their clients, for its spread. The police picked up suspect women, examined them for syphilis, and confined infected ones for treatment. As states began monitoring prostitution and other social matters like public health and housing, they had to add departments and agencies. In 1867, Hungary’s bureaucracy handled fewer than 250,000 individual cases ranging from health to poverty issues; twenty years later, it handled more than 1 million.