By the turn of the century the proportion of clerks in the working population had risen to 4 percent in Great Britain and 3 percent in the United States; in the intervening decades, the clerical working class had begun to be born.  By the census of 1961, there were in Britain about 3 million clerks, almost 13 percent of the occupied population; in the United States in 1970, the clerical classification had risen to more than 14 million workers, almost 18 percent of the gainfully occupied, making this equal in size, among the gross classifications of the occupational scale, to that of operatives of all sorts (204).