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THE STATISTICAL CENTURY
ample of the United States a little while before, and
other experiments, chiefly in the Scandinavian coun·
tries, in the Eighteenth Century. Decennial and rre·
quently quinquennial censuses have already become
almost universal throughout the civilized world. To
all this must be added a wide cultivation of statistical
methods apart from government._Associations like
your own have been formed to promote the study.
Professorships of statisticS" have likewise been set up
in the universities, though fewer, much fewer, in this
country than in Germany, France, and the United
States. Men of business have also been giving their
minds to the subject till almost every sort of business
and administration-financial, banking, railway, in-
surance, etc., etc.-has each its own statistics, while
business and economic journals, all dealing largely with
statistics, are to be counted by scores and hundreds.
All this makes the expiring period characteristically
a statistical century. What is gained, then, it may be
asked at a gathering like the present, by all this figuring
and adding up, which hardly existed in the world by
comparison before last century began? To answer this
question would be to engage in a discussion on the
utility of statistics which would be commonplace in a
statistical society. The question also answers itself, for
statistics would have been abolished by common con-
sent long ago if people in business, for instance, had
not felt the convenience of following the statistical
position of their different trades, and if public men had
not found it equally necessary and convenient to ac-
quaint themselves with the facts of trade and social
conditions which the census and the records of the
Registrar-General's and other public offices give them.
Without attempting to answer the question f!Illy,
however, it may be of some use and interest, I hope,
to draw attention to one or two leading statistical ideas
which the statistics of the first statistical century, when
a general survey is made, cannot but suggest. This is
not a new topic with me, as it is the subject of addresses