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42 ECONOMIC INQUIRIES AND STUDIES
without any considerati~m of the fact that in the one
certain expenses of government are borne on the Im-
perial budget, which in the other are borne on the
local budget, or perhaps left to private agency; or
without any consideration of such a fact as the in-
clusion in the one budget of loans or the proceeds of
the sales of public property as revenue, which in the
other are excluded altogether, or specially dealt with.
The statistics, however, are not lies in themselves; it
is only in the handling of them that the lying takes
place. I have thought it would be of interest, there-
fore, in a meeting like thiS; to raise explicitly for dis-
cussion some of the principal dangers in the handling
of statistics to which the inexpert, and some of us per-
haps, who think we are expert, are exposed, through
the too ready comparison with each other of figures
which apparently are applied to facts of a like kind,
but which really cover dissimilar facts. Such a dis-
cussion becomes more and more indispensable, I think,
on account of one of tl;1e most important causes of the
increased diffusion of statistical knowledge in recent
years-the extensive development of statistical abs-
tracts, hand-books, year-books, manuals, dictionaries,
statistical atlases, and such like works of reference.
Accustomed to see quantities, which are really dis-
similar in kind, placed together under the same head-
ing, which is done primarily for the mere purpose of
reference, we come to neglect the dissimilarity in our
speech, and, by and by, in thought. The numbers of
different communities are compared as if numbers
alone were something in themselves, without any
thought of the different qualities of the units: pro-
duction, imports and exports, and money wages in
different communities are spoken of as if they in all
cases meant the same things, and without any pre-
liminary discussion of what the figures really do mean.
All this is essentially mischievous, and is contrary to
the most elementary lessons in the study of statistics.
I t is the part of the student to re-act against the