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ON INTERNATIONAL STATISTICAL COMPARISONS 61
argument which inquirers were going to use by taking
figures from books as they found them. because I
pointed out to them what different values the figures
might have. But the dictionaries themselves could
often put inquirers on their guard.

Industrial Statistics.

I p~ss on next to a class of statistics which are still
more frequently used for international comparison, viz.,
the statistics of production, industry, and trade. There
is money in the comparisons here. There are com-
peting policies whose merits are supposed to be capable
of judgment by statistics. Or a country may wish to
advertise its resources so as to attract immigrants or
capital. There is also the patriotic bias or sentiment
to be gratified or stimulated, or the anti-patriotic bias,
which is really an inverted form of the patriotic bias
itself.
The leading statistics thus used may be classed under
the heads of agricultural production, manufacturing
production, imports and exports including shipping,
wages, and, finally, accumulated wealth. The division
is not a logical one, but it appears convenient for the
present purpose, which is to explain the principal dan-
gers into which the unwary in dealing with the vast
branches of statistics included in this department are
apt to fall.
As regards agricultural production, then, the initial
difficulty of all the statistics is that which we have
already had in dealing with population itself-,-the
different value of the units which go by the same name.
The wheat, oats, and barley of one country, though
called by the same names, are not the same as the
wheat, oats, and barley of another country. There are
the very greatest differences in quality, as any price
list of London or other market, where grain from every
part of the world is sold, would show. Yet nothing is