io6 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



THE IMPOKTANCE OF GENERAL STATISTICAL IDEAS.* 



By Sir ROBERT GIFFEN, K.C.B., LL.D., F.R.S. 



I TRUST you will excuse me, on an occasion like the present, for 

 returning to a topic which I have discussed more than once — the 

 utility of common statistics. While we are indebted for much of our 

 statistical knowledge to elaborate special inquiries, such as were made 

 by Mr. Jevons on prices and the currency, or have lately been made by 

 Mr. Booth into the condition of the London poor, we are indebted for 

 other knowledge to continuous official and unofficial records, which keep 

 us posted up to date as to certain facts of current life and business, 

 without which public men and men of business, in the daily concerns 

 of life, would be very much at a loss. What seems to me always most 

 desirable to understand is the importance of some of the ideas to be 

 derived from the most common statistics of the latter kind — the regular 

 records of statistical facts which modem societies have instituted, 

 especially the records of the census, which have now existed for a 

 century in most European countries and among peoples of Eu- 

 ropean origin. Political ideas and speculation are necessarily colored 

 by ideas originating in such records, and political action, internationally 

 and otherwise, would be all the wiser if the records were more carefully 

 observed than they are, and the lessons to be derived widely appreciated 

 and understood. 



I propose now to refer briefly to one or two of these ideas which 

 were taken up and discussed on former occasions,! and to illustrate the 

 matter farther by a reference to one or two additional topics suggested 

 in the same manner, and more particularly by the results of the last 

 census investigations, which complete in this respect the record of what 

 may be called the statistical century par excellence — the century which 

 has just closed. 



Increase of European Population during last Century. 



The first broad fact then of this kind, which I have discussed on 

 former occasions, is the enormous increase of the population of Eu- 



* Address of the President to the Economic Science and Statistics Section of 

 the British Association for the Advancement of Science. Glasgow, 1901. 



t Cf. Essays in Finance, 2nd series, pp. 275-364, and Proceedings of Man- 

 chester Statistical Society, October 17, 1900. 



