STATISTICAL COMPARISONS. 477 



miaishing, and so on. Officials at the head of the agricultural 

 department in France have been greatly impressed by consider- 

 ations like these, and have endeavoured to substitute a count of 

 cattle by weight for the mere count of heads, but even a correc- 

 tion like this would by no means be sufficient, as there might 

 still be serious difierences of quality. The comparisons, then, 

 of agricultural production which one often sees, in which 

 unlike units are taken as equal without more ado, and reasoned 

 upon as if there were no quaKtications, are most misleading. 

 Rectification to any exact degree might not in many comimri- 

 sons be possible, but the consideration of the point would 

 usually make is possible to turn the figures to support some 

 useful conclusion. 



In connection with these comi^arisons, it should also be 

 noticed that many of the deductions per head and per acre, into 

 which it is usual to convert the figures of agricultural i^roduc- 

 tion, are calculated t^^ mislead, even when the units themselves 

 are comparable, because the comparisons are with the total 

 acreage and total population of a country, and not with the 

 special acreage and agricultural population. What could be 

 more useless, for instance, than to compare two countries like 

 England and the United States as regards their production of 

 wheat or any other agricultural product per head of the whole 

 population, the one population living on its own wheat and 

 other products, and the other not. All such comparisons to be 

 of any value should be made from the purely agricultural point 

 of view— to illustrate difierences in the style of agriculture 

 carried on, or in the fertility of any two countries. But they 

 are often made with lingering!' notions that all States can, to 

 some extent, be dealt with as agricultural units, which is far 

 from being the case. 



Coming to statistics of manufacturing production again, and 

 this to some extent applies to agricultural and mining produc- 

 tion, what we find is that, save as to some particular industry 

 in detail, and for the purposes of discussions of that industry 

 by itself, there is really no common denominator between 

 countries, except in so far as the yjroduction of their respective 

 industries can be represented in money. The coal and iron of 

 one country are not the same as the coal and ii^on of another ; 

 the wool is not the same ; the cotton, woollen, and linen manu- 

 factures of the one cannot be exjjressed in the same units of 

 quantity as the similar manufactures of the other ; the same 

 with manufactures of metals, leather, and wood, and with 

 machines of all kinds. Even if there is a general likeness in 

 industrial characteristics of any two countries such as England 

 and France, yet the different distribution of the leading in- 

 dustries makes any real comparison between the two as a rule 

 impossible, except so far as it can be done in money. To make 

 the comparison in money again presents new difficulties The 

 value of different kinds of production cannot well be reckoned 

 up. A country like England, with the machineiy of its income 

 tax, has special facilities for reckoning up its income as 

 far as possessed by individuals above a certain, 

 minimum ; but it has little official knowledge by com- 



