Comparative Account : Population of Great Britain. 215 



statistical knowledge than is possessed by any other people ; and how 

 the whole country, at the last enumeration, — overseers, farmers and 

 manufacturers, awakened as if by inspiration to a sense of the impor- 

 tance of statistical researches, — rather greeted than avoided the in- 

 quiry; and how, for the first time, a great majority of parish officers 

 became absolutely enamoured with population returns; — no longer 

 shrinking from the undertaking as one affording no useful results to 

 them, but looking to it as a measure in which their own individual 

 welfare was most intimately concerned. 



Mr. Ricknian has had the pleasure, apart from all political consi- 

 derations, of seeing this very great change brought about in the public 

 mind; and to him the alteration cannot but have proved satisfactory. 

 No longer doomed to see noble peers and wealthy commoners re- 

 garding with indifference the population volume, he now finds the 

 returns sought after on all sides ; and the boundaries of boroughs, the 

 limits 0? Ainsteys, and the numerical amounts of their inhabitants, 

 forming a keen subject for senatorial debate. A permanent taste for 

 statistical inquiries may thus spring out of the great question of Re- 

 form ; and men who in times past looked at the data or operations of 

 the census with indifference or with suspicion, have now been aroused 

 to a sense of its importance and value. 



A census of the people philosophically conducted is a truly great 

 and magnificent object of inquiry ; — and who can tell the light its 

 varied details will ultimately throw on the whole frame-work of so- 

 ciety ? From its high and lofty places, downward through all its gra- 

 dations, to the lowest shades of poverty and vice, what a singularly 

 curious and interwoven fabric! Who at the present moment can form 

 even a conjectural notion of the great social edifice? — What are its 

 workings, and the springs which give it life; what the causes which 

 make its entire structure exhibit at one time ail the fair and florid 

 forms of health, and in another all the unhappy characteristics of vicis- 

 situde and decay ; — which in one season beams with hope, while tran- 

 quillity and joy are found within its borders, but at another exhibits a 

 feverish anxiety, — dark and unkindly suspicions rising angrily against 

 its best benefactors, and destroying the very hand that is raised to 

 comfort and support it? Such is human society; and to illustrate 

 its nature completely is the final object the political arithmetician has 

 in view. It is not for the mere pleasure of congregating dense piles 

 of figures, as some have supposed, that all these efforts have been 

 made by the cultivators of statistics to gather together from every 

 region numerical results, but to endeavour in the end to deduce from 

 them conclusions bearing as well on the moral as on the physical con- 

 dition of man. The two are mysteriously but beautifully interwoven : 

 and while the philosopher a|)proachcs a |)roblem of so lofty and ele- 

 vated a kind, with all the timidity wiiich its vastness and magnitude 

 inspires, he feels that he is treading on sure and perfect ground, when 

 he is patiently gathering together the great numerical foundations of 

 statistical science. Nor is he at all disheartened by the consideration, 

 that he is only preparing the tools which other artificers are to use ; 

 and while he can never hope to see the inquiry perfected in all the 



