740 REPORT— 1886. 



vegetable life. All natm-e is incessantly at war with itself, and the tattle is to the 

 strong, the race to the swift ; a sure instinct guides each individual, or each aggre- 

 gation of individuals, in the path of unswerving selfishness that leads, in the great 

 majority of cases, to the maintenance of the species. In the crowded communities 

 of the lower animals all is order, regularity, and method ; the sustenance of the 

 community, the ventilation and sanitation of the common dwelling, and the disposal 

 of its redundant population, all is provided for ; and though pestilences occur, it is 

 chiefly in the case of animals subject to man that they appear to have any sensible 

 or permanent effect on the aggregate numbers of the species. With mankind it is 

 different ; his better and more amiable feelings no less than his self-interests, his 

 virtues as well as his vices, tend ever towards results that are not in harmony 

 with those that would ensue from the operation of natural law. The higher the 

 civilisation of any community, the more does it tend to aggregation and concentra- 

 tion of its members ; in large cities the forces that lead to the deterioration as well 

 as those that promote the conservation of the race tend no less to destroy than to 

 maintain the balance of nature. Sanitary science, even though its teaching be 

 enforced by compulsory legislation, has a hard struggle to keep at bay the diseases 

 that man, less well taught in this than are the lower animals, seems inevitably to 

 invite to his crowded cities and insanitary dwellings. The resources of medicine 

 and surgery ally themselves with the promptings of humanity or natural affection 

 in promoting the survival of the least fit, and the perpetuation of a race too often 

 inheriting the vices, no less than the diseases, of their predecessors. Nor is it in 

 cities only that man's interference with natural forces reacts on the conditions of 

 his life ; the settlement and clearing of a new country, and in a minor degree even 

 a change in agricultural methods in one already settled, affects the fauna, the 

 flora, and even the climate and meteorology of the land, its power of production of 

 food, and its salubrity for habitation. 



It is something if we have learnt by the experience of time that social problems 

 are not the mere calculation of man's actions as determined by motives of self- 

 interest, and as measurable in money or its equivalents. Need we abandon all 

 observation because we cannot conduct experiments with the precision of the 

 chemist, weighing our ingredients in the balances of the laboratory ? The land, as 

 delimited by Adam Smith, by Ricardo, and even by Mill and Cairnes, has been 

 found too narrow for us ; the boundaries have been broken down and overpassed : 

 is there no alternative between the despairing admission that all is barrenness 

 before us, and the elaboration of such Utopian schemes of society as have been 

 imagined by Rousseau, by Robert Owen, or by Comte and his disciples of the 

 present day ? One lesson at least we may learn and take to heart : whether, on the 

 one hand, the problems of social science are capable of being stated and solved 

 by a method towards which we are as yet but groping our way in semi-darkness, 

 by some new organon yet to be formulated ; or whether, on the other, we must 

 depend on the promptings of well-balauced and trained common-sense for the ex- 

 planation of every new combination of conditions : whether political economy consist 

 in the discovery of truths, or merely in the recognition of facts, it must not be 

 academic only. No community can be fed on dogma ; an industrious and hard- 

 working population, such as is that of our country, and of Avhich the great city in 

 which we are assembled furnishes the most conspicuous example ; quick to appre- 

 ciate the hardness of the struggle by which it maintains itself in existence, and 

 eager to grasp at any prospect of alleviation, will not be convinced as to the 

 universal applicability of formulae of supply and demand, of entire freedom of 

 contract, and unlimited competition in the circumstances of their particular case. 

 Nor, on the other hand, will any credit accrue to the study of political economy jf 

 we abandon ourselves for all guidance to the untrained promptings of empiricism ; 

 the guidance of so-called common-sense, sometimes called iuto action by generous 

 instincts, sometimes by mere impulse, is only too frequently misleading. 



It is at this point that the statistical method comes in as an inseparable ally of 

 economic speculation. If the latter has had from time to time, and still has, to 

 a.ssert its position among the sciences, what place shall be assigned to the method 

 which is only too often assumed to be the mere massing and grouping of figures ? 



