TRANSACTIONS OF SECTION F. 741 



It has been said — and tlie saying is not altogether devoid either of truth or humour 

 — that ' statisticians when they meet together devote half their time to discussing 

 the status and dignity of their pursuit, and its precedence of, or subservience to, 

 economics.' 1 The vulgar misuse of the word statistics has no doubt contributed, in 

 many cases, to ambiguity in its use. The extreme instance need perhaps hardly be 

 mentioned when ' statistics ' are used simply as equivalent to ' figures ' ; one may 

 read or hear even this expression, ' You can prove anything by statistics.' To say 

 that you can prove anything by figures' is intelligible ; just so can you prove any- 

 thing by a syllogism with a faulty premiss, or that might is right by the law of the 

 stronger. But apart from cases in which false figures do not tell the truth — I do 

 not say false statistics, for to speak of false statistics appears to me to be very nearly 

 a contradiction in terms — there is the much more frequent class of cases in which 

 they do not tell the whole truth. Examples of this class wiU readily occur to 

 everyone ; I may refer to one very happily chosen by the President of this Section 

 in 1865 (Lord Derby), namely, the error that may be imported into the death-rate 

 by a year of pestilence, not only by its effect on the mortality of the year of its 

 occurrence, but by its clearing away feeble lives, and so lightening the death-rate in 

 years immediately consequent. There is less to be feared from errors arising out 

 of this source if we lay to heart the warning uttered by Mr. Goschen on a recent 

 occasion, ' Beware of totals,' — if we recognise more fully than we are usually 

 apt to do that a table of figures, even if it be absolutely coiTect as a statement of 

 fact, is merely raw material, not a finished product. The misfortune is that it is 

 only too frequently treated as the latter. Such a table usually sets forth what in 

 the dialect of the produce-market is known as the ' statistical position ' of some 

 article of trade, or, in the language of Mr. Wynnaid Hooper,'^ as the ' primary 

 statistical quantity.' Jlr. Hooper, while agreeing with Professor Ingram in deny- 

 ing to statistics any right to be described as a science, defines the Statistical 

 Method as ' a scientific procedure involving the employment of statistics,' the 

 intelligent compilation of these primary quantities, and the intelligent use of them . 

 when so compiled. This definition makes the statistical method applicable to the 

 solution of the well-known problem, interesting, no doubt, to some in Birming- 

 ham, ' What becomes of all the pins ? ' no less than to the most complex economic 

 questions. If the word ' statistics ' were equivalent to ' figures,' there would be 

 nothing to be said against this ; but the history of the word shows that its 

 connotation has always been in a condition of imstable equilibrium. The late Dr. 

 Guy, one of the most ardent champions of the dignity as a science of the method 

 for which he did so much, has traced for us the evolution of the word,^ from the now 

 almost extinct form ' statist," as used by Shakespeare, Milton, and the dramatists 

 of the Restoration, in the sen.'^e of economist, to the invention in 1749 by 

 Achenwall of the singular form ' Die Statistik,' and the adoption of ' statistics ' 

 in this country at the beginning of the present century. Even since that recent 

 period the wheel has come round full circle. In 1833 statistical inquiry was 

 introduced to the notice of the British Association as one which should limit itself 

 strictly to ' matters of fact ' and ' numerical results,' eschewing altogether matters 

 of opinion, even as deduced therefrom. A similar spirit seems to have been in the 

 founders of the Statistical Society of London in 1834, who adopted as their motto 

 ' aliis exterendum,' a phrase implying that their province was merely the harvesting 

 of the above-defined primary statistical quantities, to be threshed and winnowed 

 by the political economist. That this restricted scope was all that could be claimed 

 by statistics was strongly held by some of its leading members; but the original 

 motto of the Society has been abandoned, and the narrower view has been by no 

 one more emphatically repudiated than by Sir Rawson Eawson, late President of 

 the Society, in his opening address to its jubilee meeting in 1885: — 'I am not 

 prepared to make statistics the handmaid of social science, to degrade the parent 

 into the position of a hewer of wood and a drawer of water in the service of its 



' Times, June 25, 1885. 



^ 'Method of Statistical Analysis,' Jourii. of Stat. Soc, March 1881, pp. 44-45. 

 ' ' Meaning of the term Statistics,' &c., Joitrn. of Stat. Soc, Dec. 1865, pp. 478- 

 493. 



