TRANSACTIONS OF THE SECTIONS. 175 



appear to be limited to the case of Tipperary landlords), we may be pardoned for 

 doubting whether any one can assign bounds to the range of the inquiry we have 

 imdertaken. 



It is therefore both natural, and satisfactory, that statistical inquiry should year 

 by year be extending to wider fields ; since no one branch of it can be successfully 

 pursued without speedily bringing us to the necessity of inquiring into" the pro- 

 gress which is being made in other branches. The statistics of education, of crime, 

 of pauperism, of labour, of health, of trade, of agiiculture, of manufactures, and of 

 every one of the details which enter into the survey of our national condition and 

 prospects, are interdependent, and connect themselves with another. At the same 

 time, not only do they admit of being studied separately, but more true progress 

 wiU be made by such a method of study. The educational inquirer examines the 

 bearings of juvenile labom-, for instance, from one point of view ; the sanitary in- 

 quirer examines them from another ; the inquirer into the causes and conditions of 

 pauperism from a third ; and so on. Where their inquiries tend to similar conclu- 

 sions, each confirms the other all the more for the independence of their ^lines of 

 argument. Where the conclusions are inconsistent, they are all the more sugges- 

 tive ; and suggestiveness, as it seems to me, is what constitutes the gTeat value of 

 statistics. 



The old sarcasm, that you may prove anything by figures, has no doubt much 

 truth in it. In the sense in which the words are usually taken, they convey a pro- 

 test against crude, and of course still more against unfair, statistics. But we may 

 ferhaps affix another idea to them, and one less uncomplimentary to our science, 

 am sometimes inclined to look at a gi-eat mass of statistics, undigested and shape- 

 less as it seems, in the spirit in which the sculptor may be supposed to look at the 

 rude block of marble out of which he is to fetch the form of beauty that lies hid 

 within. Innumerable are the lessons which may be drawn from those hopeless- 

 looking figures, if only the student knows how to search for them; just as the 

 forms which might be developed from the marble are innumerable, if the artist 

 knows how to bring them to light. Remote as the region of statistics appears to 

 be from the region of the imagination, there is no pursuit of which it may more 

 truly be said that its success depends upon a proper exercise of the imaginative 

 faculty. A wholly unimaginative statist is as intolerable as an unimaginative 

 verse writer. A man must know what he is going to look for, and how he wiU look 

 for it, before he begins his examination of a mass of figures ; but he must keep his 

 mind open, throughout the process, to receive the suggestions which the study is 

 sure to produce. He must work upon an hypothesis, but he must be ready to aban- 

 don it as soon as he finds it untenable ; and he should be quick to form new hypo- 

 theses, and to subject his materials to new tests, as occasion arises. For all this 

 kind of work it is of great advantage that other minds should be brought into con- 

 tact with his own, and that he should profit by the suggestions which their inde- 

 pendent inquiries cannot fail to elicit. 



It is of course obvious that meetings such as that in which we are now engaged, 

 are likely to advance the study in the direction which I have been indicating. But 

 that is not their sole advantage. It is, I think, no slight one, that we are called on 

 to dispute in public, and to address ourselves to a general audience. If our studies 

 are really valuable, if our methods of conducting them are sound, if we are doing 

 good service to our countay, we certainly ought to be able to interest and to attract 

 our hearers. The subjects with which we deal are of general concern; they are 

 not mere matters for closet speculation, nor is it good that we should treat them as 

 if they were. Neither does the discussion of them involve the necessity for the use 

 of strange or technical language ; nor is it even necessary that we should weary our 

 hearers with long columns of figures. It is rather a sign of indolence than of pro- 

 fundity when speakers oppress. their hearers with technical phrases, and with pro- 

 cesses of arithmetic. These should be used in the closet, but should be as sparingly 

 as possible obtruded on the platform. Our methods of inquiry should indeed be 

 strictly scientific ; and we should never cease to be on our guard against fallacies, 

 but we should adapt our arguments to the circumstances of human nature, and 

 endeavour to make them attractive by making them intelligible. In a word, if I 

 may borrow an illustration which promises to take root among us, we must make 



