TBANSACTIOXS OF SECTION F. 823 



coincides with the century's end, the Italian and the Spanish censuses are already 

 overdue, and both France and England take their count within a few months after 

 the twentieth century has hegun. 



Not persons onty, but their conditions, their possessions, their trade, and their 

 burdens are all subjects of perennial statistical enquiry, and m connection with the 

 last of these groups in the near future the attention of statistical critics will no 

 doubt be drawn again to the massive collection of materials respecting local taxes, 

 their growth and pressure, which may be looked for from the final report of the 

 Royal Commission on Local Taxation. How many times in the last half of this 

 century this section of our finance has been debated here I have not been able to 

 ascertain. In one form or another it has exercised a fascination on the minds of 

 some of our most active economists. Personally I confess the field was one of the 

 first in which I ventured to make some enquiry and draw tabular comparisons. To 

 this I was incited by the study, not at first of the second-hand stores of the 

 many blue-books which have seen the light on this matter, but rather by the 

 peculiar circumstances of my local residence in a Yorkshire township four-and- 

 thirty years ago, when local government and local rates of necessity came home 

 with primary concern to one who happened, like myself, to be the sole inhabitant 

 householder of an area constituting for several purposes a unit of local 

 administration. 



I cannot pretend to have followed through the later years of the century the 

 wider developments of these controversies, which were far from simple even in 

 the days when the issue was limited to a question of pressure of the ratal system 

 on agricultural land. Now, when the vast and complicated outlay of the great 

 urban centres on matters which, in time past, we were not disposed to regard as 

 subjects of taxation at all^ but rather of directly remunerative outlay, has to be 

 brought into the survey, it may" well tax the ingenuity of our younger statisticians 

 to unravel the facts, and it may try the courage and the skill of the economists to 

 pronounce, as this Section may be expected to do before its sittings close, as to the 

 orthodox limits and sphere of ever-extending municipal expenditure and municipal 

 trade. 



The statistical part of such enquiries as these will abound with problems in the 

 working out of which it will be well to recall the warnings I have indicated as to 

 the danger attending the use of non-comparative or defective data. Pitfalls 

 innumerable await the less wary controversialist in such questions as these, which 

 seem near at hand, while yet wider discussion on the relative pressure and com- 

 parative growth of taxes generally may erelong attract renewed attention, as well 

 as the subjects of statistical debate which centre round the records of crime and 

 its punishment, of educational facilities and the economic results of their super- 

 vision by the State, or, again, of excursions into the intricate region of labour and 

 wages, wherein some of our section have already pursued useful investigations. 

 In all and every one of these topics the scientific statistician will have to re- 

 member that his profession does not allow him to be a partisan advocate of one or 

 the other view, in search of some figures to illustrate or decorate a predetermined 

 theory. On the contrary, his function is to work in the cold, clear light of pure 

 scientific research, and with a single aim to free the facts of each case from obscurity 

 and place the data before the world in such shape as to allow a true j udgment to 

 be recorded. 



Quite as full of difficult problems and obstinately non-comparable figures will be 

 found to be the use of statistics of production and of trade. The varj'ing and 

 scanty records of one period may have to be viewed in connection with and inter- 

 preted by the better and fuller data of the day, and the conditions of one country 

 may have to be contrasted with those of another, while the puzzling vai'iations in 

 the system employed have to be allowed for and discounted in the conclusions. 



Perhaps the difficulties of just comparison between the records of one time and 

 another, or one State and its neighbour, come home to me with peculiar emphasis 

 when the statistics dealt with relate to agricultural conditions. With ourselves 



