80t) EEPORT— 1887. 



Section F.— ECONOMIC SCIENCE AND STATISTICS. 

 Pbesibent of the Section — Robert Giffen, LL.D., V.P.S.S. 



THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 1. 



The Peesident delivered the foUowing Address :— 



The Recent Bate of Material Progress in England. 



In comiDg before you on this occasion it has occurred to me that a suitable topic in 

 the commercial capital of England, and at a time when there are many reasons for 

 looking around us and taking stock of what is going on in the industrial world, 

 will be whether there has been in recent years a change in the rate of material 

 progress in the country as compared with the period just before. Some such ques- 

 tion is constantly being put by individuals with regard to their own business. It is 

 often put in political discussions as regards the country generally, with some vague 

 idea among politicians that prosperity and adversity, good harvests and bad, in the 

 most general sense, depend on politics. And it must always be of perennial interest. 

 Of late years it has become specially interesting, and it still is so, because many con- 

 tend that not only are we not progressing, but that we are absolutely going back in 

 the world, while there are evident signs that it is not so easy to read in the usual 

 statistics the evidence of undoubted growth as it was just before 1870-73. The 

 general idea, in my mind, I have to add, is not quite new. I gave a hint of it in 

 Staffordshire last Avinter, and privately I have done something to propagate it so as 

 to lead people to think on what is really a most important subject. What I pro- 

 pose now to do is to discuss the topic formally and fully, and claim the widest atten- 

 tion for it that I possibly can. 



There is much prima facie evidence, then, to begin with, that the rate of the 

 accumulation of wealth and the rate of increase of material prosperity may not have 

 been sp great of late years, say during the last ten years, as in the twenty or thirty 

 years just before that. Our fair-trade friends have all along made a tactical mistake 

 in their arguments, ^^'hat they have attempted to prove is that England lately 

 has not been prosperous at all, that we have been going backwards instead of ad- 

 vancing, and so on ; statements which the simplest appeal to statistics was sufficient 

 to disprove. But if they had been more moderate in their contentions, and limited 

 themselves to showing that the rate of advance, though there was still advance, 

 was different from and less than what it was, I for one should have been prepared to 

 admit that there was a good deal of statistical evidence which seemed to point to 

 that conclusion, as soon as a sufficient interval had elapsed to show that the 

 statistics themselves could not be misinterpreted. There has now been ample 

 time to allow for minor variations and fluctuations, and the statistics can be fairly 

 construed. 



I have to begin by introducing a short table dealing with some of the principal 

 statistical facts which are usually appealed to as signs of general progress and the 

 reverse, and I propose to go o^-er briefly the items in that table and to discuss along 

 with them a few broad and notorious facts which cannot conveniently be put in the 

 same form. 



