TRANSACTIONS OF SECTION I'. 710 



Section F.— ECONOMIC SCIENCE AND STATISTICS. 

 President op the Section — Professor C. F. Bastable, M.A., F.S.S. 



THURSDAY, AUGUST 9. 

 The President delivered the, followiiig Address : — 



The long period that has elapsed since the British Association last met in 

 Oxford, covering as it does the life of an entire generation remarkable for activity 

 in all departments of scientific work, would of itself suggest at least some passing 

 notice of the changes that have taken place, and the progress realised in the sub- 

 jects assigned to this section. 



But some special reasons combine to give increased interest to a comparison 

 between the position of economic science in 1860 and at the present day. What 

 is usually known as orthodox political economy had taken its final shape and 

 reached its highest point of practical influence just at the time when Nassau W. 

 Senior, one of its most typical expositors, was chosen to preside over Section F. at 

 its first meeting here. Far better even than J. S. Mill, Senior represented the 

 strong and weak points of the English school. Clearness of thought, a firm grasp 

 of elementary principles, and complete freedom from the disturbing influence of 

 sentiment, are distinguishing marks of the compact treatise in which he set forth 

 the chief doctrines of Economics, and they are equally shown in his presidential 

 address. Political economy, he maintains, is a science and nothing else, limited in 

 its scope to the subject of wealth, and concerned rather with mental than with 

 physical phenomena. This very precision and rigid limitation naturally tended 

 to produce some of the less admirable characteristics of the normal 'political 

 economist.' Undue insistence on the omnipotence of purely material motives, a 

 somewhat cynical disregard of the moral forces that influence human action in 

 respect to wealth, and a certain love of paradox, especially in cases where popular 

 prejudice was concerned, may be traced in Senior's writings as in those of most 

 of his contemporaries, and go far to account for the intense repugnance felt by 

 moralists and social reformers for a system which confined itself to one, and that 

 which they deemed the lowest and coarsest side of human life. -—'-^ 



Such as it was, however, with, and in part by reason of, its definiteness and its 

 narrowness, political economy commanded the respect of a lai-ge section of the 

 public and of its instructors and guides in the Press, who looked on it as supplying 

 a rational code of industrial and commercial conduct. ' The recognised principles 

 of political economy,' or ' the immutable laws of supply and demand,' were phrases 

 that occurred as readily to a journalist in the sixties as ' the exploded doctrine of 

 laisser faire ' does to the leader-writer of to-day. The scientific doctrine of the 

 economist applied to practice became the guiding rule of the practical man of 

 business. Its influence on legislation is strikingly shown by two important 

 triumphs gained in this very year (1860). The first and most enduring was the 

 full and complete establishment of free trade as the basis of the fiscal policy of 

 the United Kingdom by the budget measures of the year; the second, though 



