TRANSACTIONS OF SECTION F. 727 



Section F.— ECONOMIC SCIENCE AND STATISTICS. 



Peesident of the Section— E. C. K. Gonner, M.A., Professor of Economic 

 Science in University College, Liverpool. 



THURSDAY, AUGUST 19, 



In the absence of the President the following Address was read by the Hon. Sir 

 C. W, Fremantle:— 



In the selection of the subject on which I propose to offer, according to custom, a 

 few remarks to-day, I have been influenced by the wish to choose one which is 

 not only of present importance, but such that it may provide occasion for the 

 discussion of the advance which economic study has made, and of the methods 

 whereby that advance has been achieved. The position of the Labour Question 

 in modern thought and its economic treatment is a matterwell worth attention 

 from these various points of view. In addition, its consideration cannot fail 

 to throw light on the connection which exists between the economic growth of _a 

 country and the main developments of Economics as a study. Whatever their 

 view of the subject itself, few will deny the curiously emphatic position occupied 

 by Labour and the various questions relating to it and its conditions at the present 

 day. Illustrations present themselves on many sides. Evidence may be adduced 

 from almost all quarters of literature, even from those seemingly unlikely. To the 

 novel writer and the novel reader working-class life has formed a continent almost 

 as newly discovered as that sighted by Columbus and others, or rather by others 

 and Columbus, in the fifteenth century ; and even when the novelist is chastened 

 into unnecessary discretion and distant allusiveness in his description of detail and 

 habits by the fear, perhaps the unnecessary fear, that his audience is less ignorant 

 than himself, Labour Problems and Labour Difficulties brood like a nightmare in 

 his mind and leave their mark on his pages. It is the same in other literature, 

 where they reign in almost undivided monopoly. The ' working man ' button-holes 

 the reader in the library and at the news-stall, and stays beside him in the very 

 discomforting guise of a problem when he sits by the fireside in the evening. And 

 as in literature so in life, as in life so in public discussion. On all sides there is 

 the same feature. In all directions there has grown up the same tacit habit of 

 regarding each question as hardly worth discussion till it has passed the pre- 

 liminary test not only of its efl'ect on the position of the working class, but of the 

 view they are likely to take of it ; rightly, no doubt, inasmuch as it implies the 

 consideration of their interests, often neglected in the past ; wrongly when con- 

 strued into the conclusion that all measures or changes which they resent are 

 necessarily evil. A similar tendency is shown in recent economic literature, 

 and particularly in that of the past quarter of a century, which treats of the con- 

 ditions and remuneration of manual labour with force just as undeniable as the 

 length of the chapters and the number of the books devoted to the subject. \Vhat 

 may be termed the bias of economic studies is very evident. Just as at one time 



