822 IIF.POKT--1892. 



Section F.— ECONOMIC SCIENCE AND STATISTICS. 

 President of the Section — The Hon. Sir Charles AV. Feemaxtee, K.C.B. 



TH VMS DAY, AUGUST A. 



The President delivered the following Address : — 



I SUPPOSE that few Presidents of any Section of this Association begin the 

 preparation of their Addresses without taldng at least a mental retrospect of the 

 work of their predecessors. I have turned with great interest to the Address 

 delivered by the late Lord Neaves, who occupied tliis chair in 1871, when the 

 Association last met in Edinburgh. Lord Neaves rightly held that the subject of 

 statistics is ancillary to the main subject of the Section, Economic Science, and 

 his immediate predecessor, the lamented Professor Stanley Jevons, pointed out 

 at Liverpool in 1870 that even 'the name "statistics" in its true meaning denotes 

 all knowledge relating to the condition of the State or people.' I propose to devote 

 the main portion of my Address to a subject to which I have devoted much atten- 

 tion, and whicli is intimately connected with the welfare of an important section 

 of our people, and I shall hope to point out the means which may be taken to 

 promote their welfare without leading them, as Lord Neaves expressed it in his 

 concluding words, ' to dispense with ordinary and necessary prudence.' It is 

 impossible to exaggerate the change which has taken place since the date of Lord 

 Neaves's Address in the ideas of the public as to its responsibilities in regard to 

 ■what is called charity. While it recognises that much which was then held to be 

 'charity' is nothing more than justice to the poorer classes, its sense of the 

 dangers of pauperisation has been greatly intensified, and it justly regards many of 

 the charitable methods which would then have been unhesitatingly advocated as 

 not conducive to their best interests. I venture to claim a considerable part of 

 the change which has taken place as due to the efforts of the Charity Organisation 

 Society, which had then been recently founded, and of which I have the honour 

 this year to be Chairman. I claim that the Society has made men everywhere 

 think, and think seriously, of the duty incumbent upon them, not only of giving, 

 but of giving with care and discrimination, and that it has enlisted in the service 

 of their poorer brethren an army which, besides being always ready to be pru- 

 dently generous, is in a thousand cases williug to ensure, by personal effort, that 

 charitable help shall be wisely and kindly dispensed. Such personal effort realises 

 what was well described centuries ago in the Talmud as ' the doing of kind- 

 ness,' and is developing 'a system founded not on rights but on sympathy, 

 dealing not in doles but in deeds of friendship and of fellowship, and demanding a 

 giving of one's self rather than of one's stores.' It has naturally followed that col- 

 lateral subjects, such as the promotion of thrift and the better regulation of 

 benevolent and benefit societies, have during the last twenty years received a 

 greatly increased amount of enlightened attention. 



Before proceeding, however, to the main subject of my iVddress, let me briefly 

 refer to two questions more directly connected with the special work to which the 

 greater part of my official life has been devoted. 



