to the imagination through
conventional figures. Perhaps it is a certain suspicion of Orientalism
that accounts for the fanatical hatred of statistics which still
exists among many of the apostles of the West. For statistics is a new
thing which has had to fight as desperately for recognition as
Impressionist art or Wagnerian opera. Infuriated Victorians still
speak of "lies, damned lies, and statistics," as the three degrees of
wickedness; and the statistician is denounced in superlatives as a
sort of gaoler of humanity, who would give us all numbers instead of
names. Now, I am not concerned to defend bad statisticians any more
than bad artists. Statistics has its charlatans, its bounders after a
new thing, as well as its Da Vincis and its Michelangelos. Or,
perhaps it is more comparable to music than to painting or sculpture.
The philosophy of number is the philosophy of proportion, of harmony,
of rhythm, and statistics is the study of the proportions, harmonies,
rhythms of society. Music and poetry, it should be remembered, are
both an affair of number. "I lisped in numbers," said the poet, "for
the numbers came." And the statistician has the same apology.
Statistics, of course, is largely concerned, like the arts, with the
disharmonies of life, but it deals with them in terms of harmony. It
is a method of asserting order amid chaos, and that is why the lovers
of chaos attempt to spread the idea among the people that statistics
is a dangerous innovation, a black-coated tyranny. That is why
landlords who benefit by the social chaos have fought so hard against
the valuation of land, and churches against the registration of
ecclesiastical property. Similarly, there was a middle-class party
that denounced the income tax because it would mean a statistical
inquest into the wealth of manufacturers and shopkeepers. Among savage
tribes, we are told, it is a common custom to hide one's name, because
those who know one's name have a magic power over one's soul.
Similarly, in civilised societies, the rich man likes to hide his
number. He knows that in some way the knowledge of this will give
society a new control over him. It is possible to ignore all the evils
of monopolised riches till one knows the numbers of the rich. To
many people it is a turning-point in social and political belief to
discover such a fact as that, of the total income of Great Britain and
Ireland in 1908,

5,500,000 people received L909,000,000,