while

39,000,000 people received L935,000,000.

In other words, the fact that one-half of the wealth of Great Britain
and Ireland goes to the twelve per cent. of the population who belong
to the class with incomes over L160 a year. It is a terrible
revelation both of poverty and of riches. The figures thunder at one's
imagination more effectively than a sea of rhetoric. And the figures
concerning destitution and the housing of the poor are still more
terrible in their realism. Shelley never wrote a revolutionary hymn
that more surely prophesied the coming of a new society. Social greed,
that has withstood ten thousand prophets and poets, at last begins to
feel troubled in the unaccustomed presence of the statistician. Not
the statistician in his study, of course: he is no more than a
dryasdust inventor. But the statistician, like Florence Nightingale,
with the genius of a fine purpose and a sure aim with sure facts. This
is not to discredit any of the old battalions of reform. It is merely
to hail the coming of the new regiment of the statisticians, who fight
with tables instead of swords, and whose leaders exhort them on the
eve of battle with passages out of Blue Books. Statistics and the man
I sing. Let the next great epic be an Arithmiad.

TURNBULL AND SPEARS, PRINTERS, EDINBURGH

TRANSCRIBER'S NOTES

1. Passages in italics are surrounded by _underscores_.

2. The word Oedipus uses an "OE" ligature in the original.

3. Missing text added on page 211 to correct "particularisations" to
"particularisations of".

4. Other than the corrections listed above, printer's inconsistencies
in spelling, punctuation, and hyphenation have been retained.

End of Project Gutenberg's The Book of This and That, by Robert Lynd

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