are afraid of being entirely dependent on partisan newspapers or election leaflets for our knowledge, and we have therefore come to value, even if for that reason only, the existence of a responsible and more or less independent Civil Service.  It is difficult to realise how short a time it is since questions for which we now rely entirely on official statistics were discussed by the ordinary political methods of agitation and advocacy.  In the earlier years of George the Third’s reign, at a time when population in England was, as we now know, rising with unprecedented rapidity, the question of fact whether it was rising or falling led to embittered political controversy.[84] In the spring of 1830 the House of Commons gave three nights to a confused party debate on the state of the country.  The Whigs argued that distress was general, and the Tories (who were, as it happened, right) that it was local[85].  In 1798 or 1830 the ‘public’ who could take part in such discussions numbered perhaps fifty thousand at the most.  At least ten million people must, since 1903, have taken part in the present Tariff Reform controversy; and that controversy would have degenerated into mere Bedlam if it had not been for the existence of the Board of Trade Returns, with whose figures both sides had at least to appear to square their arguments.

[84] Bonar’s Malthus, chap. vii.

[85] Hansard, Feb. 4th, 5th, 6th, 1830.

If official figures did not exist in England, or if they did not possess or deserve authority, it is difficult to estimate the degree of political harm which could be done in a few years by an interested and deliberately dishonest agitation on some question too technical for the personal judgment of the ordinary voter.  Suppose, for instance, that our Civil Service were either notoriously inefficient or believed to be dominated by party influence, and that an organised and fraudulent ‘currency agitation’ should suddenly spring up.  A powerful press syndicate brings out a series of well-advertised articles declaring that the privileges of the Bank of England and the law as to the gold reserve are ‘strangling British Industry.’  The contents bills of two hundred newspapers denounce every day the ‘monopolists’ and the ‘gold-bugs,’ the ‘lies and shams’ of the Bank Returns, and the ’paid perjurers of Somerset House.’  The group of financiers who control the syndicate stand to win enormous sums by the creation of a more ‘elastic’ currency, and subscribe largely to a Free Money League, which includes a few sincere paper-money theorists who have been soured by the contempt of the professional economists.  A vigorous and well-known member of parliament—­a not very reputable aristocrat perhaps, or some one loosely connected with the Labour movement—­whom everybody has hitherto feared and no one quite trusted, sees his opportunity.  He puts himself at the head of the movement, denounces the ‘fossils’ and ‘superior persons’