Page:The Economic Journal Volume 1.djvu/587

 REVIEWS Laborer and Life of the People. Edited by Charles Booth. 1891. Volume II. London continued. London: Williams and Norgate, Ir the concluding section of the second instalment which Mr. Booth has now given to the public of his vast undertaking, he remarks that at an early stage in his work, when asked by one from whom he sought information,' What is the good of it all ?'he had to admit that he ' walked in faith.' This attitude of mind had changed but little when he reached the end of his first volume, although he had by that time arrived at the conclusion that the crux of the problem of London poverty consisted in the elimination of his Class B, or, as he describes it more fully, the class of the very poor casual labour, hand-to-mouth existence, chronic want. The conclusion of a second volume, he now tells us,' leaves his position unchanged.' An extension of the area of inquiry from East London to the whole of London has enlarged the wilderness of figures, but has not done much to make the path more clear. If Mr. Booth will allow us on behalf of economists and statisticians to venture upon an answer to the inquiry of his questioner, we should say that in the first place he had furnished a model of statistical investigation. Professor Marshall, if we remember rightly, in introducing Mr. Booth at the meeting of the British Association at Leeds last year, observed that anyone who wished to discover what was the most important, the largest and the most successful statistical inquiry which was being undertaken in England would look not so much to any department of government or public association as to a private individual in the .person of Mr. Booth. There are few, if there are any, econo- nists or statisticians, who would not be inclined to lend, if possible, greater emphasis to Professor Marshall's eulogy. The vastness of the undertaking in which Mr. Booth is engaged is not more conspicuous than the success with which from the point of view alone of the mere statistician and economist his efforts have been attended. He