Page:The Economic Journal Volume 1.djvu/588

 566 THE ECONOMIC JOURNAI modestly speaks of a ' wilderness' of figures; but it would be more correct to say that he has opened out a path through what was a 'wilderness'before. A reference to the maps which accompany the present volume will suffice to show the admirable results of his patience and enterprise;and, if he has done nothing else, he has at least presented a pattern of the way in which facts and figures should be collected and arranged in an intelligible order. Nor is this any in- considerable achievement. It is a trite observation to say that a malady must be correctly diagnosed before a remedy can be successfully applied; but the familiarity does not detract from the truth of the maxim, or from the appropriateness of the analogy to social science. In the infancy of the Royal Statistical Society, the motto adopted was a sheaf of corn encircled with the badge ' aliis exteredum,' though it is true that the Society had not existed very long before the badge was removed. In the same way Mr. Booth himself, after describing the condition of the peopleinOf C. entral and South London, grouped according to their trades, his next volume, and, after taking stock of all that is now being done to remedy the condition of the poor by means of existing agencies, hopes to turn his own attention again to the consideration of what should be the way or ways of solving the problem. In this sense of the words of the motto we have quoted he is naturally not going to be content to leave the 'thrashing out' of his figures to others; but, even as it is, he has not merely collected, but he has already gone far to thrash out his figures by the remarks which accompany them. And yet, had he done no more than merely collect and arrange the figures, he would have successfully achieved a most .important and a most difficult piece of statistical work; justly earned the repute of a statistician of the first would have formed a correct diagnosis of the disease. he would have rank; and he To criticise his book is as unnecessary as it would be impertinent; for its success has been recognised on all sides. But we may endeavour to ascertain some of the reasons for that result; and they may perhaps be conveniently summarised under two heads. On the one hand such uncertainty had previously prevailed, and there had been such mistaken ideas of the extent and the nature of London poverty; and Mr. Booth has shown on more than one point that previous diagnoses were either based on inadequate evidence, or were positively misleading and mischievous. This was perhaps the case more with his first volume than with his second; but it is probably new to many of his readers to find that it is not so much East as South London which enjoys an unenviable pre- eminence in poverty; and we may perhaps say that on the whole the extent of irremediable poverty is shown, despite of proportions whicl; are sufficiently serious, to be less than was previously imagined. In comparison, then, with what had been known or imagined before, Mr. Booth's work appears immeasurably superior, and its success may be partly attributed to this cause. But the more important reason for that result is the absolute, and