bjectively in place or
time without any conscious reference to the laws which relate or
explain them; of another branch of study that it is scientific because
it is engaged in the discovery, formulation, and correct expression of
the laws according to which facts are related, without affecting to
give a full presentment of those facts. The treatment in this book
belongs in this sense to economic science rather than to industrial
history as being an endeavour to discover and interpret the laws of
the movement of industrial forces during the period of the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries.

It cannot, however, be pretended that any high degree of exactitude
can attach to such a scientific study.

Two chief difficulties beset any attempt to explain industrial
phenomena by tracing the laws of the action of the forces manifested
in them. The first is that only a limited proportion of the phenomena
which at any given time constitute Industry are clearly and definitely
ascertainable, and it may always be possible that the laws which
satisfactorily explain the statical and dynamical relations of these
may be subordinate or even counteracting forces of larger movements
whose dominance would appear if all parts of the industrial whole were
equally known.

The second difficulty, closely related to the first, is the inherent
complexity of Industry, the continual and close interaction of a
number of phenomena whose exact size and relative importance is
continually shifting and baffles the keenest observer.

These difficulties, common to all sciences, are enhanced in
sociological sciences by the impossibility of adequate experiment in
specially prepared environments.

The degree of exactitude attainable in industrial sciences may thus
appear to be limited by the development of statistical inquiry. Since
the collection of accurate statistics, even on those matters which are
most important, and which lend themselves most easily to statistical
description, is a modern acquirement which has not yet widely spread
over the whole world, while the capacity for classifying and making
right use of statistics is still rarer, it is held by some that in a
study where so much depends upon accurate statements of quantity
little advance is at present possible.

And it is, of course, true that until the advance of organised
curiosity has provided us with a complete measurement of industrial
phenomena over a wide area of commerce and over a