he
individual existence of their casual neighbours.

Wordsworth's _Prelude_ describes with pathetic clearness a mental
history, which must have been that of many thousands of men who could
not write great poetry, and whose moral and intellectual forces have
been blunted and wasted by political disillusionment. He tells us that
the 'man' whom he loved in 1792, when the French Revolution was still at
its dawn, was seen in 1798 to be merely 'the composition of the brain.'
After agonies of despair and baffled affection, he saw 'the individual
man ... the man whom we behold with our own eyes.'[45] But in that change
from a false simplification of the whole to the mere contemplation of
the individual, Wordsworth's power of estimating political forces or
helping in political progress was gone for ever.

[45] _The Prelude_, Bk. XIII., ll. 81-84.

If this constantly repeated disappointment is to cease, quantitative
method must spread in politics and must transform the vocabulary and the
associations of that mental world into which the young politician
enters. Fortunately such a change seems at least to be beginning. Every
year larger and more exact collections of detailed political facts are
being accumulated; and collections of detailed facts, if they are to be
used at all in political reasoning, must be used quantitatively. The
intellectual work of preparing legislation, whether carried on by
permanent officials or Royal Commissions or Cabinet Ministers takes
every year a more quantitative and a less qualitative form.

Compare for instance the methods of the present Commission on the Poor
Law with those of the celebrated and extraordinarily able Commission
which drew up the new Poor Law in 1833-34. The argument of the earlier
Commissioners' Report runs on lines which it would be easy to put in _a
priori_ syllogistic form. All men seek pleasure and avoid pain. Society
ought to secure that pain attaches to anti-social, and pleasure to
social conduct. This may be done by making every man's livelihood and
that of his children normally dependent upon his own exertions, by
separating those destitute persons who cannot do work useful to the
community from those who can, and by presenting these last with the
alternative of voluntary effort or painful restriction. This leads to 'a
principle which we find universally admitted, even by those whose
practice is at variance with it, that the situation [of the pauper] on
the whole shall