ed since
1834. Newspaper writers, in discussing the problem of destitution, tend
now to use, not general terms applied to whole social classes like the
'poor,' 'the working class,' or 'the lower orders,' but terms expressing
quantitative estimates of individual variations, like 'the submerged
tenth,' or the 'unemployable'; while every newspaper reader is fairly
familiar with the figures in the Board of Trade monthly returns which
record seasonal and periodical variations of actual unemployment among
Trade Unionists.

One could give many other instances of this beginning of a tendency in
political thinking, to change from qualitative to quantitative forms of
argument. But perhaps it will be sufficient to give one relating to
international politics. 'Sixty years ago sovereignty was a simple
question of quality. Austin had demonstrated that there must be a
sovereign everywhere, and that sovereignty, whether in the hands of an
autocracy or a republic, must be absolute. But the Congress which in
1885 sat at Berlin to prevent the partition of Africa from causing a
series of European wars as long as those caused by the partition of
America, was compelled by the complexity of the problems before it to
approach the question of sovereignty on quantitative lines. Since 1885
therefore every one has become familiar with the terms then invented to
express gradations of sovereignty: 'Effective occupation,' 'Hinterland,'
'Sphere of Influence'--to which the Algeciras Conference has perhaps
added a lowest grade, 'Sphere of Legitimate Aspiration.' It is already
as unimportant to decide whether a given region is British territory or
not, as it is to decide whether a bar containing a certain percentage of
carbon should be called iron or steel.

Even in thinking of the smallest subdivisions of observed political fact
some men escape the temptation to ignore individual differences. I
remember that the man who has perhaps done more than any one else in
England to make a statistical basis for industrial legislation possible,
once told me that he had been spending the whole day in classifying
under a few heads thousands of 'railway accidents,' every one of which
differed in its circumstances from any other; and that he felt like the
bewildered porter in _Punch_, who had to arrange the subleties of nature
according to the unsubtle tariff-schedule of his company. 'Cats,' he
quoted the porter as saying, 'is dogs, and guinea-pigs is dogs, but this