L
ondon was the fountainhead of international statistics. Adolphe Quetelet enjoyed visiting the British capital. Early in his career he had discovered that many British thinkers shared his vision of statistics. He had a hand in the estab-lishment of the Statistical Section (Section F) of the British Association for the Advancement of Science and the Statistical Society of London. In 1851 he chose the Great Exhibition of London as the stage for launching the European statis-tical congress. He expected the British to be very supportive and the Crystal Palace seemed the ideal place to introduce the international plans being devel-oped by statisticians. The immense exhibition building defied the imagination and exuded confidence in the future. No cast-iron structure had ever been built on this scale. Joseph Paxton, a former gardener, had designed a modern, covered Garden of Eden. It was surrounded by pavilions displaying the most amazing and ingenious inventions of the day and in the centre there were foun-tains, boscages and towering elms. Birds flew around overhead. It was as if you could touch the sky, which is precisely what statisticians wanted to do.Statisticians found an attentive listener in Prince Albert, Queen Victoria’s German husband and the initiator of the Great Exhibition. As a former student of Adolphe Quetelet, he was well-versed in statistics. He became the patron and honorary chairman of the Statistical Society of London shortly after his marriage and relocation to Britain in 1840. There is no doubt that he was an active proponent of his former teacher’s plans in 1851 and, wherever possible, mobilised scientists to support the initiative. When the fourth international statistical congress was held in London in 1860, there was no one better suited to opening the proceedings than Prince Albert. Quetelet and the Prince corre-sponded regularly. In 1859, on behalf of the statistics community Quetelet invited the Prince to attend the forthcoming congress.1 The organisers had apparently intended to convene the congress in the summer of 1859, but the
war between Austria and Piedmont made it necessary to postpone.
Albert carried the boundless scientific optimism of the Great Exhibition with him until his premature death in 1861. He corresponded with prominent scientists and scholars and regularly attended scientific gatherings. In 1859, at the annual meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, he made an impassioned plea for the unification of science and public admin-istration. He asked William Farr, the most authoritative English statistician of the day, to help him prepare his opening address at the statistical congress on 16 July 1860. The prince purportedly said: ‘Now, Dr Farr, I wish to suck your brains’. But he did not restrict himself to picking Farr’s brains. Dr Farr later acknowledged that the prince had digested much more than the one report he had sent him. Albert’s speech was his own work.2
That speech may have marked the highpoint of nineteenth-century statistics.
Never before had any member of a royal court or government spoken with such authority about statistics. Albert began by focusing on the congress’s public and national character, which was entirely consistent with the high intensity of polit-ical life in Britain where every important issue was debated in the public arena.3 In Albert’s view, statistics was everyone’s business: everyone in the country should be able to access statistical information, and everyone should contribute to it. A tradition of openness and participation typified the role of statistics in Britain. Like so many others, Albert saw Britain as the birthplace of statistics:
the eleventh-century Domesday Book was ‘one of the oldest and most complete monuments’ of that field of inquiry. And, of course, he was able to report that the idea of an international statistical congress germinated when visitors from all over the world gathered together ‘at the Great Exhibition of 1851 to exhibit their science, skill and industry in noble rivalry’.
It was then that Albert’s speech took a serious turn. He shifted away from dutiful expressions of pride to tackle some of the big issues in statistics. First, he spoke of the alleged dullness of figures and tables. Statistics held little appeal for the general public, a fact that was as understandable as it was regrettable. ‘The public generally … connect in their minds statistics, if not with unwelcome taxa-tion (for which they naturally form an important basis), certainly with political controversies, in which they are in the habit of seeing public men making use of the most opposite statistical results, with equal assurance in support of the most opposite arguments.’ There was no justification for manipulating numbers and calculations but, in Albert’s opinion, the fact that men of science and poli-tics were relying on statistical data more and more meant they were attributing growing importance to statistics. Whatever the prejudices, statistics was there to stay.
The prince went on to say that while statistics appeared to be an imperfect science – more an auxiliary discipline than an autonomous field of inquiry – this was not actually the case. Statistics abstained from the discovery and pres-entation of universal laws, which was the province of politics and the natural sciences, but did so out of ‘self-imposed abnegation’. ‘Those general laws, there-fore, in the knowledge of which we recognise one of the highest treasures of
man on earth, are often left unexpressed, though rendered self-apparent, as they may be read in the uncompromising, rigid figures placed before them’.
The crux of his argument lay in his next point: the belief that statistics was an attack on the Christian faith. The year 1860 was a turbulent time for faith and religion in Britain. A fierce public debate about Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species (1859) had erupted and had converged around the dichotomy between creation and evolution, between faith and science. And if that were not enough, in 1860 colleagues of Benjamin Jowett, a professor of Greek, compiled a controversial book entitled Essays and Reviews in which they defended the proposition that the Bible should be interpreted like any other book and the Scriptures could be analysed like the great classics of Antiquity. There was a considerable risk that statistics would be tarred with the same brush as godless science. Albert understood this and tried to knock the bottom out of the argu-ment. First, he summarised the fears of the opponents: statistics robbed the Almighty of His power, transformed His world into a machine and led to fatal-ism because it reduced human beings to mere cogs in the machine with no will of their own. The prince’s rejoinder to this criticism is a paragon of rhetoric:
Is the power of God destroyed or diminished by the discovery of the fact that the earth requires 365 revolutions upon its own axis to every revolution round the sun, giving us so many days to our year, and that the moon changes 13 times during that period, that the tide changes every six hours, that water boils at a temperature of 212 degrees Fahrenheit, that the nightingale sings only in April and May, that all birds lay eggs, that 105 boys are born to every 100 girls? Or is a man a less free agent because it has been ascertained that a generation lasts about forty years; that there are annually put in the post-offices the same number of letters on which the writers had forgotten to place any address; that the number of crimes committed under the same local, national, and social conditions is constant; that the full-grown man ceases to find amusement in the sports of the child?
Albert went on to explain that the field of statistics did not claim that this was how things should be, only that this was how things had always been, and as long as the same causes persisted, it was highly likely that the same effects would be produced. In nature there are no certainties, only likelihoods. Albert marvelled at how statistical data could be used to determine human life expect-ancy so precisely that life insurance companies could create a specially adapted policy for any individual. Without, he emphasised, disrespectfully attempting to determine the person’s date of death.
Albert’s best defence against religiously inspired opposition was his proposi-tion that the general laws and patterns revealed by statistics were not applicable to each individual case, and therefore did not restrict human freedom. The only real connection between statistics and the Almighty was that the former showed that He had created a world governed by unchanging laws, but where every human being was a free agent, with full and free command of his facul-ties. This was met with thunderous applause.
Having cracked the hardest nut, Albert ended his speech in style. He stressed the importance of international congresses: which ‘pave the way to an agree-ment among different Governagree-ments and nations’. He reiterated the basics of statistics that Quetelet, his teacher, had formulated seven years before at the opening of the first congress: to study many facts, varied facts, comparable facts and facts collected at different times and places. The previous congresses had issued many recommendations to answer this call. Albert had to admit that some states had failed to comply fully. Since he could not possibly blame his guests, he acknowledged that Britain had not toed the line on population and law enforcement statistics. On the other hand, he hoped that other countries would follow Britain’s good example in the areas of agricultural and trade statis-tics. Albert predicted that the figures would show how interdependent nations had become. In this interdependent world, competition and rivalry were bene-ficial, as long as peace and goodwill were preserved.
Goodwill was indeed essential but difficult to orchestrate. A curious incident occurred immediately after the opening session on 16 July. Old Lord Brougham, as radical at 82 as he was in his youth and not one to mince his words, stood up and addressed the American ambassador, George Mifflin Dallas. The political climate in the United States was highly charged (the Civil War would begin a few months later) and the world had taken notice. Dallas had been ambassador under President Lincoln’s predecessor, James Buchanan, and as such had been involved in several diplomatic conflicts between Britain and the United States concerning the slave trade. Brougham maliciously asked whether Dallas had noticed that there was a black man in the room. Dallas remained uncomforta-bly silent, but Martin R. Delany, the black man in question, took it upon himself to reassure Prince Albert and Lord Brougham, stating simply ‘I am a man’.
According to his biographer, this was his shortest but most effective speech.4 Delany had been invited to the congress because of his struggle for a homeland in Africa for black Americans, an endeavour that had found some support in Britain. The Times wrote the next day that Lord Brougham’s impertinent ques-tion ‘elicited a round of cheering very extraordinary for an assemblage of sedate statisticians’. It took a great deal of effort to prevent a disruption of diplomatic relations between Britain and the United States. It was clear that the congress was not immured from political issues, however much the statisticians or Prince Albert, for that matter, wished it was.
The Times was rather critical of the state of statistics in Britain. In an article published on 17 July the paper saw the fact that the Prince had opened the congress as evidence that the true value of statistics was not appreciated in government circles. A minister would have little to say if asked about the appli-cation of statistics in legislation. According to The Times, politics was about interests, conflicts and sentiments, but ‘dry statistics are very seldom mentioned, except to be disposed of’. The science of statistics was not part of ‘hard poli-tics’ in Britain, although it had proven that certain occupations, bad drains, crowded buildings, bad water and leaky gaspipes were life-threatening (as was
the polluted Thames). Boisterous speakers, the paper continued, were ready to flatly deny that there was any danger at all to be concerned about or perhaps claim, but only under duress, that a slight shortening of the lifespan was insig-nificant. ‘Nothing but the small still voice of a statistical demonstration will beat these loud talkers off the field’.
Albert’s speech set the tone for the congress, but not the language. Once again there was a debate about what the official language should be. As he had in Paris before, Debrauz proposed to accept French as the lingua franca, cleverly appeal-ing to the ‘British freedom’ of which Prince Albert had spoken so highly. But Debrauz was fighting a losing battle; Farr, the organiser of the London congress, had already announced that both English and French could be spoken. The session chairman, William Francis Cowper, soothed a potential conflict by deciding that the congress would follow the same procedure as the last one, namely that the language of the host country and French would be accepted.
All the afternoon plenary sessions were held in the Large Hall of King’s College in Somerset House, a colossal complex between the Strand and what is now Victoria Embankment. Somerset House accommodated several adminis-trative services, including the Inland Revenue Office, the Audit Office, the Wills Office and the General Register Office, and a few learned societies, such as the Geological Society and the Royal Society of Antiquaries. King’s College occu-pied the east wing. It was the ideal place to hold a congress. Numerous rooms with a scholarly ambiance were available for the morning sessions. And hotels were abundant in the neighbourhood.
Many of the official delegates travelled to London a few days before the congress began. After three congresses, a kind of fellowship had arisen among the regular participants and they had agreed to meet up in London in advance of the official proceedings. Jan Ackersdijck, one of the Dutch delegates, arrived on 11 July and took a room near the British Museum. He participated in various preparatory meetings and went on a tourist excursion with Berg, Engel, Hopf, Quetelet, Czoernig, Asher, Sierakowski, Von Bouschen, Von Baumhauer, Brown and Hendricks, the crème de la crème of international statistics. On 13 July he joined the company of statisticians who in those days met regularly at the home of Florence Nightingale, who incidentally did not participate in the discussions.5 She wrote to her father that he should send her all of his flowers, fruit, vegetables and whatever else he could spare. This was a major event that would ‘cement the peace of Europe’.6 Expectations were high, and not just Nightingale’s. Farr and all the regular congress participants were determined to create as much harmony among themselves as possible before the official activities commenced. Only then was there a chance that their governments would accept the resolutions adopted by the congress. After three congresses, it was high time they did.
Political arithmetic and other roots of statistics
Britain had much to offer the international statistical community.
Notwithstanding The Times’s bitter commentary on the disparagement of statistics in government circles, the country had a rich statistical tradition. The manuals that didn’t hark back to the Domesday Book proudly referred to the seventeenth-century numerical exercises of William Petty and John Graunt, which were generally considered to be precursors of statistics. Petty coined the term ‘political arithmetic’ to express his predilection for numbers. ‘The method I take … is not very usual; for instead of using only comparative and superlative Words, and intellectual Arguments, I have taken the course … to express myself in Terms of Number, Weight, or Measure.’7 Petty’s zeal for numbers pertaining to population, housing, capital, trade and other economic indicators sprang from the desire to set numerical criteria for state power. His contemporary, Graunt, was particularly interested in mortality rates, which he attempted to couple with birth and immigration rates. He observed many trends that tempted him to make pronouncements about population dynamics in London and elsewhere in Britain. The belief in order and constant ratios would turn out to be trap that only a few statisticians would manage to avoid in the centuries that followed.
The concept of statistics entered the English language at the end of the eight-eenth century. John Sinclair’s Statistical Account of Scotland, which was published in volumes between 1791 and 1799, made it a permanent fixture. Sinclair was responsible for the frequently cited distinction between the German notion of statistics (i.e. investigation of national political power and thus limited to state affairs) and the Anglo-Saxon interpretation, which was based on the idea that the well-being of the country’s population was the object of statistical research.
It is an appealing contrast, but ultimately this two-dimensional portrayal of the relationship between the state, society and statistics in the nineteenth century falls flat.
Britain itself is a case in point. In the first half of the century, the devel-opment of British statistics was more varied than Sinclair’s dichotomy would suggest. There was great political freedom, which meant it was possible to experiment with statistics in many different areas. Since 1801 Britain had been conducting a census every ten years. Initially the counts were crude but they foreshadowed a more extensive government statistics; Malthus’s frightening proposition that population growth could only be restrained by famine, disease and crime sparked an interest in accurate population figures; and among politi-cal economists the clamour for reliable statistics was growing louder. There was no single statistics movement, as has been suggested. At most, there was an emerging ‘tendency’ – as Quetelet would have put it – to substantiate argu-ments with statistical data. For example, in the introduction to the first edition of Das Kapital (1867) Karl Marx cast back to a tradition of social statistics, which manifested itself in an endless series of reports by factory inspectors, physicians and commissioners charged with studying women’s labour and child labour, living conditions and nutrition.8
The tradition to which Marx referred was more recent than he may have thought. It was not until the years after 1830 – the same period when statistical activity began to diversify – that people started conducting social surveys in the large cities. It was not by accident that the rise of statistics in those years coin-cided with a strengthening of the central state, which – until then – bore little resemblance to states like France, Prussia and Austria. Very much depended on the cooperation and motivation of local government. The centralisation of knowledge coincided with, and in some ways even laid the foundation for, the
The tradition to which Marx referred was more recent than he may have thought. It was not until the years after 1830 – the same period when statistical activity began to diversify – that people started conducting social surveys in the large cities. It was not by accident that the rise of statistics in those years coin-cided with a strengthening of the central state, which – until then – bore little resemblance to states like France, Prussia and Austria. Very much depended on the cooperation and motivation of local government. The centralisation of knowledge coincided with, and in some ways even laid the foundation for, the