“The modern census is so closely related to the science of statistics that no general discussion of it is possible without considering the principles on which statistical science rests and the objects which it proposes to reach.
“The science of statistics is of recent date, and, like many of its sister sciences, owes its origin to the best and freest impulses of modern civilization. The enumerations of inhabitants and the appraisements of property made by some of the nations of antiquity were practical means employed sometimes to distribute political power, but more frequently to adjust the burdens of war, but no attempt was made among them to classify the facts obtained so as to make them the basis of scientific induction. The thought of studying these facts to ascertain the wants of society had not then dawned upon the human mind, and, of course, there was not a science of statistics in this modern sense.
“It is never easy to fix the precise date of the birth of any science, but we may safely say that statistics did not enter its scientific phase before 1749, when it received from Professor Achenwall, of Göttingen, not only its name, but the first comprehensive statement of its principles. Without pausing to trace the stages of its growth, some of the results of the cultivation of statistics in the spirit and methods of science may be stated as germane to this discussion:
“1. It has developed the truth that society is an organism, whose elements and forces conform to laws as constant and pervasive as those which govern the material universe; and that the study of these laws will enable man to ameliorate his condition, to emancipate himself from the cruel dominion of superstition, and from countless evils which were once thought beyond his control, and will make him the master rather than the slave of nature. Mankind have been slow to believe that order reigns in the universe—that the world is a cosmos and not a chaos.
“The assertion of the reign of law has been stubbornly resisted at every step. The divinities of heathen superstition still linger in one form or another in the faith of the ignorant, and even intelligent men shrink from the contemplation of one supreme will acting regularly, not fortuitously, through laws beautiful and simple rather than through a fitful and capricious system of intervention.
“Lecky tells us that in the early ages it was believed that the motion of the heavenly bodies, as well as atmospheric changes, was affected by angels. In the Talmud, a special angel was assigned to every star and every element, and similar notions were general throughout the Middle Ages.
“The scientific spirit has cast out the demons, and presented us with nature clothed and in her right mind and living under the reign of law. It has given us, for the sorceries of the alchemist, the beautiful laws of chemistry; for the dreams of the astrologer, the sublime truths of astronomy; for the wild visions of cosmogony, the monumental records of geology; for the anarchy of diabolism, the laws of God. But more stubborn still has been the resistance against every attempt to assert the reign of law in the realm of society. In that struggle, statistics has been the handmaid of science, and has poured a flood of light upon the dark questions of famine and pestilence, ignorance and crime, disease and death.
“We no longer hope to predict the career and destiny of a human being by studying the conjunction of planets that presided at his birth. We study rather the laws of life within him, and the elements and forces of nature and society around him. We no longer attribute the untimely death of infants wholly to the sin of Adam, for we know it is the result of bad nursing and ignorance. We are beginning to acknowledge that—
“‘The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,
But in ourselves, that we are underlings.’