I have also to acknowledge my extreme indebtedness to Mr. Reginald H. Hooker, for invaluable assistance afforded to me, during my recent illness, in preparing this address. Without his help it would scarcely have been possible for me to submit it to the Society this evening.

PROCEEDINGS on the 17th NOVEMBER, 1896.

AFTER the preliminary formal business of the meeting,

The CHAIRMAN (Mr. CHARLES BOOTH) said he had to apologise for occupying his present position, and was sure that all present would regret to hear that the President, Mr. John B. Martin, had been seriously ill with a severe attack of pleurisy. Up to the last moment he had hoped and intended to be present, but his courage had had to give way to prudence and the imperative orders of his medical adviser, as was stated in the following letter which he (the Chairman) had just received.

DEAR MR. BOOTH,

17, HYDE PARK GATE, S.W., 17th November, 1896.

I am not feeling quite as bright as I did when you called on Sunday, and I am afraid that I must submit to the doctor's imperative orders, which I might otherwise have defied, and put up with the great disappointment of absenting myself from the meeting this afternoon. Please to express to the meeting the great disappointment which I feel.

I have said in my address that I look upon its delivery as by no means the essential part of the President's duties, and I trust that during my tenure of office, I may have the satisfaction of promoting the interests of the Society in other ways. Thanking you for your kindness in taking my place,

I am,

Charles Booth, Esq.,

Yours sincerely,

JOHN B. MARTIN.

Royal United Service Institution,

Whitehall, S.W.

The President's Inaugural Address was then read by Mr. R. H. Hooker.

The CHAIRMAN said that he believed the portion of the address which had been omitted would prove to be of no less value than that which they had heard, for an account of what was being done in other countries with regard to statistics was quite as necessary as a discussion of what statistics were and what they could do. The collection of this valuable mass of material had been a work of considerable time, and in putting it together in the way he had, Mr. Martin had added a great deal to the grasp which could be taken of what statistics were doing all over the world. Altogether it was a most valuable address, and in asking those present to pass a vote of thanks to the President, he should

like to associate with it an expression of sympathy with him at not being able to attend the meeting, and in having had the disadvantage of being ill while preparing it, thus aggravating the very considerable labour involved. An address of this kind formed an admirable justification, if one were needed, of the policy of selecting their President from amongst the working members of the Society.

Dr. W. OGLE said that Mr. Booth had expressed so fully the thanks of the meeting to the President for his Address, and the general regret at his unavoidable absence, that the duty of seconding the vote of thanks became a mere formality. They had all listened to the Address with much interest; and this, though it came before them with two disadvantages-firstly, that, owing to the exigencies of time, it had only been read in part; and, secondly, that it had not been delivered orally by the writer himself. For though Mr. Hooker had read it to them with most admirable clearness, an address could not but lose some of its charm when it did not reach the ear directly from the lips of the author. An inaugural address, however, onerous as its preparation was, was only a comparatively unimportant part of a President's duty, as was fully recognised in the opening part of the Address itself; and that the more important duties of guiding the course of the Society, of extending its work and influence, and generally of promoting the advance of statistical inquiry, would be worthily carried out by their new President, they had an adequate guarantee in the zeal and success with which he had for sixteen years filled the onerous offices of Honorary and Foreign Secretary. He had much pleasure in seconding the vote of thanks.

ADDRESS to the ECONOMIC SCIENCE and STATISTICS SECTION of the BRITISH ASSOCIATION, held at LIVERPOOL, 1896. By the RIGHT HON. LEONARD Courtney, M.A., M.P., PRESIDENT of the SECTION.

WHEN the British Association revisits a town or city, it is the laudable custom of the President of a Section to refer to what was said by his predecessor in the same chair on the former occasion. I should in any case be disposed to follow this practice, but I could not choose to do otherwise when I find it was my honoured friend Professor Jevons who occupied this place in Liverpool in 1870. He was one of a group which passed away in quick succession, to the great loss of the study of economics in this country, since each had much promise of further usefulness, and left us with labours unfulfilled. Bagehot, Cairnes, Cliffe Leslie, Fawcett, Jevons, occupied a large space in the field of economic study, and no one among them excelled Professor Jevons in the vigour and clearness of his analysis or in the sincerity and range of his speculations. His first work which arrested public attention was perhaps not so much understood as misunderstood. This busy, bustling, hurrying world cannot afford time to pause and examine the consecutive stages of a drawn out argument, and too many caught up and repeated to one another the notion that Jevons predicted a speedy exhaustion of our coalfields, and they and their successors have since been congratulating themselves on their cleverness in disbelieving the prophecy. No such prophecy was in truth ever uttered. The grave warning that was given was of the impossibility of continuing the rate of development of coal production to which we had been accustomed, of slackening, and even arrested growth, and of the increasing difficulty of maintaining a prosperity based on the relative advantages we possessed in the low cost of production of coal; and this warning has been amply verified in the years that have since passed, as will be at once admitted by all who are competent to read and understand the significance of our subsequent experience. But I must not dwell on this branch of Jevons's work nor on the many other contributions he made to the study of our economic life. I am concerned with what he said here twenty-six years since.

At first sight the address of my predecessor may seem looso and discursive; but viewed in due perspective, it appears a serious inquiry into the apparent failure of economic teaching to change

the course and elevate the standard of our social life, and an earnest endeavour to impress these principles more strongly on the public mind, so that the future might better the history he reviewed. He referred to the repeal of the Corn Laws, and owned with regret that the condition of the people was little changed, that pauperism had scarcely abated, that little forethought was shown by the industrial classes in preparing for the chances of the future; and he dwelt on the mischievous influence of the unthinking benevolence of the wealthy in undermining providence by its constant and increasing activity in mitigating the evils of improvidence. Jevons was not content to condemn the doles of past testators; he wanted the reorganisation of the hospital service of our towns, so that, as far at least as the ordinary and inevitable casualties of sickness and accident are concerned, they might be met by the co-operation of workers inspired by motives of selfreliance instead of by ever open gratuitous service making forethought unnecessary and even foolish. In this connection it may be noticed that while giving a hearty welcome to Mr. Forster's Education Act, passed in the same year that he spoke, he noted with satisfaction that primary education had not been made gratuitous so as to take away another support of prudence. It is strange, too, in the light of our recent experience, to find him regretting that the task of remodelling local taxation had not been undertaken, so that local wants might be met by a just apportionment of their charge, and the principles of association of the members of local communities placed on a firmer basis.

It will be seen that what really occupied the mind of my predecessor was the apparent slow success of economic thinkers in influencing political action, and we, looking back over the intervening twenty-six years, have certainly no more cause of congratulation than he felt. We are forced to ask ourselves the same question, What is the reason of our apparent failure? We are driven to examine anew whether our principles are faulty and incomplete, or whether the difficulties in their acceptance, they being sound, lie in the prejudices of popular feeling which politicians are more ready to gratify than to correct.

I do not pause to meet the charges of inhumanity or immorality which have in other times been brought against economists. Jevons pleaded for the benevolence of Malthus, who might indeed be presumed, as an English clergyman, to be not altogether inhuman or immoral. In truth, everyone who has ever had any thought about social or fiscal legislation-and we have had such laws among ourselves for five centuries-everyone who has ever tried to influence the currents of foreign trade-and such attempts date from an equally remote past-has been moved by some train of