The Condition of the People question, as Carlyle says, is the most pressing of all. But it is a question almost impossible to answer, and few inquiries are more futile than the attempt to ascertain the comparative well-being of different countries. Two inquirers with equal knowledge of a country will collect statistics and compile elaborate volumes, and one will come to the conclusion that the people are extremely well off and the other that they are in extreme destitution. They will then apply themselves to another country with the same contradictory results. Carlyle complains: "Hitherto, after many tables and statements, one is still left mainly to what he can ascertain by his own eyes, looking at the concrete phenomenon for himself. There is no other method; and yet it is a most imperfect method. Each man expands his own hand-breadth of observation to the limits of the general whole; more or less, each man must take what he himself has seen and ascertained for a sample of all that is seeable and ascertainable. Hence discrepancies, controversies, widespread, long-continued; which there is at present no means or hope of satisfactorily ending." Wages, price of food, rents, and the other weapons of the statistician are of very little use in attacking the problem. The Hindu peasant may be too poor to buy meat, but if he is non-carnivorous, the deprivation is no hardship, and he may enjoy much greater material well-being than many who eat meat daily. But knowledge of the elementary facts about the life of a people seems to have little effect in elucidating the question, for, as just remarked, people with long experience come to diametrically opposite conclusions. Those who have lived all their lives in England or Ireland disagree _toto cælo_ in their opinions as to the well-being of the working classes. Many observers, of course, believing that facts are silent until they are interpreted by theory, use their facts for the sole purpose of making their theory speak, but, as a matter of fact, entirely disinterested persons differ quite as profoundly. One is tempted to believe that in the Condition of the People question there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so. Probably no one could get an idea of the condition of the poor approaching in any degree to accuracy without living long among them in exactly their way, and even then his conclusions would be warped in every way by reference to his own standards and by the fact that the circumstances, which to him were temporal, were to his associates everlasting. Further, his imperfect knowledge would apply only to one people and so would be useless for the purposes of comparison. It is not likely, therefore, that a visitor will be able to impart much information upon the subject, but the opinions of the experienced and the testimony of statistics form a rough guide, and these may be given.