The Congress of Vienna had its Statistical Commission, one of the most successful parts of the Congress, which collected the statistical data for parcelling out peoples among the various princes. It was limited, however, to statistics of population, the counting of heads being the only basis there admitted in the balancing of territorial adjustments. The Paris Conference needed a far larger and more varied body of knowledge, not only because it covered every part of the world, but because its declared principles necessitated information of every sort respecting the history, traditions, aspirations, ethnology, government, resources, and economic conditions of the peoples with which it was to deal. Information the Conference had in huge quantities, literally by the ton. It came in every day in scores of foreign newspapers, in masses of pamphlets, in piles of diplomatic reports and despatches. Every special interest was on hand, eager to present its case orally to the Conference or its commissions, to enlighten personally the commissioners or their subordinates, to hand in endless volumes of more or less trustworthy ethnographical maps and statistics, of pictures and description, of propagandist matter of every conceivable sort. A steady head, a critical judgment, and a considerable background of fact were required to keep one’s vision clear amidst this mass of confusing and conflicting material. The collecting and sifting of such information for the Conference had begun years before. The French, systematic as always, had appointed governmental commissions, economic, military, geographic, and had also a special university committee with Professor Lavisse as chairman, the Comité d’Etudes, which prepared two admirable volumes, with detailed maps, on the European problems of the conference. The British had printed two considerable series of Handbooks, one got out by the Naval Intelligence Division under the guidance of Professor W. McNeil Dixon of Glasgow, the other prepared in the Historical Section of the Foreign Office under the editorship of Sir George Prothero. The United States had put little into print, but more than a year before the armistice, by direction of the President, Colonel Edward M. House had organized a comprehensive investigation, known as the ‘Inquiry,’ with its headquarters at the building of the American Geographical Society in New York City, whose secretary, Dr. Isaiah Bowman, served as executive officer. It enlisted throughout the country the services of a large number of geographers, historians, economists, statisticians, ethnologists, and students of government and international law; and carloads of maps, statistics, manuscript reports, and fundamental books of reference accompanied the American Commission to Paris. The specialists who went along or were later brought together were organized into a group of economic advisers--Messrs. Baruch, Davis, Lamont, McCormick, Taussig, Young, and their staffs--; two technical