On December 16, 1867, General Garfield made a second speech on the subject, so elaborate and remarkable, so unlike any thing to be found elsewhere in all the annals of the American Congress, that we yield large space to it. The latter part of the speech relates to the defects of the old law, and the advantages of the proposed new one: “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.