“In these remarks I disclaim any reference to the dominion of the Creator over his spiritual universe, and the high and sacred duty of all his intelligent creatures to reverence and worship him. I speak solely of those laws that relate to the physical, intellectual, and social life of man. “2. The development of statistics is causing history to be rewritten. Till recently the historian studied nations in the aggregate, and gave us only the story of princes, dynasties, sieges, and battles. Of the people themselves—the great social body with life, growth, sources, elements, and laws of its own—he told us nothing. Now statistical inquiry leads him into the hovels, homes, workshops, mines, fields, prisons, hospitals, and all places where human nature displays its weakness and its strength. In these explorations he discovers the seeds of national growth and decay, and thus becomes the prophet of his generation. “Without the aid of statistics, that most masterly chapter of human history, the third of Macaulay’s first volume, could never have been written. “3. Statistical science is indispensable to modern statesmanship. In legislation as in physical science it is beginning to be understood that we can control terrestrial forces only by obeying their laws. The legislator must formulate in his statues not only the national will, but also those great laws of social life revealed by statistics. He must study society rather than black-letter learning. He must learn the truth ‘that society usually prepares the crime, and the criminal is only the instrument that accomplishes it;’ that statesmanship consists rather in removing causes than in punishing or evading results. “Light is itself a great corrective. A thousand wrongs and abuses that grow in the darkness disappear like owls and bats before the light of day. For example, who can doubt that before many months the press of this country will burn down the whipping-posts of Delaware as effectually as the mirrors of Archimedes burned the Roman ships in the harbor of Syracuse? “I know of no writer who has exhibited the importance of this science to statesmanship so fully and so ably as Sir George Cornwall Lewis, in his treatise _On the Methods of Observation and Reasoning on Politics_. “After showing that politics is now taking its place among the sciences, and as a science its superstructure rests on observed and classified facts, he says of the registration of political facts, which consists of history and statistics, that ‘it may be considered as the entrance and propylæa to politics. It furnishes the materials upon which the artificer operates, which he hews into shape and builds up into a symmetrical structure.’ “In a subsequent chapter, he portrays the importance of statistics to the practical statesman in this strong and lucid language: