THE inquiry through which the reader has been invited to travel will probably suggest several considerations; and first of all the importance of putting a stop to the statistical nuisance which has of late years flourished with so rank a growth. Surely it is time that members of both Houses of Parliament, who resent so jealously any attempt on the part of Government officials to exceed or fall short of the precise instructions given them, in making returns, should raise their voices against the system of publishing with official statistics the crude, and, as it has been seen, the nonsensical but pernicious theorizings of the persons entrusted with the task of compiling reports. Like Mr. Mantalini, the majority of persons never trouble themselves to examine a numerical process, but content themselves with simply asking what is the total; and it therefore becomes the duty of Parliament to see that the unsuspecting confidence of the public is not abused. The reader must not suppose that the Report on Religious Worship is the only recent one which is open to objection. The Census Report on Schools is just as full of fallacies; and it has certainly been one of the strangest phenomena ever witnessed in the history of public discussion, that the schemes of Lord John Russell and Sir John Pakington, assailed as they were on every side, should have escaped what would, after all, have been the most effective blow that could have been aimed against them—the simple but conclusive fact, so easily deducible from the premises of the Report on Schools, that nearly as many children were under education as could be induced to attend unless they were driven to the class of the teacher by the policeman’s staff. {27}