Wordsworth’s Prelude describes with pathetic clearness a mental history, which must have been that of many thousands of men who could not write great poetry, and whose moral and intellectual forces have been blunted and wasted by political disillusionment.  He tells us that the ‘man’ whom he loved in 1792, when the French Revolution was still at its dawn, was seen in 1798 to be merely ‘the composition of the brain.’  After agonies of despair and baffled affection, he saw ’the individual man ... the man whom we behold with our own eyes.’[45] But in that change from a false simplification of the whole to the mere contemplation of the individual, Wordsworth’s power of estimating political forces or helping in political progress was gone for ever.

[45] The Prelude, Bk.  XIII., ll. 81-84.

If this constantly repeated disappointment is to cease, quantitative method must spread in politics and must transform the vocabulary and the associations of that mental world into which the young politician enters.  Fortunately such a change seems at least to be beginning.  Every year larger and more exact collections of detailed political facts are being accumulated; and collections of detailed facts, if they are to be used at all in political reasoning, must be used quantitatively.  The intellectual work of preparing legislation, whether carried on by permanent officials or Royal Commissions or Cabinet Ministers takes every year a more quantitative and a less qualitative form.

Compare for instance the methods of the present Commission on the Poor Law with those of the celebrated and extraordinarily able Commission which drew up the new Poor Law in 1833-34.  The argument of the earlier Commissioners’ Report runs on lines which it would be easy to put in a priori syllogistic form.  All men seek pleasure and avoid pain.  Society ought to secure that pain attaches to anti-social, and pleasure to social conduct.  This may be done by making every man’s livelihood and that of his children normally dependent upon his own exertions, by separating those destitute persons who cannot do work useful to the community from those who can, and by presenting these last with the alternative of voluntary effort or painful restriction.  This leads to ’a principle which we find universally admitted, even by those whose practice is at variance with it, that the situation [of the pauper] on the whole shall not be made really or apparently so eligible as the situation of the independent labourer of the lowest class.’[46] The a priori argument is admirably illustrated by instances, reported by the sub-commissioners or given in evidence before the Commission, indicating that labouring men will not exert themselves unless they are offered the alternative of starvation or rigorous confinement, though no attempt is made to estimate the proportion of the working population of England whose character and conduct is represented by each instance.