The final decisions that will be taken either by the Commission or by Parliament on questions of administrative policy and electoral machinery must therefore involve the balancing of all these and many other considerations by an essentially quantitative process.  The line, that is to say, which ultimately cuts the curves indicated by the evidence will allow less weight either to anxiety for the future as a motive for exertion, or to personal health as increasing personal efficiency, than would be given to either if it were the sole factor to be considered.  There will be more ‘bureaucracy’ than would be desirable if it were not for the need of economising the energies of the elected representatives, and less bureaucracy than there would be if it were not desirable to retain popular sympathy and consent.  Throughout the argument the population of England will be looked upon not (as John Stuart Mill would have said) ’on the average or en masse,’[47] but as consisting of individuals who can be arranged in ‘polygons of variation’ according to their nervous and physical strength, their ‘character’ and the degree to which ideas of the future are likely to affect their present conduct.

[47] See p. 132.

Meanwhile the public which will discuss the Report has changed since 1834.  Newspaper writers, in discussing the problem of destitution, tend now to use, not general terms applied to whole social classes like the ‘poor,’ ‘the working class,’ or ‘the lower orders,’ but terms expressing quantitative estimates of individual variations, like ’the submerged tenth,’ or the ‘unemployable’; while every newspaper reader is fairly familiar with the figures in the Board of Trade monthly returns which record seasonal and periodical variations of actual unemployment among Trade Unionists.

One could give many other instances of this beginning of a tendency in political thinking, to change from qualitative to quantitative forms of argument.  But perhaps it will be sufficient to give one relating to international politics.  ’Sixty years ago sovereignty was a simple question of quality.  Austin had demonstrated that there must be a sovereign everywhere, and that sovereignty, whether in the hands of an autocracy or a republic, must be absolute.  But the Congress which in 1885 sat at Berlin to prevent the partition of Africa from causing a series of European wars as long as those caused by the partition of America, was compelled by the complexity of the problems before it to approach the question of sovereignty on quantitative lines.  Since 1885 therefore every one has become familiar with the terms then invented to express gradations of sovereignty:  ‘Effective occupation,’ ‘Hinterland,’ ’Sphere of Influence’—­to which the Algeciras Conference has perhaps added a lowest grade, ‘Sphere of Legitimate Aspiration.’  It is already as unimportant to decide whether a given region is British territory or not, as it is to decide whether a bar containing a certain percentage of carbon should be called iron or steel.