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Updated: May 16, 2025
At the beginning of the "twentieth century" a careful study by trustworthy contemporary statisticians of the public records and those apparently private ones known as "newspapers" showed that in a population of about 80,000,000 the annual number of homicides was not less than 10,000; and this continued year after year to increase, not only absolutely, but proportionately, until, in the words of Dumbleshaw, who is thought to have written his famous "Memoirs of a Survivor" in the year 1908 of their era, "it would seem that the practice of suicide is a needless custom, for if a man but have patience his neighbor is sure to put him out of his misery."
So that the statisticians have to exaggerate all the figures in order to establish a maximum of eight million producers to forty-five million inhabitants. Strictly speaking the creators of the goods exported from Britain to all the ends of the earth comprise only from six to seven million workers.
The census for 1870 reaped the benefits of the new determination; yet even of this General Walker was forced to write: "This census concludes that from one to two hundred thousand workers are not accounted for, from the difficulty experienced in getting proper returns. The nice distinctions of foreign statisticians are impossible." And he adds:
If, as is believed by many statisticians, the census of 1860 should show that the centre of population and power in these United States is steadily advancing westward, and that by the year 1880 it will be at some point on the Great Lakes, then, certainly, the history and resources of those inland seas cannot fail to be interesting to the general reader.
South Carolina furnished more troops in proportion to her male white population than any State in the South, being forty-five thousand to August, 1862, and eight thousand reserves. It is supposed by competent statisticians that the South lost in killed and died of wounds, ninety-four thousand; and lost by disease, one hundred and twenty-five thousand.
It is estimated by Wuggard statisticians that in twenty years from the close of the war the annual appropriation for pensions in Ug will amount to no less than one hundred and sixty gumdums to every enlisted man in the kingdom. But they know not the Uggard customs of exterminating the army.
Hundreds of shells have already fallen in the town, and there are some zealous statisticians who compile charts showing exactly where each shell struck and the direction from which it was fired, but the majority of us do not concern ourselves much about any that burst beyond a radius of fifty yards from our own camps or houses, and so many fall harmless that we seldom ask whether anybody has been hit, and it sometimes happens therefore that one does not hear of serious casualties except by accident.
Secondly, the careful figures collected by these statisticians show that the national income equally divided throughout the community would yield an average income, per family, of about £182 per annum. A comparison of this sum with the average working-class income of £94, brings home the extent of inequality in the distribution of the national income.
"In 1913, in this country at least 15,000 women, it is estimated, died from conditions caused by childbirth; about 7,000 of these died from childbed fever and the remaining 8,000 from diseases now known to be to a great extent preventable or curable," says Dr. Meigs in her summary, "Physicians and statisticians agree that these figures are a great underestimate."
But to the public every Pasteur patient who did not die was miraculously saved from an agonizing death by the beneficent white magic of that most trusty of all wizards, the man of science. Even trained statisticians often fail to appreciate the extent to which statistics are vitiated by the unrecorded assumptions of their interpreters.
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