> Quetelet the practicing statistician was always more sensible than Quetelet the social physicist.

> "Like other sciences,that of Statistics seeks to deduce from well-established facts certain general principles which interest and affect mankind; it uses the same instruments of comparison, calculation, and deduction: but its peculiarity is that it proceeds wholly by the accumulation and comparison of facts, and does not admit of any kind of speculation."

> It is not needful in the present day to discourage thinkers, they are not too numerous.
Irrelevant to the discussion, but this was amusing to read. Some things really don't change.

> Implicitly, at least, statistics tended to equalize subjects. It makes no sense to count people if their common personhood is not seen as somehow more significant than their differences. The Old Regime saw not autonomous persons, but members of estates. They possessed not individual rights, but a maze of privileges, given by history, identified with nature, and inherited through birth. The social world was too intricately differentiated for a mere census to tell much about what really mattered.

> According to Malthus, the principle of population contradicted the utopian schemes of Condorcet and Godwin by showing "that though human institutions appear to be, and indeed often are, the obvious and obstrusive causes of much mischief to society, they are, in reality, light and superficial, in comparison with those deeper-seated causes of evil, which result from the laws of nature and the passions of mankind." Malthus held society to be a dynamic and potentially unstable force, an incipient source of turmoil that threatened to confront the lover of English freedoms with a choice betweeen revolution and repression. To avert this, Malthus upheld the need for public education to acquaint the people with the true causes of their misery. Political leadership was not unimportant, for a wise government could perhaps chart a safe course through those troubled seas. For this, however, it required a familiarity with the principles of political economy, and also that "cleared insight into the internal structure of human society" which could be derived from statistical investigations.

> The statistical initiative in France was taken chiefly by advocates of public health, particularly by army surgeons released from service at the conclusion of the Napoleonic wars. Initially, these writers focused their attention on the salubrity of orphanages, prisons, and poorhouses, usually with the specific aim of instigating reform of the institution in question. Other public-spirited mutations of the old descriptive statistics followed shortly thereafter. Among the most noteworthy and influential was the use of statistics in the campaign for public education. A magical significance was attached to the proposition that education leads to a reduction of crime, which was conclusively demonstrated again and again through the shameless manipulation or misinterpretation of numerical records. A. Taillandier was able to establish, without any information on literacy rates in the population at large, that "the definitive result of these researches on the instruction of prisoners reveals that 67 out of 100 are able neither to read nor write. What stronger proof could there be that ignorance, like idleness, is the mother of all vices?" In the same vein, the patient forebearance of statisticians from admitting preconceived opinions was revealed in the announcement of a prize for the best memoir on the abolition of the death penalty by the [pardon the latinization] Societe francaise de statistique universelle: "By attaining statistical certainty that fewer crimes are committed where the penalty of death has been abolished, the influence that a gentler and more genuinely philosophical legislation exerts on the criminality of human actions can be better appreciated."
>
> Although the occasional appearance of numerical results directly contradicting preconceptions of this sort obliged statistical authors to maintain a certain degree of flexibility in interpreting their figures, the general disposition of these writers was to present their findings as direct and incontrovertible proof of the propositions they seemed to support. Statistics, wrote Alphonse De Candolle, "has become an inexhaustible arsenal of double-edged weapons or arguments applicable to everything, which have silenced many by their numerical form." Less cynically, if more mysteriously, Moreau de Jonnes claimed that the figures of statistics "are like the hieroglyphics of ancient Egypt, where the lessons of history, the precepts of wisdom, and the secrets of the future were concealed in mysterious characters. They reveal the increase in the power of empires, the progress of arts and of civilization, and the ascent or retrogression of the European societies." Statistics "does not have the power to act," he wrote, "but it has the power to reveal, and happily, in our day, this is practically the same thing."

> Ignorance and filth were seen as responsible for the prevalance of disease, the rampant growth of crime, and the threat of domestic turmoil among the working classes. Statistical investigation, it was presumed, would provide empirical support for the reforms that were obviously needed. Thus the Royal Cornwall Polytechnic Society issued the following statement in 1837:
> > If "the proper study of mankind be man," the value of statistical information can no longer be doubted. It stimulates the benevolence and gives aim and effect to the energies, of the philanthropist; it furnishes the legislator with materials on which to found remedial measures for social derangement, and plans for increasing the mass of social happiness; and though its conclusions often consist in a bare numerical statement of aggregate results, yet they come home with all the authority of stubborn facts, and often tell more than the most elaborate moral appeal. From information thus furnished, it cannot be questioned that the public attention has been fastened, with an intensity never before given to the subject, upon the physical and moral degradation of the poorer classes in the metropolis and many of our large towns. The appeal thus made has been nobly respondedto; the dry facts have been interpreted; and means have been adopted for carrying the blessings of education, order, and virtue into those dark recesses where ignorance, vice, and misrule appeared to have fortified themselves in impenetrable obscurity.

> The motto of the new society was *Aliis exterendum*--"to be threshed out by others"--and the council declared that "the first and most essential rule" of the conduct of the society was "to exclude all opinions." As late as 1861, William Farr wrote to Florence Nightingale: "We do not want impressions. We want facts.....Again I must repeat my objection to intermingling Causation with Statistics....The statistician has nothing to do with causation; he is almost certain in the present state of knowledge to err....You complain that your report would be dry. The dryer the better. Statistics should be the dryest of all reading."

Pages 41-55 talk about Quetelet at length, go read it if you're curious. He's not the brightest mind in the field, but he was the most attention-grabbing popularizer of it.

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