It was the business of the thirties to transfer the treatment of ...

It was the business of the thirties to transfer the treatment of affairs from a polemical to a statistical basis, from Humbug to Humdrum.' In 1830 there were hardly any figures to work on. Even the Census was still far from perfect: in that of 1831 the acreage of England is given twice over, with a discrepancy as large as Berkshire.

Imports were still reckoned by Official Values based on the prices of 1690. But statistical inquiry, fostered very largely by the development of the Insurance business, was a passion of the times. The Statistical department of the Board of Trade was founded in 1832; the department of the Registrar-General in 1838; the Royal Statistical Society sprang out of the Cambridge meeting of the British Association in 1833. Two private compilations of the thirties,

McCulloch's Statistical Account of the British Empire

and Porter's Progress of the Nation, are still the best approach to Victorian history.

The Brookfields in the fifties claimed to have introduced the new style of conversation, brisk and allusive.

Mrs Carlyle used to torture London parties with the elaboration of her anecdotes. As a symbol of the age, one might cite the Lords' Report on 'the expediency of

Discontinuing the present Mode

of Engrossing Acts of Parliament in Black Letter and substituting a Plain Round Hand'. But until Lord Thring took it in hand, the actual drafting of statutes came far short of these good intentions which gives more space to Oxford than to Canada.

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