a fact of striking interest that, at a time when European governments are instituting systems of state insurance and pensions, maintained wholly or partly by general taxation, the American railroad and industrial corporations are attempting to solve this problem on their own initiative, through private systems supported by the revenues of the pensioning company.

The Commission intends to issue another special report, dealing with the question of pensions for municipal employees. This will embody the results of inquiries instituted by the Commission into the pension systems of all the larger cities in the United States. The problem of pensions confronting the municipality is essentially the same as that with which the large corporations have had to deal. The same reasons that have induced the latter to make special provision for the retirement of aged workers hold good in the case of the municipality. To continue men in the municipal service after they have outlived their usefulness in the positions that they hold means waste of the taxpayers' money and demoralization of the working force. On the other hand, to discharge outright aged workers who have been in the employ of the city for a long period of years is manifestly a harsh course, which the city as an employer of labor cannot afford to sanction by its example. The waste of the present practice of retaining aged employees in the service at regular wages is shown by certain returns prepared by heads of Boston departments, at the request of Mayor George A. Hibbard. The returns show that the total number of employees over sixty-five years of age in various departments is 491. The amount of compensation paid to them is $419,888.45. The number over sixtyfive reported as inefficient is 296, and the compensation paid to this group is $200,194.35. Twenty-five per cent. of these employees have been in the service of the city over thirty years, only 5 per cent. less than five years. The percentage of inefficient employees over sixty-five years of age in some of the departments is strikingly large. In the Cleaning and Watering Division of the Street Department, for example, thirty-five men are employed, of whom all are reported inefficient. In

the Cemetery Department sixteen are employed, of whom all are reported inefficient. The Commission is obtaining similar returns relating to aged municipal employees from other cities in the country. This question of pensions for municipal employees is regarded by the Commission as the most urgent phase of the pension problem. Besides issuing a special report on the subject, the Commission will give it further extended consideration in its final report.

THE RELATION OF STATISTICS TO ECONOMICS AND SOCIOLOGY.*

BY S. N. D. NORTH.

The unavoidable absence of the distinguished President of the American Statistical Association imposes upon me the completion of a duty he has already in large part discharged. At the last annual meeting President Wright delivered the first presidential address to which the American Statistical Association has ever listened. His address was a review of the history and work of the Association,—a history that reaches back to 1839, a period of seventy years, thus making it one of the oldest of the scientific societies in the United States, and very much the oldest of the organizations now in simultaneous session in Atlantic City.

At that meeting there was an organized movement to bring this old and honorable organization out of the rut of mere existence and into the strenuous activities of to-day. The American Statistical Association has lapsed at times into a condition semi-moribund, taking little cognizance of the rapid advance in statistical science, and contributing in desultory and perfunctory fashion towards its development. It must, however, be credited with establishing a fine statistical library and a system of exchanges with foreign statistical offices and organizations. It has also established and maintained an official publication, and its quarterly publications have been the only organs through which our students of statistical problems have been able to reach a sympathetic audience. The publications have been among the most valuable periodical contributions to statistical science, taking rank with the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society of Great Britain and the publications of the

* Presidential address delivered at a joint meeting of the American Statistical Association and the American Sociological Society at Atlantic City, December 28, 1908.

International Statistical Institute. The publications can be made still more useful by a wider and better organized editorial co-operation among the members.

With all this to its credit, the Association has furnished little direct stimulus to statistical work, has suggested no new methods of procedure, and has not been a rallying point for young men and women who realize the possibilities and the opportunities of this field of study.

At the present moment the question which chiefly interests the Association is, What can be done-what ought to be done -to make the American Statistical Association a vital, predominating force in determining the directions in which statistical science shall advance in the United States and the agencies through which that advance shall be encouraged? It is a question we are not to dispose of to-night or to-morrow. We are to take it home with us, and we are to bring back our answers from year to year, at the future meetings of the Association.

We are already prepared to make a preliminary answer. With a large membership roll, in which the whole country is represented, the American Statistical Association has in reality been a local society, with its habitat in Boston. The interest in its meetings has thus been largely limited to that environment. An attempt to extend its influence by the establishment of a branch organization in Washington, in 1896, met with failure, chiefly because of the lack of stimulus from direct contact with the responsible officers of the Association.

Guided by this experience, we have now made a departure from which we hope to trace a new vitality and usefulness. We have sought affiliation with the several organizations with whose fields of study our own is in intimate touch. The membership roll of our association is largely made up of the men who sustain these other organizations. The purposes of all the organizations appeal equally to the same groups of students and thinkers.

The several sciences to which each is devoted are cognate branches of the same general science, which, in the broadest

terms, has been called the Science of Life. So intimately related are they that no one can draw a hard-and-fast line to indicate where the field of one ends and that of another begins. At every point they run into each other, and contribute to each other. The pioneer organization, the American Social Science Association, covers every field of research now outlined in the constitutions of these four organizations. The constitution of the American Economic Association especially includes all fields of statistics. It declares the purpose of that organization to be "the encouragement of economic research, especially the historical and statistical study of the actual conditions of industrial life." It has thus always recognized that statistics is at the root of economic science. In announcing its advent, the American Sociological Society declared that "it heralds the faith that all the social sciences are unscientific in the degree in which they attempt to hold themselves separate from each other, and to constitute closed systems of abstractions."

The separate existence of the present bodies is an illustration of the tendency of the times toward closer specialization in every line of human thought. By narrowing the field, more effective work results; but the bond of sympathy, the community of interest, remain unimpaired.

Since the final settlement of the questions growing out of the Civil War, the character of American political thought and activity has undergone a remarkable change. The old slogans have become meaningless. Our politics has to face the economic and sociological problems of a remarkable era. Congress must now deal with the practical questions which our extraordinary industrial development has created. The relations of labor and capital, the currency and banking, immigration, the regulation of railroads and their traffic, of corporations and their methods, these are types of the questions which now dominate, both in Congress and the legislatures; and their insistent prominence gives to the work of all scientific organizations an increasing significance and a growing potency. Old age pensions, factory legislation, employers' liability, humanitarianism, in many forms and by means of many reforms,—