We have gathered to pay tribute to the memory and to commemorate the services of Carroll Davidson Wright, the President of the American Statistical Association. In an active existence of seventy-one years this venerable and useful Association has had but five presidents, each of whom was re-elected until his death. Hon. Richard Fletcher, the first, served six years; Dr. George C. Shattuck, the second, five years; Dr. Edward Javis, the third, thirty years; General Francis A. Walker, the fourth, thirteen years; and Colonel Wright, the fifth President, twelve years.

It is a remarkable roll of illustrious men, each of whom was regarded in his day as the ablest statistician in the United States.

Carroll Davidson Wright was the legitimate legatee of Francis A. Walker, in the presidency of the Association.

At the moment of his untimely death in 1896, General Walker was recognized not only as the ablest statistician this country had yet produced, but the greatest all-round master of the science of statistics. It is my function to demonstrate that President Wright, while he differed from General Walker in many of his methods, while he did not carry the science of

* Address delivered at a special meeting of the American Statistical Association, Boston, May 14, 1909.

statistics to the close analytical results attained by General Walker, nevertheless belonged by right in this kingly company; that he enlarged the scope of statistical investigation in new and difficult fields; and that in certain important particulars he was the peer, if not the superior, of any of his predecessors.

This is not the occasion for a biography of President Wright, but I must briefly outline certain features of his career which are almost unique, extremely significant, and strikingly illustrative of his character and motives.

Descended from typical New England ancestors, of mingled English and Scotch blood, President Wright was born in New Hampshire in 1840, the son of a devout country preacher of the Universalist denomination. He was taught from boyhood that he must be the architect of his own fortunes. Denied the advantages of college training, he alternately studied in the rural academies and taught school to pay his way. Leaving home at sixteen, at eighteen he was studying law, first at Dedham and afterwards at Boston.

When he was almost ready to take up his chosen profession, he was caught and overwhelmed by the thought that his country needed, instantly, the best service of its every loyal son. At the age of twenty-two he enlisted as a private soldier in Company C of the Fourteenth New Hampshire Volunteers. He was commissioned second lieutenant of his company before his regiment was ordered to the front.

He revealed at once certain qualifications which marked him for special and delicate duties. He was in turn commissary, aide-de-camp, assistant adjutant-general, under different commanding officers; and at the close of the war he returned to his home the colonel in command of the regiment in which he had enlisted as a private.

President Wright resumed the study of law, and was admitted to practice. He made rapid progress in his profession, and as quickly earned the esteem and confidence of his friends and neighbors. In 1871, and again in 1872, he was elected to represent the Sixth Middlesex District in the Massachusetts Senate.

His services here were of notable value, as chairman of the Committees on Insurance and on Military Affairs. His career as lawyer and legislator was permanently ended in 1873, when he accepted the appointment as Commissioner of the newly created Massachusetts Bureau of Statistics of Labor.

It was the turning-point in his career. He was upon the threshold of a successful legal practice. He was assured of rapid political advancement in a state which ties to men of his type. It can hardly be said that he dropped his profession with the deliberate intention of never returning to it: he could not foresee what was to happen; but it is certain that he was tempted into the new field by a vague realization of the possibilities it offered for a great governmental innovation. It appealed to his sympathies and aspirations as offering a unique opportunity to do the world a peculiar service. Once his hand was put to the plough, he neither faltered nor hesitated nor regretted. He had found a mission in life. He found himself fitted into just that niche for which his mind and temperament were best adapted. It was given to him to fill this niche for the forty best years of his life; to expand it and enlarge it, as he himself developed and grew; to become recognized throughout the civilized world not only as a pioneer, but as the greatest exponent of a new gospel of industrial ethics.

It thus fell to Colonel Wright to blaze the pathway in am entirely novel field of governmental investigation in the United States, a field into which many men, at the time, thought it unnecessary, chimerical, and even dangerous for the government to enter at all.

The Massachusetts Bureau of Labor Statistics, established in 1869, was the first bureau of its kind in this country-perhaps the first in the world. Its first chief, General Henry K. Oliver, a good, earnest, honest man, did not fully grasp the significance of the movement he had been chosen to lead. The three years of his administration worked out nothing definite, tangible, or valuable. The whole undertaking was still in the air,-in truth, according to good authority, it was well on the

road to extinction as a useless appendage to the body politic.* Governor Washburn sent for Colonel Wright, then about thirty years of age and just completing his service in the Senate. He said to him: "I have watched your work on some measures in the Senate. I think I know you, and now I want you to take charge of this Bureau of Labor, and make it or bust it!" Governor Washburn read the young man right: he must have foreseen something of what was to come from his choice, but he could not have foreseen all nor the greater part.

The Massachusetts Bureau of Labor Statistics was established as a half-hearted, and perhaps not altogether sincere experiment, in recognition of the fact that the relations of capital and labor constitute a practical problem in self-government which the state must face and deal with, in some fashion, sooner or later. It was then regarded as a purely state problem-not an interstate or national problem-which each state must separately handle in its own way. That Massachusetts was the first to recognize its existence is to her everlasting credit. Her action was a natural result of industrial supremacy combined with high civic standards-the same combination of causes which has kept the Bay State ever since in the vanguard of the American commonwealths in legislation to protect and promote the welfare of the wage-earning citizen.

It is difficult to realize, at this distance of time, the discouraging conditions which surrounded the earlier work of the Massachusetts Bureau. Its advent had been made amidst apprehension, criticism, and open or covert hostility on the part of the employing interests. Its failure and abandonment, as I have said, were imminent. The task of steering the ship into a harbor of useful vitality confronted Mr. Wright at the start. He took his bearings by the sun of common sense and constructive conservatism. From the start he resolutely refused, in the face of much pressure and much hostile criticism, to convert this new state mechanism into an engine of factious agitation and partisan propaganda. He set out to make reports that should search for and find the truth, not in the in

*See Quarterly Publications, American Statistical Association, March, 1908, p. 15.

terests of one class of the community against those of another, but in the interest of all classes alike. He held the scales impartially.

When President Wright delivered the eulogy before this Association on the character and services of his predecessor, Francis A. Walker, he quoted at length a letter of advice and counsel he solicited and received from him when he became chief of the Massachusetts Bureau. "Your office has only to prove itself superior alike to partisan dictation and to the seductions of theory," wrote General Walker to Colonel Wright, "to command the cordial support of the body of the people. If any mistake is more likely than others to be committed in such a critical position, it is to undertake to recognize both parties as parties, and to award so much in due turn to each. ... I have strong hopes that you will so distinctly and decisively disconnect the Massachusetts Bureau from politicsfrom dependence on organizations, whether of workingmen or employers, and from the support of economic theories, individual views, or class interests-as to command the moral support of the whole body of citizens and receive the cooperation of men of all occupations and degrees."

"In this characteristic reply," commented President Wright, "General Walker laid down the enduring principles of official statistics, whoever adheres to them will meet with success; whoever neglects them commits a crime." In the thousands of pages of official reports and investigations which have since appeared over President Wright's name, there is not an instance of departure from the straight and narrow pathway thus laid down and thus unreservedly accepted. They contain conclusions which were frequently controverted,-from some of which I have myself dissented, but there is no instance of a partisan bias or a prejudiced perversion of the truth.

Thus in time President Wright conquered opposition, disarmed criticism, and made his bureau the agency for gathering together a wealth of data relating to the conditions surrounding industrialism in Massachusetts which has had enormous influence upon the development of the Commonwealth. In the