People Who Counted: Political Arithmetic in the Eighteenth Century

Author(s): Peter Buck

Source: Isis, Vol. 73, No. 1 (Mar., 1982), pp. 28-45
Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of The History of Science Society
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/232080 .
Accessed: 09/05/2014 18:47

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .
http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of
content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms
of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

The University of Chicago Press and The History of Science Society are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize,
preserve and extend access to Isis.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 169.229.32.138 on Fri, 9 May 2014 18:47:24 PM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
 People Who Counted:
Political Arithmetic in the
Eighteenth Century
By Peter Buck*

rT'HIS STUDY OF POLITICAL ARITHMETIC in eighteenth-century Eng-

I land explores what sorts of things Englishmen concerned with vital statis-
tics thought they were counting, what they believed it meant to think sta-
tistically, and why they used their statistical tools in the ways that they did.
These questions presuppose that statistical thinkers are more usefully regarded as
thinking about specific social experiences than as pondering abstract problems of
general demography. Particular statistical theories and practices may have uni-
versal application in principle, but they bear the imprint of the particular social
arrangements they were meant to explain. Statistical thinkers also work within
particular intellectual traditions. The frameworks of social and political thought
that they take for granted shape the ways in which they gather their data,
aggregate them into units fit for mathematical treatment, and assemble the results
of their analyses into more or less coherent representations of reality. Finally,
statistical thinkers view their social environments from specific vantage points
within their own societies, not from some higher ground outside: statistical
investigations have social contexts, as well as social subject matters, and while the
two overlap, they are not identical. In addition to showing how statisticians'
concepts and methods related to the social structures on which they were brought to
bear, and tracing the dependence of their conclusions on inherited patterns of
thought, the historian is therefore obliged to ask the standard Namierite ques-
tions: who are these people, and what do they want?
Who English statisticians were and what they wanted changed significantly in
the second half of the eighteenth century, when a broad shift in the social and
ideological locus of statistical thinking transformed political arithmetic. In the
work of men like the nonconformist clergyman and supporter of the French and
American revolution Richard Price, what had been a scientific prospectus for
the exercise of state power became a program for reversing the growth of govern-
ment and reducing its influence on English social and economic life. The result
was a new sense of the importance of demographic questions and a changed
conception of what political arithmeticians were investigating when they counted
births, deaths, and marriages. Until the 1750s it was taken for granted that
populations were political creations, dependent on assertions of sovereign au-
thority for their existence as aggregates open to statistical study. The connection
was as clear to partisans of political arithmetic-who accepted that it was "with

*Program in Science, Technology, and Society, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cam-

bridge, Massachusetts 02139.

ISIS, 1982, 73 (266) 28

This content downloaded from 169.229.32.138 on Fri, 9 May 2014 18:47:24 PM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY POLITICAL ARITHMETIC 29

the strictest propriety that his Majesty calls us a great People"-as it was to critics
who accused statisticians of treating Englishmen as if they were "the numbered
vassals of indiscriminating power." But by 1800 the logic underlying such ex-
changes had been reversed: F. M. Eden's Estimate of the Number of Inhabitants
in Great Britain and Ireland carried the epigraph "THESE CONSTITUTE A STATE."1
In fashioning a new conception of populations as assemblages of citizens rather
than subjects, late eighteenth-century statisticians like Richard Price drew on and
helped to alter the meaning of ideas about politics and property associated with
the classical republican tradition in English thought. In that tradition citizenship
was equated with the Aristotelian ideal of autonomous participation in politics,
and the source of political autonomy was traced to the independence that
property gave to its owners, especially property in land, inheritable freeholds
being less easily alienable than other forms of property. This emphasis on land led
classical republican theorists to identify increases in administrative and court
power as the principal threats to republican virtue. Expanding governments
threatened to invert the proper relationship between property and political
authority by creating a class of rentiers, stockholders, and officials whose eco-
nomic well-being depended either on their ability to provide the state with funds,
in return for which they received incomes, or on their possession of bureaucratic
skills for which only governments could find uses or the means to pay.
These arguments provided the primary themes around which political arith-
metic was reorganized in the decades after about 1750. They also helped to define
the social and political space that statistical thinking came to occupy. The classical
republican tradition has been variously identified with Commonwealthmen, Real
Whigs, aspects of religious dissent and nonconformity, the Country half of the
Court-Country cleavage in English politics, and the more broadly European
configuration of ideas known as civic humanism.2 Some of these referents were
socially interchangeable; two were not. A common intellectual commitment to
republican ideals was shared by Country gentlemen who were not dissenters and
nonconformists who were not part of the landed interest. It was precisely because
these two groups remained socially distinct that their ideological convergence
played such a potent role in determining the political significance of vital
statistics.

STATISTICS AND "NUMBERED VASSALS OF INDISCRIMINATING POWER"

The history of life tables shows how political arithmetic was recast. The chief
instruments on which republican statisticians based their expectations, these
familiar items in the armamentarium of eighteenth-century political arithmetic
were initially fashioned with a view to considerations of state power. Their
original monarchical complexion is evident from the account Edmund Halley
offered of his 1694 life table. "Drawn from curious Tables of Births and Funerals
'Richard Forster to Thomas Birch, 2 Dec. 1760, in D. V. Glass, Numbering the People (Farn-
borough: Saxon House, 1973), p. 88; "An Account of the Proceedings in Parliament, on the Bill to
Number the People," Gentleman's Magazine, 1753, 23:550-551, on p. 550; Frederick Morton Eden,
An Estimate of the Number of Inhabitants in Great Britain and Ireland (London: 1800), title page.
2See Caroline A. Robbins, The Eighteenth-Century Commonwealthman (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard Univ. Press, 1959); J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment (Princeton: Princeton
Univ. Press, 1975); Pocock, "Civic Humanism and Its Role in Anglo-American Thought," and
"Machiavelli, Harrington and English Political Ideologies in the Eighteenth Century," in Politics,
Language and Time (New York: Atheneum, 1971), pp. 80-103, 104-147.

This content downloaded from 169.229.32.138 on Fri, 9 May 2014 18:47:24 PM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
30 PETER BUCK

at the City of Breslau," it was constructed with a view to the economic matters
that could be "regulated" on the basis of accurate mortality data: "the Price of
Insurance upon Lives" and "the Valuation of Annuities." But when Halley
reflected on the "Political Uses" of his work, the "first one" he mentioned
pointed to political arithmetic's then close ties to the state. It was "to show the
proportion of men able to bear arms in any multitude." When he brought his
"Further Considerations on the Breslau Bills of Mortality" to a conclusion with a
final passing remark on their "political consequences," it was that "the strength
and glory of a King [is] in the multitude of his subjects."3
Halley's interest in annuities had a similar political cast. The particular annuity
he had in mind when he made his calculations was a "fund lately granted to their
Majesties" by an act of Parliament. One million pounds was to be raised through
the sale of 14% single-life annuities. For the government this was an unwise
offering. Made without regard for the age of the purchasers, it presented a "great
advantage," as Halley noted, to young people whose lives were "worth above
thirteen years purchase."4 A similar exercise in public finance was not performed
again until 1704, when to help finance the War of the Spanish Succession some
?300,000 was raised by the sale of annuities for one, two, and three lives. The
results, again, were financially disastrous: as Daniel Defoe saw in 1711, the effect
was to leave the government burdened by debts that were perpetual in fact if not
in theory.5 Nonetheless, the subsequent failure of the 1717 sinking fund to solve
the problem of the national debt was followed by repeated proposals for a return
to annuities as sources of money, on the grounds that the debts thus acquired
would be at least ultimately self-liquidating. In 1747, when James Hodgson,
Master of the Royal Mathematical School at Christ's Hospital, London, con-
structed a life table for the value of annuities, he confidently assumed that "the
easy way of raising money for public uses, by granting annuities upon lives, has
met with so great encouragement, that there is no reason to doubt, that it will be
carried down to future times."6
By the middle of the eighteenth century, government annuities were no longer
central to the economic and political concerns framing the study of mortality
rates. Hodgson expected that his life table would prove applicable to a variety of
other topics besides government finance: "The frequent entails upon estates by
wills, the granting of leases upon the lives of persons of different ages, and
differently interwoven, have rendered a true estimate of the values of lives,
according to the present circumstances of times, of very great consequence."7 Six
years later another and more mathematically sophisticated student of mortality
rates, James Dodson, Hodgson's successor as Master of the Royal Mathematical
School, had expanded the range further. The chief importance of life tables now
lay in "the great property vested in them," Dodson announced in his Mathe-
matical Repository. For "all the freehold estates in these kingdoms" were held
3Edmund Halley, "An Estimate of the Degrees of Mortality of Mankind drawn from Curious
Tables of Births and Funerals at the City of Breslaw," Philosophical Transactions, 1693, 17:596-
610, on pp. 596, 602, 601; Halley, "Some Further Considerations on the Breslaw Bills of Mortality,"
ibid., pp. 654-656, on p. 656.
4Halley, "Estimate," p. 604.
5Daniel Defoe, A Review of the State of the British Nation, 8 Feb. 1711, cited in P. G. M. Dickson,
The Financial Revolution in England: A Study in the Development of Public Credit 1688-1756
(London: Macmillan, 1967), p. 21.
6James Hodgson, The Valuation of Annuities upon Lives; Deduced from the London Bills of
Mortality (London: 1747), p. iv.

This content downloaded from 169.229.32.138 on Fri, 9 May 2014 18:47:24 PM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY POLITICAL ARITHMETIC 31

either by men who were "tenants for life" or by their widows, to whom the
reversion of their husbands' estates had been conveyed by marriage settlements.
To these Dodson added "the great number of copyholds determinable on lives,"
various church and college lands leased for life, and properties held "by eccles-
iastical persons of all degrees." It followed "that the values of the possessions,
and the reversions, of much the greatest part of the real estates, in these king-
doms, will, in one way or another depend on the values of lives." The same was
also true, significantly, of more mobile forms of property associated with govern-
ment service and commerce: incomes "annexed" to various civil and military
positions, all pensions, and even some dividends from stocks that, "by the wills of
their possessors," had been made into annuities for the lives of their beneficiaries.8
With so much riding on the proper determination of the values of lives and life
annuities, Dodson found it "strange" that no "attempt towards computing" them
had been made until Halley had taken up the problem. The tenures involved had
often "subsisted from the very origin of private property in these kingdoms," and
Dodson was certain that "the advantages" to be had from "the determination of
these things" by mathematical means were "obvious." The alternative, "antient
ways of determining them" depended entirely on "customs" that had been
"established, in the places where they are used, merely for want of good methods
of calculation."9
Here Dodson was recapitulating a theoretical conflict that eighteenth-century
political arithmeticians and Commonwealthmen had inherited from the seven-
teenth century. Graunt and Petty had worked from equally negative judgments
about the power of "antient ways" to regulate property relations effectively,
while civic humanists of their day had been just as certain that the reason
freeholds in land provided the best foundation for republican virtue was that
they were secured by immemorial sanctions of common law. Dodson's formal
challenge to that claim was underscored by the practical political context in which
he chose to place his argument. By dedicating the second volume of his Mathe-
matical Repository to David Papillon, "One of the Honourable Commissioners
of the Excise," he identified political arithmetic with precisely the kind of govern-
ment department that Commonwealthmen found most objectionable.'?
Of all the bureaus of the British state, the Excise was the most bureaucratic and
self-contained. l At a time when government agents stationed outside of London
were usually more beholden to local notables than to Westminster, excisemen
were salaried officials, forbidden to accept any other payment for their work,
prohibited from entering into financial arrangements with persons under their
official scrutiny, and assigned to districts away from where they had been born or
trained. Too, the very nature of their work involved skills for which there was no
call outside 'the government: as Thomas Paine wrote in 1772, "every year's
experience gained in the Excise is a year's experience lost in trade; and by the
time they become wise officers, they become foolish workmen."'2 All of this
combined to make excisemen among the best examples available to eighteenth-

7Ibid.
8James Dodson, The Mathematical Repository (London: 1753), Vol. II, pp. vii-viii.
9Ibid., p. x.
i0Ibid., p. iv.
I See John Torrance,"SocialClassand BureaucraticInnovation:The Commissionersfor Examin-
ing the Public Accounts 1780-87," Past and Present, 1978, 78:60-66.
"2ThomasPaine, "The Case of the Excise Officers,"quoted in ibid., p. 63.

This content downloaded from 169.229.32.138 on Fri, 9 May 2014 18:47:24 PM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
32 PETER BUCK

century English political theorists of government functionaries who pursued their

careers at the cost of their political autonomy. Isolated by virtue of their special-
ized occupations and the conditions of their employment from the configurations
of class, locality, and kinship that structured English politics, excisemen were
rightly suspected by their contemporaries of being politically responsive only to
the board's political interests.
That Dodson should have addressed his treatise on vital statistics to an officer
of the crown in part reflected the exigencies of his own career. As mathematical
master at Christ's Hospital, he was primarily engaged in preparing young men for
service in the British navy; his closest associates, men like William Mountaine
and John Robertson, likewise had strong ties to the Admiralty; and the investi-
gations that first made his reputation were directed at problems of navigation.
Having worked in an area of mathematics intimately related to the needs of
government, Dodson was well positioned to see connections between his compu-
tations and the state when he turne'd to annuities, life tables, and real property.
He was also prepared to act on this expectation. The year before Volume II of
his Mathematical Repository appeared, he availed himself of the opportunity
afforded by the publication of a plan for changing the form of the London bills of
mortality to urge that special provision be made for information useful for "fixing
the values of lives."'3

THE 1753 CENSUS BILL

Dodson's apparently modest suggestion had important consequences. Coming

from a mathematician who was insisting that property relations be based on life
tables, it amounted to a proposal for bringing "all the freehold estates" of the
kingdom under government regulation. The point was taken by those concerned
to reform the bills of mortality, and in the name of providing materials for
"political calculations respecting insurance on lives," they submitted a plan for
taking a national census to Parliament in 1753.14 But linking vital statistics to
questions about property and the state in this way was fatal to the enterprise. The
act would have required all parishes to take "an annual account of the total
number of people" and to maintain accurate records of births, deaths, and
marriages.15 It was defeated by opponents of the administration then in office
who seized on the idea of a national census and denounced it as "totally sub-
versive of the last remains of English liberty." It would destroy the autonomy of
the propertied classes by forcing "every individual" to expose "his property" to
government scrutiny. 16
This was the language of Country opposition to Court power, and its principal
themes figured prominently in the arguments marshalled against "the registering
bill." In addition to being attacked as a threat to property, the census was
13"A Letter from Mr. James Dodson to Mr. John Robertson, F.R.S. concerning an Improvement
of the Bills of Mortality," Philosophical Transactions, 1753, 47:333-340, on p. 339.
14John Fothergill, "Some Remarks on the Bills of Mortality in London with an Account of a late
Attempt to Establish an Annual Bill for this Nation," in The Works of John Fothergill (London:
1784), p. 294.
15See "A Bill, with the Amendments, for Taking and Registering an annual Account of the total
Number of People, and the Total Number of Marriages, Births, and Deaths; and also the total
Number of Poor receiving Alms from every Parish, and extraparochial Place, in Great Britain," rpt.
in D. V. Glass (ed.), The Development of Population Statistics (Farnborough: Gregg, 1973).
'6"On the Motion for a Bill to take an annual Account or Register of the People," Gentleman's
Magazine, 1753, 23:499-501, on p. 500; "Account of the Proceedings," p. 551.

This content downloaded from 169.229.32.138 on Fri, 9 May 2014 18:47:24 PM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY POLITICAL ARITHMETIC 33

described as a project that would simultaneously increase the national debt (a

favorite target of Country hostility) and encourage the state to divert more of the
public wealth to its own uses (the act provided for an accounting of money set
aside in each parish for poor relief, and it appeared that "the return so made may
tempt a future minister by the vastness of the sum, to take it for the public
service"). It was also a symbol of the threat to ancient freedoms posed by an
expanding government ("a tame submission" to census takers would "prove that
the spirit of our ancestors is departed and has left us unworthy of our birthright"),
as well as an example of the perfidious influence of "place men" on national
politics. Only "the creature of a Court, who subsists by the salary and the
perquisites of his place," could support a plan to reduce Englishmen to the status
of "numbered vassals of indiscriminating power." 17
Like James Dodson, Country critics of the 1753 census bill had a specific
example in mind when they contemplated what joining vital statistics to state
power would entail. Their example was in fact the same as his. While he was
dedicating his tract on life tables and annuities to David Papillon, they were
introducing their side of the argument with remarks to the effect that the
registering act was only a further round in "the debates on the excise," only a
scheme for bringing "every man's private family" under its purview.'8 This
consensus about appropriate reference points helped to fix the ideological posi-
tion of vital statistics.
But the proposed machinery for numbering the people and recording their
births and deaths was not patterned after the model of the Excise. There was, for
example, no provision for anything like the latter's staff of specialized officers.
Instead, primary responsibility for implementing the registering act would have
been divided among the overseers of the poor and the clergy in each parish. Once
a year the overseers were to conduct a house-to-house survey, taking down the
number of inhabitants in each dwelling; the schedules they prepared would have
then been handed over to the ministers and churchwardens or chapelwardens of
the parish, who were required to certify the results "on oath." The clergy would
also have been required to maintain a general registry book. Births and deaths
would have been entered as they occurred, with parents and persons responsible
for funerals being charged with reporting the events in question. 19
Relying on ministers and overseers of the poor precluded placing the registra-
tion of vital events outside local structures of power and authority. Where the
excise sought to insulate its officers from class, family, and local ties, the census
would have been firmly grounded in the traditional particularism of English
society. The overseers of the poor were to have been assisted in their work by
"constables and headboroughs," while "other principal inhabitants" of each
parish would have joined the clergy in examining the results of the annual
surveys. The same local notables would also have been responsible for attesting
to the accuracy of the parish registry book. Their presence would have been felt
again when annual abstracts of the registered births and deaths, together with the
census schedules assembled by the overseers, were forwarded to the Chief
Constable of the Hundred and then to the clerk of the peace at the next General
" A Letter to a Member of Parliament on the Registering and Numbering the People of Great Britain
(London: 1753), rpt. in Glass (ed.), Population Statistics, p. 12; "On the Motion for a Bill," p. 501;
"Account of the Proceedings," p. 550.
"8"On the Motion for a Bill," p. 499.
'9"Bill for an annual Account," pp. 1-5.

This content downloaded from 169.229.32.138 on Fri, 9 May 2014 18:47:24 PM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
34 PETER BUCK

or Quarter Sessions.20 With judges, justices, and juries all chosen from the
propertied classes, those courts were preeminently instruments of gentry rule in
the countryside. In the absence of either a regular police force or an established
system of state prosecutions, the Sessions were settings in which nearly all cases-
criminal or civil-were brought by private individuals and conducted at their dis-
cretion.21 Transmitting vital statistics to them would have further tied the census
into local fabrics of obedience and deference where personal ties of dependence
and obligation took precedence over detailed regulations formulated by a distant
court and administration.
These proposed procedures for assembling demographic data reflected the
broader flow of political control away from Westminster that, Country fears
notwithstanding, characterized the extreme decentralization of government in
eighteenth-century England. The mechanisms envisioned for insuring that the
data would be collected were similarly informed by the resulting confusion of
public and private business. Where the Excise sought to separate the two by
salarying its officers and prohibiting them from receiving piecemeal rewards for
their services, the census act mandated an elaborate system of fees and penalties.
The clergy would have been paid sixpence by the overseers of the poor for each
birth and death they recorded, while the overseers were to have drawn ten
shillings a year from county rates for their efforts; the clerks of the peace would
have been recompensed by the justices of the peace, also out of county rates.
Conversely, individuals interfering with the overseers and ministers were to have
been liable to fines imposed by the justices and payable to the overseer or
minister involved, for his "use and benefit." In turn the clergy and the overseers
would have been subject to fines for failing to discharge their obligations; the
penalties would have been paid to the clerks of the peace, again for their private
"use and benefit," and the latter could have been penalized by the justices,
the money going in that case to the "aid of the county rates."22
It may be difficult to see why proposals that would have embedded vital
statistics so deeply in the structure of local politics aroused hostility or seemed to
be an example of "indiscriminating power." Country critics saw two problems
with the registering bill. Their first objection was to the requirement that census
schedules and abstracts of the clergy's registry books be deposited with the
Commissioners of Trade and Plantation in London. It appeared that this would
convert the poor into "the King's Chattles," because it meant extending the
Board of Trade's authority into their houses.23 That defect was not mitigated by
the fact that in principle the homes of rich and poor were to be equally open to
invasion by the overseers of the poor and the constabulary, acting in their ca-
pacity as agents of the executive, and armed with as much power as they would
have acquired on "receiving a warrant to apprehend a felon or a traitor." Country
gentlemen and their parliamentary representatives assumed as a matter of course
that preserving order required maintaining the finest social gradations; they were
consequently not about to have "all distinctions . . . destroyed by universal
coercion. "24
20Ibid., pp. 2-3, 5-6.
21See Douglas Hay, "Property, Authority and the Criminal Law," in Douglas Hay, Peter Line-
baugh, John G. Rule, E. P. Thompson, and Cal Winslow, Albion's Fatal Tree: Crime and Society in
Eighteenth-Century England (New York: Pantheon, 1975), pp. 17-64.
22"Bill for an annual
Account," pp. 6, 10-11.
23A Letter, p. 18.
24"Account of the Proceedings," pp. 550-551.

This content downloaded from 169.229.32.138 on Fri, 9 May 2014 18:47:24 PM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY POLITICAL ARITHMETIC 35

These were ideologically potent considerations. But questions about how the
census might alter relations between the state and those whose numbers would be
recorded were finally pressing not so much in their own right as on account of
their bearing on a second, more fundamental issue. The decisive complaints
lodged against the registering bill had to do with its effects on the status, relative
to the government, of the men who would have implemented its provisions. The
act's leading parliamentary advocate, Thomas Potter, a son of the Archbishop of
Canterbury, did his part to insure that this would be the focus of critical attention,
when he urged his plan on his colleagues as a measure to give the country "a
police, or a local administration of civil government, upon certain and known
principles."25 His opponents agreed that the project had the potential to change
the distribution of power and authority in their localities, and it was on that
ground that they objected to it most strenuously. In the act's system of financial
penalties for noncompliance they saw a scheme for putting ministers, constables,
clerks of the peace, and overseers of the poor all "absolutely in the Power of the
Justices of the Peace" and ultimately under the dominion of Westminster. This
promised to be "a perilous condition" for them as individuals; it was also
symptomatic of broader "mischief" already "arising from the union of the
executive and legislative power in this country," a union that defenders of local
prerogatives against encroaching Court and administrative influence viewed as an
unqualified threat to the "delegation of power."26

PROPERTIED INDEPENDENCE: THE DILEMMA OF THE COMMERCIAL ELITE

Neither the defeat of Potter's bill nor the rejection five years later of a similar
proposal for registering births, deaths, and marriages consigned vital statistics to
oblivion. Far more public attention was paid to demographic questions after 1750
than before. But the population debates of the second half of the eighteenth
century were conducted on the assumption that the pursuit of statistical inquiries
was a private affair, to be managed locally by individuals acting on their own
account. In a society where all manner of government functions were being
appropriated by local ruling elites, freeing political arithmetic from the ideolog-
ical albatross of state power stimulated the development of the science by
allowing it to reenter the domain of public controversy on new terms. The new
private nature of statistics shows in the description that one of James Dodson's
successors at Christ's Hospital, William Wales, gave of his working procedures in
1781. On discovering that for his Inquiry into the Present State of Population in
England he required "authentic information" about the number of dwellings in
specific towns and villages, he naturally addressed his queries "to every acquaint-
ance" he had in the country "as well as to every other person that I could get
recommended to." The data he needed concerned matters about which he "knew
it would be very easy for a person who lived on the spot, to inform himself." The
results showed "how much a single person, who is disposed to do it, may
perform."27
As a private undertaking, political arithmetic proved especially attractive to
men who were committed to the very republican visions that had shaped opposi-

25"On the Motion for a Bill," p. 499.

26A Letter, p. 17; "Account of the Proceedings," p. 550.
27William Wales, An Inquiry into the Present State of Population in England and Wales (London:
1781), pp. 5-6, 10.

This content downloaded from 169.229.32.138 on Fri, 9 May 2014 18:47:24 PM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
36 PETER BUCK

tion to the 1753 census act. What is made of this reversed ideological position of
statistical thought depends on how the social and intellectual history of English
dissent is read. After the middle of the eighteenth century, political arithmetic
became almost the exclusive domain of nonconforming clergymen and physi-
cians. The dominant figure in the population controversies of the 1760s and 1770s
was an eminent Commonwealthman, Arian minister, and later champion of the
American and French revolutions, Richard Price. At the center of what D. V.
Glass called "the actuarial and demographic establishment of the period," Price
based his studies on information gathered and supplied to him by individuals
who, like him, combined statistical interests with nonconformity in religion and
republicanism in politics.28
This religious and political matrix generated the material for Price's Northamp-
ton life table. From 1729 to 1752 Northampton was the site of Philip Doddridge's
famous dissenting academy. As a Presbyterian with decidedly Whiggish political
views, Doddridge was intermittently harassed by the local Anglican clergy, the
archdeacon's court, and occasional rioters. But he survived to train an impressive
array of nonconforming ministers, lecturers, writers, and teachers who carried his
educational practices to academies later founded at Daventry, Warrington,
Hoxton, and Hackney. In Northampton itself it was his school's presence that
transformed the town into a prime object for statistical scrutiny. Among the
results which flowed from its influence on local social and intellectual life,
William Farr later wrote, were comprehensive accounts of births and deaths kept
from 1735 on in the parish of All Saints and for the whole town after 1741; the
same "impulse to the intellect and benevolence" led to a census in 1746.29
Price used the All Saints parish records in constructing his life table, and he was
indebted to Doddridge's academy and the example it set in other, less direct ways
as well. Among the more prominent of the dozen or so sources he cited in his
Observations on Reversionary Payments,30 one, Stephen Addington, had been a
student of Doddridge's; a second, Dr. John Aikin, was the son of a graduate of
the academy. Aikin's father had also been a tutor at Warrington Academy, a
school patterned after Doddridge's institution and itself the focus of liberal
opinion and dissent in Lancashire. In addition to the younger Aikin, two more of
Price's informants were educated there: William Enfield, a nonconforming
minister and historian of Liverpool, and Dr. Thomas Percival. A Unitarian in
later life, Percival would become active in the antislavery movement, help to
form the Manchester sanitary commission, and be one of the founders of the
Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society. For his part, Aikin was a member
of the Revolution Society and later defended Price against attacks by Edmund
Burke. Another of Price's sources, Dr. John Haygarth of Chester, was a friend
of both Aikin and Percival, while two others, John Disney and John Lee, were
tied to dissent and republicanism through Price's ally, Theophilus Lindsey, the
reform-minded Unitarian clergyman whose circle founded ,Hackney College,
Burke's "hotbed of sedition." Disney was Lindsey's son-in-law, as well as his
assistant and then successor as minister of the Essex Street Chapel. Lee was one

28Glass, Numbering the People, p. 65.

29William Farr, "The Northampton Life Table," from 8th Report of the Registrar-General of
England and Wales (London: 1849), rpt. in Glass (ed.), Population Statistics, p. 305.
30 Richard Price, Observations on Reversionary Payments; on Schemes for Providing Annuities for

Widows, and for Persons in Old Age; on the Method of Calculating the Values of Assurances on Lives;
and on the National Debt, (5th ed., London: 1792).

This content downloaded from 169.229.32.138 on Fri, 9 May 2014 18:47:24 PM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY POLITICAL ARITHMETIC 37

of the "Honest Whigs," a club that included Price and Joseph Priestley, as well as
Lindsey; he included among his friends yet another of the persons Price would
cite in his work, in this case critically, the Whig magnate William Eden, Lord
Auckland.
That dissenting clergyman and doctors should have regarded themselves as
"real Whigs," and hence as legitimate heirs to Country political ideals, in part
reflected an earlier historical reality when the strength of noble and gentry
nonconformity in the countryside was substantial. Well into the eighteenth
century, in some parts of the kingdom the proportion of gentlemen and trades-
men among dissenters was nearly equal. This was the case in Lincolnshire, where
John Disney was born, for example, and Price's father was a substantial land-
owner in his district. Even where dissenting tradesmen outnumbered dissenting
gentlemen, enough gentry families attended chapels and meeting houses to make
them the most socially significant element in nonconforming congregations. But
by the accession of George III in 1760 the situation was changing, as genteel
support for dissent waned and its position in the countryside deteriorated
accordingly. From then on the balance of nonconformist influence shifted in-
creasingly to the provincial towns where the industrial revolution was being
made. There dissent, republicanism, trade, manufacturing, and natural philos-
ophy were welded together in a powerful alliance that defined the social and
cultural contours of early British industrial development.31
Political arithmetic became part of that alliance when it was taken over by
nonconforming ministers and physicians. Through them it was brought into the
orbit of new commercial elites in such cities as Percival's Manchester, Enfield's
Liverpool, and the Northampton of Price's life table. Its transformation into an
instrument of republican politics was shaped by the determination of those elites
"to move in the higher spheres of life," as one Unitarian preacher described the
"honorable ambition" of his congregation's members, to "appear with greater
consequence and respectability," especially in their political dealings with their
"fellow citizens."32
Despite their wealth, newly prosperous dissenting merchants and manufactures
were cut off by occupation and religious preference from the local social status
and national political influence claimed by the landed interest. This marked
disparity between improved economic position and continued political weakness
set the terms for the arranged marriage of vital statistics, already divorced from
the Court, to classical republican doctrine, then in the process of being separated
from the Country. Having achieved religious and commercial success in spite of
rather than with the help of the state, nonconforming entrepreneurs and trades-
men were predisposed to embrace the Commonwealthman's identification of
civic virtue with opposition to expanding government power. But they could not
appropriate that dictum for their own ideological use so long as the Common-
wealthman's other central dogma, that property in land was the exclusive
guarantor of political independence, retained its force.
This was the dilemma that Price and his nonconforming statistical associates
sought to resolve. Their political arithmetic was consequently organized around
31See W. A. Speck, Stability and Strife: England, 1714-1760 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
Univ. Press, 1977), p. 101; and Arnold Thackray, "Natural Knowledge in Cultural Context: The
Manchester Model," American Historical Review, 1974, 89:672-709.
32Thomas Barnes, "A Plan for Liberal Education," Manchester Memoirs, 1785, 2:35, quoted in
Thackray, "Natural Knowledge," p. 690.

This content downloaded from 169.229.32.138 on Fri, 9 May 2014 18:47:24 PM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
38 PETER BUCK

three problems. They aimed first to provide new means for checking the growth
of the state; second, to show that according a privileged status to freeholds in land
was no longer a socially realistic strategy for securing autonomous political
participation; and third, to demonstrate that mechanisms could be developed for
stabilizing more mobile forms of property, thereby making their owners plausible
candidates for positions of political authority.

PROPERTY, POPULATION, AND POLITICS

For Price the first of these issues was primarily a question of combatting
"exorbitant public debts." The greatest danger he discerned in "that GREAT NA-
TIONAL EVIL" predictably lay in "the increasing dependence on the crown" that it
bred. He believed that the peril was rooted in the national debt's power to
subvert the proper relationship of politics to property by creating a class of
persons whose economic interests were calculated to keep them from being
"constantly jealous and watchful" of state power. The opposition and resistance
necessary to check the tendency of all governments toward "despotism" would
always seem to threaten "the ruin of the public funds"; "the apprehension of this
must influence all who have their interest connected with the preservation of the
funds, and incline them always to acquiescence and servility."33
To cure that disease Price prescribed a remedy, the sinking fund, whose
countervailing therapeutic power derived from mathematics. Establishing a sink-
ing fund would do more than set "a limit beyond which the national debt could
not increase"; that great "support of corruption and despotism" would be over-
whelmed and reduced to nothing, he argued, because however small an amount
was initially committed to such a fund, the sum would be "improved at compound
interest, and therefore in the most perfect manner." That promised to make it
"indeed omnipotent," a source of revenue sufficient to redeem all the bonds on
which the government was merely paying simple interest, with "increasing sums"
left over to be "thrown annually into the public markets, and returned to the
public creditors." Price understood that the sinking fund could work its mathe-
matical magic only if "allowed to operate, WITHOUT INTERRUPTION, a proper
time." For that to happen, arrangements had to be made to "take it out of the
hands of the Treasury, and form a check even on the House of Commons itself."
Where his predecessors, such as Graunt, Petty, and Halley, had viewed political
arithmetic as an instrument of executive authority, now mathematicizing a
problem entailed separating it from "the superintendency and care" of those
"faithful guardians of the state" whose susceptibility to "corrupt influences" was
notorious.34
Mathematical emphases aside, Price's images of despotism, corruption, acqui-
escence, and servility had long been stock rhetorical flourishes of Country
ideologues. But he had not divorced political arithmetic from Court power in
order to hand it over to representatives of the landed interest. In his view they
were no longer in a position to be jealous and watchful defenders of ancient
liberties; the growth of public debts paralleled a larger breakdown in the property
relations on which political independence had traditionally rested. Like other
Commonwealthmen before him, he was convinced that freeholds in land had

33Price, Reversionary Payments, Vol. I, pp. xiv, 206-207.

34Ibid., pp. xviii, xix, 183, 202, 208, 221-222.

This content downloaded from 169.229.32.138 on Fri, 9 May 2014 18:47:24 PM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY POLITICAL ARITHMETIC 39

once been the securest foundations for republican virtue. But by the last third of
the eighteenth century, it seemed that those foundations had irreparably eroded.
This was the major conclusion Price drew from his demonstration that the
population of England had fallen precipitously since the end of the seventeenth
century. The "principal evidence" he adduced was the decline in the number of
houses in the kingdom between 1690 and 1777. Data on births, deaths, and
marriages would have decided the issue more directly, he acknowledged, but they
were available only for limited areas of the country, "chiefly that very part which,
it is well known, has increased."35 Price also understood that population figures
could not be derived immediately from house counts; it was necessary to find
ways of estimating the average number of inhabitants per dwelling at different
times. These were technical difficulties, and he was prepared to meet them on
technical grounds. But they were finally marginal to the main burden of his
argument. For his purposes counting houses was more than an adequate sub-
stitute for counting people, because the forces reducing the number of dwellings
in any country were guaranteed to cause its population to fall. With regard to
England in particular the former decrease was "an effect which could not but
arise from the enclosing of common fields, the engrossing of farms," and the con-
sequent "inequality in the division of property, which has lately prevailed among
us more than ever." Those were also the primary causes of the country's
decreasing size: no maxim was "more evident," Price wrote, "than that the
division of property promotes population."36
The reasons were partly economic: enclosed fields and engrossed farms were
less productive, Price believed, than small farms and open commons, and with
diminished production always bringing increased pressure on the means of sub-
sistence, "families of children will become burdens, marriage will be avoided, and
population will decline." Yet economic considerations were not decisive for a
demographer and statistician whose interest in questions of property was primar-
ily political. The more basic problem was that enclosure and the engrossing of
farms robbed the majority of Englishmen of the independence that property in
land had once given them. This had been well understood in "former times";
Francis Bacon, for example, had appreciated the wisdom of maintaining farms
"with such a proportion of land to them, as may breed a subject in convenient
plenty and no servile condition." But the "modern policy" of encouraging
inequality was converting "the little farmers . . . into a body of men who earn
their subsistence by working for others." As a result "the circumstances of the
lower ranks" were being "altered in almost every respect for the worse." From
being "little occupiers of land" and hence independent persons, they had been
"reduced to the state of day-labourers and hirelings."37
Faced with evidence that the traditional bases of political independence had
deteriorated beyond repair, classical republican theorists could have held out
little hope for England's political future. Reflecting on the combined evils of
expanding public credit and declining population, Price himself was frequently
given to predicting balefully that "we shall pursue the path we are in, till the edge
of the precipice towards which we are advancing awakens us, and ruin becomes

35Ibid., Vol. II, pp. 229, 322.

36Richard Price, An Essay on the Population of England from the Revolution to the Present Time
(2nd ed., London: 1780), p. 39; Price, Reversionary Payments, Vol. II, p. 252.
37Ibid., pp. 260-261, 270-272, 274, 340-341.

This content downloaded from 169.229.32.138 on Fri, 9 May 2014 18:47:24 PM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
40 PETER BUCK

unavoidable." Yet the conventional republican polarity, landed independence

against despotic government, no longer exhausted the range of possible political
futures, especially not for dissenting clerical and medical statisticians whose
constituents were propertied but not landed. Price's scheme for wiping out the
national debt by establishing a sinking fund derived its force from his sense of the
independence of mathematics from the state. A similar vision of mathematical
autonomy suggested how political arithmetic could be used to counter the
political dangers raised by the demise of freeholds in land. Public credit, wage
labor, and commercial wealth all posed identical threats to liberty: each involved
a form of property that could be easily alienated and therefore could not be
counted on to provide a basis for autonomous political participation. Price had
persuaded himself that the potential for "general alienation" inherent in public
funds could be contained by having the national debt reduced according to a
"regular and certain course of payments" dictated by the mathematics of com-
pound interest. It seemed equally plausible to search for mathematically sound
mechanisms to restrict the way landless individuals disposed of their wages and
wealth.38

STABILIZING MOBILE PROPERTY OVER TIME

The devices Price found were annuity societies. They seemed ideal instruments
for investing mobile forms of property with the same stability and permanence
that Commonwealthmen had ascribed to property in land. Land owed its special
place in the classical republican canon to the manner in which it was passed on
from generation to generation. Inheritable in a way that incomes were not, it
displayed a reality that spanned the contingencies of historical experience. As
such it performed a crucial theoretical function for Commonwealthmen by
providing a medium, as J. G. A. Pocock has emphasized, for relating transcen-
dent republican virtues and liberties to "a society's existence in time." The
property rights and relations that had grown up around land seemed, that is, to
constitute the framework required for "the living to succeed the dead in a real
and natural order."39 In Price's Observations on Reversionary Payments, this was
exactly the function assigned to annuity societies. If they were organized along
lines "consistent with a sufficient probability of permanence," they would enable
an individual without property in land but "possessed of an estate, or salary,
which must be lost with his life," to provide for the security of persons "depen-
dent upon him" after his death. Such organizations promised to extend the benefits
of propertied independence to all classes in the society. "Persons in the lower
station of life," for example, could be "brought to a habit of industry, in the
beginning of life, by striving to get" the funds to purchase annuities "and thus to
make provisions for themselves in the more advanced parts of life."40
Yet as mechanisms for stabilizing mobile property, annuity societies were open
to damaging criticism. When Price first began examining them in the late 1760s,
their history was replete with failures and scandals. They had proven as sus-
ceptible to manipulation and corruption as the speculative "bubbles" of public
finance and credit. "The same principle" was involved in both cases: faulty
annuity schemes were bankrupted because they failed to set their premiums high
38Ibid., Vol. I, pp. xxiii, 181, 209.
39Pocock, Machiavellian Moments, p. 463.
40Price, Reversionary Payments, Vol. I, pp. vi, 137, 154.

This content downloaded from 169.229.32.138 on Fri, 9 May 2014 18:47:24 PM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY POLITICAL ARITHMETIC 41

enough to cover the benefits that they eventually had to pay. As a result, their
first beneficiaries were always "gainers" at the expense of later contributors,
"and the more insufficient the scheme" was, "the greater" were the injustices;
"for the greater number of exorbitant payments" such societies made, "the more
they consume[d] the property of future annuitants." This nearly universal fault in
annuity programs was partly a consequence of the motives that led their "con-
trivers" to establish them in the first place. They were usually founded by
"persons in the more advanced ages" who were predictably concerned only "that
the schemes they [were] supporting. . . last their time, and that they ... be
gainers"; "as to the injury that may be done to their successors, or to younger
members, it is at a distance, and they care little about it."41
There was another more serious difficulty even with schemes aimed at "nothing
but the advantage of the public." It had to do with the contingencies that made all
kinds of mobile property so unsatisfactory as frameworks for organizing social
existence over time. For Commonwealthmen the point about stable property
relations was that they allowed men to establish other enduring social and
political arrangements that would not be undermined by cycles of decay and
degeneration. Those cycles threatened all polities; they were the only forms of
temporal change that republican theorists could envision. In principle, annuities
were likewise intended as hedges against political and economic deterioration,
"contrived" to be "durable, and at the same time easy and encouraging." But
Price was convinced that "the nature of things do not admit of this in the degree
that is commonly imagined." Far from being examples of how volatile property
arrangements in the present could be transformed into firm foundations for the
future, the annuity programs he investigated were basing "present relief on
future calamity." They showed how "vain" it was "to form such establishments
with the expectation of seeing their fate determined soon by experience. If not
more extravagant than any ignorance can well make them, they will go on
prosperously for twenty or thirty years; and if at all tolerable, they may support
themselves for forty or fifty years; and at last end in distress and ruin."42
These "experiments" were prone to ruin for reasons set by the circumstances of
life in nations that, like England, were "far advanced into the last and worst state
of society." Annuity programs had to be fashioned on the basis of expectations
about how long the individuals contributing to them would survive. In countries
whose inhabitants led "entirely natural and virtuous" lives, sound estimates of
life expectancy were easy to make, because there few people died "without
measuring out the whole period of present existence allotted them." The pattern
was characteristic of "the first or the simple stages of civilization," where
property was "equally divided" and consequently "the blessings of a natural and
simple life [were] enjoyed." But mortality patterns were not so well arranged in
societies that had entered into "the refined states of civilization." With property
"engrossed, and the natural equality of men subverted," death was no longer
primarily a result of old age. Its principal causes were "adventitious" and
traceable to "the corruptions introduced by the vices and false refinements of
civil society."43
Those corruptions had to be taken into account in the design of annuity

41Ibid.,pp. vii, 105,135.

42Ibid., pp. 97-98, 105.
43Ibid., p. 105; Vol. II, pp. 243, 259, 260; Vol. I, p. 377.

This content downloaded from 169.229.32.138 on Fri, 9 May 2014 18:47:24 PM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
42 PETER BUCK

programs. They were sufficiently complex in their action that neither good
intentions nor even experience could dictate plans that would be "rational and
equitable and permanent." It was in "the nature of things," to use Price's phrase,
that with adventitious causes at work, in "particular periods, and in particular
instances, great deviations" from the ordinary range of events would "often
happen." The only defense was to have annuity societies be "guided by the
authority of mathematicians." Their calculations would "only determine proba-
bilities," to be sure, but nothing better could be anticipated in a corrupt age, and
it could in any case "be depended on, that events [would] happen on the whole"
in conformity to their predictions. Even, and indeed especially, in a society
where "artificial and irregular modes of living" prevailed, there was a "law
according to which human life wastes in all its different stages." But predictable
mortality rates were not causes for congratulation. They were neither a sign that
"the author of nature" was shaping the apparently random facts of human
existence in accord with some inscrutable plan, as some of Price's predecessors
had complacently inferred, nor evidence of a natural order inherent in human
affairs, as some of his successors would equally complacently assume. The law he
discerned in vital statistics, and the law his life table manifested, testified only to
the power of civil society to breed its own mortal illnesses. "It is by no means
strictly proper to consider our diseases as the original intention of nature," he
insisted; "they are without doubt, in general, our own creation," and having
discovered the regularity with which they dispatch us, "instead of charging our
maker with our miseries," we were better advised "to accuse and reproach
ourselves."44
Despite being a sign more of corruption than of virtue, the law governing
human mortality had positive political significance. It allowed "able mathema-
ticians" to construct the life tables that would make annuity programs rational,
equitable, and permanent.45 In a country where property relations reflecting the
natural equality of men no longer obtained, programs so based would have a
special significance. They would be exempt from the processes of decay and
degeneration set in motion by enclosure, the engrossing of farms, and the general
accumulation of movable property. This was the message of the first chapter of
Price's Observations on Reversionary Payments. Through a series of questions and
examples, he showed that if an annuity society met certain specifiable conditions,
over time it would settle into a state of permanent equilibrium, with its contrib-
utors and beneficiaries equal and sure to remain so. Conversely, he was also able
to show that when his conditions were not met, ruin was guaranteed, its onset no
less predictable than the initial, incidental period of success that would precede
eventual collapse and make its coming all the more calamitous. Here then was a
formula for making rational sense out of temporal change, for situating at least
one kind of artificial institution "in time" without exposing it to the forces of
corruption, whose operation classical republican doctrine had identified as the
central dynamic of history. What earlier Commonwealthmen had sought from
property in land, Price found in vital statistics and life tables: a system of rights
and relations to insure that the living would "succeed the dead in a real and
natural order," even in an age when individuals neither lived nor died naturally.

44Ibid., pp. 105, 133, 165-166; Vol. II, pp. 2, 243.

45Ibid., Vol. I, p. 168.

This content downloaded from 169.229.32.138 on Fri, 9 May 2014 18:47:24 PM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY POLITICAL ARITHMETIC 43

To contend that annuity societies would be stable only when they were "guided
by the authority of mathematicians" was to return to the position occupied in the
1750s by statisticians like James Dodson. But by the last quarter of the eighteenth
century, when Price was writing, the argument's ideological complexion had
changed drastically. Dodson's scheme for linking property to the census had been
rejected on the grounds that it would have subverted ancient liberties. With the
collection and manipulation of vital statistics taken over by private individuals
and consequently freed from the taint of court and administrative influence, that
objection had lost its force. In Price's hands the authority of mathematics was
opposed to the power of the state. His political arithmetic, like his sinking fund,
was designed to counter the threats to republican ideals posed by the principal
causes of depopulation, "dependence and venality." He would have "let there be
entire liberty" under a government "founded, not in constraint, but in the respect
and the hearts of the people."46

STABILIZING MOBILE PROPERTY IN SPACE

Separating political arithmetic from the state and making it a private matter
involved more than simply changing its ideological colors. It also entailed
fashioning different conceptual frameworks to guide statistical thought and
practice. This was partly a consequence of the particular kind of social standing
that dissenting statisticians sought for themselves and their constituents. In
asserting that mobile forms of property, once stabilized by political arithmetic,
could perform the same political function as freeholds in land had earlier, their
aim was to extend to commercial wealth the prestige and authority traditionally
reserved to the landed interest. For the argument to be persuasive, it was
necessary to show that vital statistics could be as deeply embedded in local con-
figurations of deference and dependence as property rights and relations sur-
rounding land had been. To that end analytic categories had to be developed to
give statistical expression to the traditional particularism of English society.
As a topic in political philosophy, the problem was like the one of decay and
degeneration that Price had sought to resolve by incorporating questions about
change over time into his actuarial studies. He and his contemporaries addressed
the two issues in much the same way. In framing particularistic categories for
analyzing vital statistics, they were once again shifting the theoretical underpin-
nings of their science away from the foundations on which political arithmetic had
initially been built and toward intellectual terrain long occupied by Common-
wealthmen. For the commonwealths that the latter had envisioned were spatially
as well as temporally delimited polities. Accordingly, their principal concern as
political theorists had been to devise ways of knowing appropriate for individuals
whose capacity for rational action depended upon their ability to comprehend the
finite and localized determinants of their specific situations.
To that undertaking seventeenth-century political arithmetic had little to
contribute. Graunt and Petty worked from essentially Hobbesian presuppositions
about the relationship of political theory to civil society. The mathematically
formulated propositions they advanced about the conditions for economic and
political order were intended to be valid independently of place, time, and cir-
cumstance. Like Hobbes, they took it as self-evident that the rational truths of
46Ibid., Vol. II, p. 258.

This content downloaded from 169.229.32.138 on Fri, 9 May 2014 18:47:24 PM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
44 PETER BUCK

mathematics could not be bound by, and hence could not be applied to the under-
standing of, the local and transitory features of particular polities. To be con-
cerned with the latter problem was to step outside the province of "reason" and
into the domain governed by "prudence," to use Hobbes's dichotomy, prudence
unfortunately being a product of that "experience" which "concludeth nothing
universally." Halley was similarly careful to distinguish his political arithmetic
from studies limited by the circumstances that gave specific situations their
individual character. That was the premise for his explanation of the relevance to
England of a life table formed from the Breslau bills of mortality. "It may be
objected," he acknowledged, "that the different salubrity of places does hinder
this proposal from being universal." But having reflected-in a wholly nonmathe-
matical fashion-on the condition of the people in Breslau, their city's geo-
graphical location, the quality of its air, and the fact that few immigrants settled
there in any year, he was persuaded that "there cannot be any better place
proposed for a standard."47
By the second half of the eighteenth century such arguments had ceased to be
persuasive. Life tables based on a single "standard" did not meet the needs of
nonconforming statistical investigators, who presented themselves as individuals
pursuing inquiries under the auspices of fundamentally local arrangements of
power and authority. These men aimed to establish themselves among the
"principal inhabitants" of their districts, who would have been required to oversee
the 1753 census. They sought to account for the accuracy of their data, as opposed
to whatever figures might be compiled by agents of the government, by stressing
that they were well acquainted with the "many gentlemen" of their districts who
were unlikely to "give an account of their families" to constables or magistrates.
As Dr. John Heysham of Carlisle explained, on examining the returns from a
"survey of all the inhabitants" of his county ordered by the Court of Quarter
Sessions in 1787, he found "marked down, the names of all those persons who
refused" to provide the information demanded; from his own knowledge he "was
enabled to make up the deficiency" and contribute "the numbers in each of their
families." Data gathered in this way could be depended upon to be well adapted
to the special conditions of particular places, and that was what was required.
According to one of Price's main informants, Dr. Haygarth, the "important
questions in civil society [could] only be determined by faithful registers, showing
the duration of human life in various situations of town and country." For his
part, Price also emphasized that in assembling vital statistics for as many parts of
the kingdom as possible, his primary concern was to grasp "the particular cir-
cumstances which discriminate different situations."48
This conception of statistical thinking, as a mode of inquiry preeminently suited
to the task of rendering intelligible the conditions of life in discrete places, did not
preclude a sense for the reality of larger demographic units. Rather it enhanced
the appreciation that dissenting political arithmeticians had for the power of their
science to bring the general properties of those aggregates into focus. They
assumed as a matter of course that meaningful questions could be asked about

47Halley, "Estimate," p. 610.

48John Heysham, "Observations on the Bills of Mortality in Carlisle, for the Year 1787," rpt. in
Glass (ed.), Population Statistics, p. 3; John Haygarth, "Observations on the Bills of Mortality in
Chester for the Year 1772," rpt. in James H. Cassedy (ed.), Mortality in Pre-Industrial Times: The
Contemporary Verdict (Farnborough: Gregg, 1973), pp. 67-68; Price, Reversionary Payments, Vol.
I, p. 375.

This content downloaded from 169.229.32.138 on Fri, 9 May 2014 18:47:24 PM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY POLITICAL ARITHMETIC 45

"the population of England" as a whole; was it increasing or decreasing, for

example, and why? But answering demographic questions no longer seemed, as it
had to Halley, chiefly a matter of identifying one or another locality as a standard
from which inferences could be drawn about greater statistical entities. For Price
and his contemporaries, "all desirable precision" required, at a minimum,
working with averages "arising from the aggregate of correct and well authen-
ticated information from two or three principal towns, and thirty or forty villages
and country parishes in every province throughout the nation."49
Nor did those averages mean quite the same thing in the last half of the
eighteenth century as earlier, because the individuals and groups whose births
and deaths were being combined appeared in a different light when they were dis-
aggregated. For a Charles Davenant or a Gregory King writing at the end of the
seventeenth century, arranging the people into statistically significant subdivi-
sions only incidentally entailed classifying them by places of residence. It was
much more important to divide them, Davenant explained, "into such proper
classes and ranks, as may in a manner show the wealth and substance of the whole
kingdom."50 King's well known classification system, which Davenant borrowed,
thus consisted of twenty-six "ranks, degrees, titles and qualifications," extending
from spiritual and temporal lords to "vagrants." Those categories were designed
to serve fiscal purposes, which was only appropriate, since the main "use of
political arithmetic," as Davenant described it, was to "help any ruler to under-
stand fully that strength which he is to guide and direct." Conversely, if the
statistically relevant division of the people into ranks and classes was according to
their contribution to their prince's strength, then it was only reasonable to regard
their reaggregation as equally dependent on sovereign guidance and direction,
aided by political arithmetic, "the art of reasoning by figures upon things relating
to government."51
Nothing at all like King's categories figured in the statistical analyses carried
out by Price and the people who supplied him with information. They had a
wholly different sense of what they were thinking about when they thought in
statistical terms. In a political arithmetic concerned with variations in degrees of
mortality by place and locale, differences in life expectancy as a function of class
and rank were not obtrusive. They were subsumed within a more general
argument about the consequences for birth and death rates of the contrasting
styles of life found in great cities, smaller towns, and country parishes. Nor was
the statistical conflation of such places into a larger aggregate conceived as an
enterprise involving government action. It was a mathematical operation to be
conducted by statisticians whose authority flowed from their local social status,
not from official position. In vital statistics such men found a means for defining
the spatial and temporal dimensions of demographic reality in a way that made
only negative reference to the state as a corrupting presence. Armed with
statistical procedures that promised to restore the propertied independence of all
Englishmen, late eighteenth-century political arithmeticians looked forward to
counting citizens, not subjects.
49
Uncertainty of the Present Population of this Kingdom (London: 1781), p. 31.
50Charles Davenant, "Of the Use of Political Arithmetic, in all considerations about the revenues
and trade," in "Discourses on the Public Revenues and on Trade," in Charles Whitworth (ed.), The
Political and Commercial Works of Dr. Charles D'Avenant (London: 1771), Vol. I, p. 137.
51Davenant, "Political Arithmetic," pp. 138, 128. For a summary of King's scheme, see Speck,
Stability and Strife, pp. 297-298.

This content downloaded from 169.229.32.138 on Fri, 9 May 2014 18:47:24 PM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions