ABSTRACT
Gentlemen, Your Société d’utilité publique did me the honour of asking for a report on the
influence of national and international development of industry and commerce on the situation of communities living in more rural regions. The short time you have granted me for this paper gives me absolutely no opportunity of dealing thoroughly with a question that would require a volume when studied profoundly. However, I suppose that, in appealing to a man of pure theory, you wanted to ask less about facts than about principles, in order to derive from the facts their inherent meaning. I am an economist and not a statistician. So I do not have a large number of first-hand figures at my disposal. If necessary, I shall borrow some from specialist and authoritative men and base my arguments on exercises with this material. Indeed, gentlemen, in questions like those that have been asked me, the figures are, in relation to reasoning, what raw material is to the machine, or, to take a still more rigorous comparison, what the specific data of a problem are to the algebraic formula producing the solution to that problem. The task of the professional mathematician is to furnish this algebraic formula, which indicates in a general way the relation between the data and the unknown variables. The task of the practical man is to replace, in each particular case, abstract data by numerical quantities and to deduce [240] numerical values for the unknown variables from the formula as a result. So the figures I shall use will have only narrative value. The only thing for which I am responsible is the reasoning I shall apply to them.
