ABSTRACT
Our national participation in the war has brought with it an enormous demand for prompt and exact statistical information. Such a demand is, of course, an inevitable accompaniment of a war waged under modern conditions. War has come to be a conflict of directed masses,—of aggregates. Men, money, munitions, food, railways, shipping, raw materials, and manufactured products in great variety are impressed into the service of the nation. The problems of the effective control and use for war purposes of these varied national resources is intimately dependent upon a knowledge of their quantities, that is, upon statistics. Like chemistry, physics, and the applied sciences, statistical knowledge and the statistical method have come to be important tools of modern warfare. Just as this war is our largest national undertaking, so its statistical demands constitute, in the aggregate, the largest statistical problem with which we have had to deal.
