Throughout the argument the population of England will be looked upon not (as John Stuart Mill would have said) 'on the average or _en masse_,'[47] but as consisting of individuals who can be arranged in 'polygons of variation' according to their nervous and physical strength, their 'character' and the degree to which ideas of the future are likely to affect their present conduct.
[47] See p.

132.
Meanwhile the public which will discuss the Report has changed since 1834.

Newspaper writers, in discussing the problem of destitution, tend now to use, not general terms applied to whole social classes like the 'poor,' 'the working class,' or 'the lower orders,' but terms expressing quantitative estimates of individual variations, like 'the submerged tenth,' or the 'unemployable'; while every newspaper reader is fairly familiar with the figures in the Board of Trade monthly returns which record seasonal and periodical variations of actual unemployment among Trade Unionists.
One could give many other instances of this beginning of a tendency in political thinking, to change from qualitative to quantitative forms of argument.

But perhaps it will be sufficient to give one relating to international politics.

'Sixty years ago sovereignty was a simple question of quality.