Austin had demonstrated that there must be a sovereign everywhere, and that sovereignty, whether in the hands of an autocracy or a republic, must be absolute.

But the Congress which in 1885 sat at Berlin to prevent the partition of Africa from causing a series of European wars as long as those caused by the partition of America, was compelled by the complexity of the problems before it to approach the question of sovereignty on quantitative lines.

Since 1885 therefore every one has become familiar with the terms then invented to express gradations of sovereignty: 'Effective occupation,' 'Hinterland,' 'Sphere of Influence'-- to which the Algeciras Conference has perhaps added a lowest grade, 'Sphere of Legitimate Aspiration.' It is already as unimportant to decide whether a given region is British territory or not, as it is to decide whether a bar containing a certain percentage of carbon should be called iron or steel.
Even in thinking of the smallest subdivisions of observed political fact some men escape the temptation to ignore individual differences.

I remember that the man who has perhaps done more than any one else in England to make a statistical basis for industrial legislation possible, once told me that he had been spending the whole day in classifying under a few heads thousands of 'railway accidents,' every one of which differed in its circumstances from any other; and that he felt like the bewildered porter in _Punch_, who had to arrange the subleties of nature according to the unsubtle tariff-schedule of his company.

'Cats,' he quoted the porter as saying, 'is dogs, and guinea-pigs is dogs, but this 'ere tortoise is a hinsect.' But it must constantly be remembered that quantitative thinking does not necessarily or even generally mean thinking in terms of numerical statistics.