Benjamin Disraeli or Mark Twain is still disputed), the industrializing nations were just beginning to become addicted to statistics-figures on popula- tion, the economy, and other matters of concern to the state. As scholars note, even accurate numbers can obfuscate as well as illu- minate. "I still think that a familiarity with the best that has been thought and said men of letters," critic Joseph Wood Krutch wrote in 1963, "is more helpful than all the sociologists' statistics."...