Numerical amateurs became public administrators. Sir John Sinclair came to town in 1793 to found the Board of Agriculture, establishing one of numerous bureaucracies whose tasks were in part statistical. A great landowner and a public man, caught up in the vibrant movement for agricultural reform in Scotland, he had been convinced in Europe that facts and numbers were the handmaiden of progress. Nothing was known of his country: he would change that. 1799 saw the completion of the 21-volume Statistical Account of Scotland that he had started directly after the European tour, 1788. He wrote to each minister of the Church of Scotland requesting a detailed schedule of facts about his parish. Some were obliging, some recalcitrant. He begged, bullied, made jocular threats. ‘Large parties of the Rothsay and Caithness fencibles are to be quartered upon all the clergy, who have not sent their statistical account, on or before the term of Martinmass, so that the ministers have it in their choice, either to write to the Colonel, or to treat his soldiers.’ When at last only six of the 938 parishes were deficient, he wrote in blood-red, to suggest by ‘the Draconian colour of his ink’ what would attend the delinquents.