THE STUDY OF SOCIOLOGY. 647 



health, wishing to show the need for those measures he advocated, 

 drew a comparison between the rate of mortality in some most salu- 

 brious village (in Cumberland, I think it was), and the rate of mor- 

 tality in London ; and then, pointing out the marked difference, 

 alleged that this difference was due to " preventible causes " to 

 causes, that is, which good sanitary administration would exclude. 

 Ignoring the fact that the carbonic acid exhaled by nearly three mill- 

 ions of people and by their fires, caused in the one case a vitiation of 

 the air which in the other case did not exist ignoring the fact that 

 most city-occupations are of necessity in-door, and many of them seden- 

 tary, while the occupations of village life are out-of-door and active 

 ignoring the fact that in many of the Londoners the activities are 

 cerebral in a degree beyond that to which the constitution of the race 

 is adapted, while in the villagers the activities are bodily, in a degree 

 appropriate to the constitution of the race ; he set down the whole 

 difference in the death-rate to causes of the kind which laws and offi- 

 cials might get rid of. 



A still more marked example of this effect of a cherished hypothe- 

 sis in vitiating the evidence given by an inquirer, was once uncon- 

 sciously yielded to me by another enthusiast for sanitary regulation. 

 Producing his papers, he pointed out a statistical contrast he had been 

 drawing between the number of deaths per annum in the small town 

 near London where he lived, and the number of deaths per annum, in a 

 low district of London Bermondsey, or Lambeth, or some region on 

 the Surrey side. On this great contrast he triumphantly dilated as 

 proving how much could be done by good drainage, ventilation, etc. 

 On the one hand, he passed over the fact that this small suburban 

 town was, in large measure, inhabited by a picked population people 

 of means, well fed and clothed, able to secure all appliances of comfort, 

 leading regular and quiet lives, free from overwork and anxiety. On 

 the other hand, he passed over the fact that this low region of London 

 was, by virtue of its lowness, one out of which all citizens pecuniarily 

 able to take care of themselves escaped if they could, and into which 

 were thrust an unusual number of those whose poverty excluded them 

 from better regions the ill-fed, the drunken, the dissolute, and others 

 on the highway to death. Though, in the first case, the healthiness of 

 the locality obviously drew to it an excess of persons otherwise likely 

 to live long ; and though, in the second case, the unhealthiness of the 

 locality made it one in which an excess of those not likely to live long 

 were left to dwell or brought to die ; yet the whole difference was put 

 down to direct physical effects of pure air and impure air respectively. 



Statements proceeding from witnesses whose judgments are thus 

 warped statements republished by careless sub-editors, and readily 

 accepted by the uncritical who believe all they see in print, diffuse er- 

 roneous prepossessions ; which, again, tend to justify themselves by 

 drawing the attention to confirmatory facts and away from facts that 



