156 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



een States a small majority of tlie people are of low general in- 

 telligence; and this mere counting of the entries may show me 

 that, when taking the States one by one, I have made a somewhat 

 different estimate of the general intelligence of the people of the 

 entire country from that which I made when looking at all the 

 people of the country as an undivided mass. 



If still unsatisfied with my judgment, I may proceed to sub- 

 divide each State into its counties, and take the counties as enu- 

 meration units. I may go through the process of recording my 

 judgments by entering symbols in the several columns of my table, 

 and at the end I may again count up my totals of high, medium, 

 and low intelligence. Obviously, I can do this work only if I am 

 able to travel through every county in the United States, and, by in- 

 terviews with people, by forming general impressions and by vis- 

 iting schools, get a fairly definite idea of the relative intelligence 

 of each civil division; or if, being unable to make this personal 

 inquiry, I resort to printed information — namely, educational re- 

 ports, miscellaneous public documents, historical records, newspa- 

 pers, and other objective data throwing light upon the intellectual 

 status of these various divisions. This, I find, is an enormous 

 labor; but if I conscientiously perform it I correct my subjective 

 impressions, and there is a fair presumption that my final result 

 is a judgTuent vastly nearer the truth than was my first general 

 impression of the intelligence of the whole undivided mass of the 

 American population. 



Thus the conscientious use of the method which I have sug- 

 gested insures, in the interest of precision, two important modi- 

 fications of ordinary sociological description: First, it subjects the 

 purely subjective processes of judgment to a certain correction and 

 measurement; secondly, it leads the observer step by step, and 

 almost unconsciously, to resort more and more to definite objec- 

 tive data in place of first impressions. 



Essentially the same method, by slight modifications of detail, 

 may be extended to historical inquiries. How often do we en- 

 counter in historical monographs the statement that, since a cer- 

 tain date, there has been a marked increase of this or that activity, 

 or that such a trait or such a habit, occasionally observed half a 

 century ago, is now characteristic of whole sections or popula- 

 tions! To the credit of the historians, it must be said that careful 

 men seldom make such statements without offering in substantia- 

 tion of them a certain amount of objective evidence. But the 

 method is loose, and it has the radical defect of permitting such 

 terms as " increase " and " decrease," " great increase " and " great 

 decrease " to stand for different quantities when applied to differ- 



