NURTURE AND NATURE 19 



the Manchester special schools what was the connection between 

 wages and drink, but the wages are very seldom given when the 

 father drinks. From the few cases where they are given I found the 

 average wage of a drinking father to be 235. yd., and of a non-drinking 

 father to be 235. 4^., i.e. a slightly higher wage for the drinking father 

 in Manchester, but the numbers are too few for the results to be 

 considered of any importance. If wage then is an estimate of ability 

 and physique we may say that the ability and physique of the 

 drinking workman is about the average, and we can state with greater 

 confidence that the "well-known fact" that drinking has a bad effect 

 on the physique and intelligence of the children has yet to be proved. 



The whole subject of the influence of environment, owing to its 

 complexity, is a fascinating one, partly because we are only just 

 beginning to apply modern statistical methods to this side of eugenics, 

 and the results we obtain are often very unexpected, perhaps we may 

 say wholly contrary to current belief. 



The fact that our conclusions as to the comparative unimportance of 

 the environment factors of employment of mothers, occupation of fathers 

 and drink of the parents are contrary to preconceived opinions, makes 

 more work and more statistics on this side of eugenics most necessary. 



We now come to the last point under consideration the effect of 

 the home environment on the intelligence, eyesight, glands and hearing 

 of the children. The statistics being taken from the C.O.S. Report. 

 The home environment factors we have chosen are: 



(a) The number of people per room of the home. Unfortunately 

 we do not know the, size of the rooms, but in a general way we have 

 a measure of the space in the home by considering the number of 

 people per room. 



(b) Economic condition of the home. We divided the homes into 

 "good" and "bad" from a consideration of the information given in 

 the C.O.S. "Summary of Facts," and took into account also the 

 cleanliness of the children, regularity of attendance, &c. 



(c) Physical condition of the parents. The Report states if the 

 parents are broken down in health or suffer from tuberculosis, &c., 

 persistent alcoholism was included in bad physique. 



(d) Moral condition of the parents. The chief difficulty was to 

 decide how far alcoholism is to be treated as a moral complaint. 



Generally speaking we placed the heavy drinker in the category of 

 moral failure when the drinking was accompanied by "conviction for 

 brutal assault on wife," "house a regular brothel," frequent convictions 



