34 A REPLY TO CRITICISMS OF THE 



meaning which Professor Pearson in his memoir and in the 

 Times said they had.' 



Now here are the exact words of my letter of February 4 

 (^.j?/. 7., 191 1, p. 279): 



' The origin of this wage value of the trade is perfectly 

 well known to Sir Victor Horsley and Dr. Sturge; we 

 stated it ourselves. It is " the average of the recorded wages 

 of individuals following that trade", and has nothing to do 

 with sobriety or intemperance ; it is a trade scale, and not 

 a sobriety scale.' 



Here is the sentence: 'this wage value of the trade . . • 

 has nothing to do with sobriety or intemperance.' Sir Victor 

 deliberately — there is no other word for it — cuts out the 

 noun * wage value of the trade ' and replaces it by ' table ', 

 and then proceeds to assert that it is needful to suppose 

 that my headings S. and D. do not refer to * sober ' and 

 * drinking ' ! After this peculiarly surgical operation I think 

 I can afford to leave Sir Victor to the judgement of the 

 future, and to the applause of that audience — somewhat 

 remote from the field of science — for which he seems to 

 crave. Where there is noise and clatter there is no real 

 science in the making.^ 



1 I do not intend to carry this controversy further, but hope to issue shortly 

 other Memoirs dealing with alcoholism. I may, however, state here that 

 I wholly disagree with Mr. Keynes's naive attempt, although a party to 

 a controversy, to act as judge and sum it up {Journal of the Royal Statistical 

 Society, vol. Ixxiv, p. 339). No doubt Dr. Saleeby's melodramatic visit to 

 the North Canongate School in Edinburgh (^B, M. J., Feb. 11, 191 1, p. 332) 

 will be given by medical readers of the B. M. Journal just the weight they 

 are accustomed to give to his judgements on medical and other topics. As 

 a layman, I always find the fertility of his imagination and the picturesque 

 flow of his language most impressive ; yet they invariably seem to lack the 

 convincing factor which arises from intimate study of any single subject. Of 

 Sir Victor Horsley's attempt to discredit our Manchester Data by stating that 

 in his opinion the material is * quite useless for the purpose to which they 

 were put', little need be said; no one who has studied the manner in which 

 Sir Victor Horsley and Dr. Sturge deal with statistical material in their 



