MEMOIR ON PARENTAL ALCOHOLISM 15 



to children under six years of age, and 30 to 40% to 

 children from six to ten ! What criticism can be made of 

 persons who simply issue dogmatic statements having no 

 basis in fact at all, except to say that they place themselves 

 wholly outside the court of science ? 



Why indeed children killed by tramcars and lorries should 

 not be included, even if their numbers were greater than 

 they are, it must baffle any one but a Sir Victor Horsley to 

 determine. Cases of children under five running about the 

 streets without proper control are as much instances of 

 parental carelessness as burns or scalds, and we show in our 

 memoir that the children of drinking parents spend much 

 more of their time than those of the sober in the streets. 



As I have indicated above, for a death which is really 

 due to carelessness to be returned as an accident, it must 

 take place soon after the accident, and when the signs of it 

 are recognizable, or the accident must occur in a public 

 place. It is clear that returns made to the Registrar- 

 General do not all come to the notice of the police, or at 

 any rate Sir Victor Horsley and Dr. Sturge had not accu- 

 rate information from their police informants. Why they 

 choose to use unpublished private data, and to ignore the 

 usual official sources of information, which curiously enough 

 give the number of accidental deaths inconveniently large 

 for their argument, is a question for them to answer. Their 

 verbal quibbles in the B.M. J, of Feb. 11, 191 1, form no 

 reply acceptable to any one in the least conversant with 

 statistics. 



I now turn to the subject which Sir Victor Horsley and 

 Dr. Sturge assert to be 



' the chief generalization raised by Miss Elderton and 

 Professor Pearson, namely, that the effect of his alcoholism 

 on the male parent himself is for biological and social 

 statistics a negligible quantity, since their calculations 



