ON THE PHYSIQUE AND ABILITY OF OFFSPRING 15 



dealt with. I have already referred to this point, and 

 any one at all familiar with the Scottish conditions 

 would anticipate a far larger number of drinkers than 

 occur in Enghsh towns. Statistics in the Laborator}- 

 appear to indicate that at least somewhere from 25% to 

 40% would be classed in the English manufacturing 

 districts under the same grades of ' drinking ' as we have 

 used for the Edinburgh data ; probably the upper limit 

 would be reached in a town like York with a population 

 more akin to Edinburgh ; (ii) the number in receipt of 

 charitable relief ; this amounts to 53% in the cases as 

 tabled by us. I should be surprised to find it sensibly 

 less — with the same wide definition of ' charity ' — in the 

 same general working-class population of a non-manu- 

 facturing EngHsh town ; and for the same reason, that 

 the average wages of a lai-ge section are not adequate for 

 the maintenance of a wife and family, (iii) 74% of the 

 families being in one- or two-roomed tenements. Now the 

 tenement system is largely pecuUar to Edinburgh, and the 

 only comparison possible in such a case is with the popu- 

 lation of a city which is also largely tenemental. It is 

 perfectly true that in the EngHsh manufacturing districts 

 only about 25% of the families are said to be in tenements 

 of two or less rooms. The general arrangement is a small 



I have been able to discover in Air. Keynes's paper, is that we have given 

 " in general no evidence as to the habits of the parents at the time of the 

 birth of the children, many of them 11 or 12 years of age — a point 

 of some importance ". The reply to this is that there are as many 

 children of 5 and 6 as of 11 and 12, and if some children were born 

 before parental alcoholism had started, some were certainly born after, 

 and therefore this mixed category should be w^orse than the category 

 containing children whose parents have not been alcoholic at all. 

 Further, a pretty wide experience of the relative healthiness of children, 

 earlier and later born, has shown us that the preponderance of crimi- 

 nality, idiocy, phthisis, and other signs of degeneracy usually attributed 

 to parental alcoholism occurs among the elder born. 



