22 INFLUENCE OF PARENTAL ALCOHOLISM 



and much information as to their parents, as ' widely 

 representative ' of, not the specially selected skilled 

 artizan class, but of the general working population of 

 a big non-man afacturing town. Such population samples, 

 although neither creditable to our race nor to our civiliza- 

 tion, are in fact widely representative. And it is not the 

 members of the Eugenics Laboratory, but the Cambridge 

 economists in their cloistered studies, who exhibit igno- 

 rance, when they try to demonstrate that the Edinburgh 

 sample belongs to an exceptionally ' low grade ' population 

 in which ' physical and moral squalor are rampant '. 



I have discussed the nature of the Edinburgh sample 

 at length, not because it is of importance for our investi- 

 gation, whether it be or be not a sample of the general 

 working-class population, but because it illustrates the 

 temperament with which our critics approach their 

 problem. They tell us that our labour is wasted because 

 our material is exceptional ; but they make no attempt 

 to show any differentiation in the two sections of the 

 population we are deahng with. They content themselves 

 with asserting that the population is a ' low grade ' one, 

 which has no logical bearing on the problem in hand. 

 And even this is a mere assertion, for they bring no data 

 to show what a Glasgow or a Liverpool, a York or a 

 London school of like character in a working-class neigh- 

 bourhood would show as to parentage and as to offspring. 

 All they can achieve is to quote the percentages of drinkers, 

 of charity-receivers, and of two-roomed tenements in the 

 Report, and assert that these numbers are markedly 

 different from what they are elsewhere ; but what they 

 may be in other parts of Edinburgh, in Glasgow, in other 

 tenement cities, or allowing for difference of race and 

 environment in York or London, they neither state nor 



