24 INFLUENCE OF PARENTAL ALCOHOLISM 



slight but sensible influence of alcoholism of the mother 

 on the height and weight of the daughter, and a still less 

 influence on the son, while there was practically no influence 

 of the alcoholism of the father on the children of either sex. 

 We are not Hkely to give up modern methods of statistics 

 because Mr. Ke^mes assumes that we must find them 

 laborious, or holds that they are unnecessary. We have 

 heard that story before from biologists, from anthro- 

 pologists and from medical statisticians. But we know 

 that it is precisely by those methods that hght has been 

 thrown into many dark places, where, in the manner 

 suggested by Mr. Keynes, all sorts of opinions had been 

 asserted as deducible from mere inspection of the figures. 

 Yet nowadays these modern methods have been estabHshed 

 in anthropology, they have contributed valuable results to 

 biology, they are creeping even into the reports of medical 

 officers of health and of education committees ; nay, 

 thanks to the Americans, we know that they can be of the 

 utmost service to economics. Some day Cambridge may 

 awake to the fact that a school of modern statistics may 

 help to raise to a still higher level its biology, its anthro- 

 pology, its medicine, and even its economics;^ 



I will go further and, using Professor Marshall's phrase, 

 say that it is very healthy for the Cambridge economists 

 if occasionally a ' mathematical outsider ' — please note 

 the hierarch in the use of this phrase — does ' upbraid ' ^ 

 them with propounding plausibilities before they have even 

 examined the material on which the investigation they set 

 out to cri ticize has been based. Is it not a very serious state 

 of affairs that an investigation which Professor Marshall 



^ The reader of Professor Marshall's letters and Mr. Keynes's criticism 

 would certainly anticipate that I and not they had opened the con- 

 troversy and accused them of ' wasting labour ',' culling facts in a hurry ', 

 and of generally foolish and ignorant conduct ! 



