482 RURAL SOCIOLOGY 



In the second place, the survey takes from the physician his 

 art of applying to the problems at hand standards and expe- 

 rience worked out elsewhere. To illustrate, if your pure scien- 

 tist were studying the housing situation in a given town, he 

 would start out perhaps without any hypotheses, tabulate every 

 salient fact as to every house, cast up long columns of figures, and 

 make careful deductions, which might and might not be worth 

 the paper they were written on. Your housing reformer and 

 your surveyor ought to know at the start what good ventilation 

 is, and what cellar dwellings are. These things have been 

 studied elsewhere, just as the medical profession has been study- 

 ing hearts and lungs until they know the signals which tell 

 whether a man's organs are working right or not, and what to 

 look for in making a diagnosis. 



In the third place, the survey takes from the engineer his 

 working conception of the structural relation of things. There 

 is a building element in surveys. When we look at a house, we 

 know that carpenters have had a good deal to do with it, and 

 it is possible to investigate just what the carpenters have done; 

 also the bricklayers, the steam-fitters and the rest of the building 

 trades. But your engineer, like your general contractor and 

 architect, has to do with the work of each of these crafts in its 

 relation to the work of every other. So it is with a survey, 

 whether it deals with the major elements entering into a given 

 community which has structural parts of a given master prob- 

 lem such as Dr. Palmer describes in his survey of the sanitary 

 conditions in Springfield. Only recently I received a letter from 

 a man engaged in making a general social survey of a manufac- 

 turing town a so-called survey. He did not think that it was 

 truly a survey, nor did I, because out of the scope of that in- 

 vestigation had been left all of the labor conditions in the 

 mills. The local committee had been fearful of raising opposi- 

 tion in forceful quarters. Yet these labor conditions were basic 

 in the town's life; on them, for better or worse, hung much of 

 the community welfare; and by ignoring them, the committee 

 could deal with partial solutions only. It was as if a diagnosti- 

 cian in making his examination had left a patient's stomach out 

 of consideration because the patient was a dyspeptic and irri- 

 table. They had violated the structural integrity of their survey. 



