lvi LIFE OF DB. ROLLESTON. 



11 drunkenness has decreased wonderfully ; " and my informant, 

 whose words I quote, but who, like myself, has seen reason to 

 disbelieve wholly in the " system," professed himself astonished 

 at the change. You may think that my informant and myself 

 are hard to please if we do not think this a success. I have to 

 say that a man must be hard to please and must not be easily , 

 satisfied nor contented with first impressions if he is either to 

 get at the real facts or to draw true inferences from them in a 

 matter which is not merely somewhat complex in itself, but 

 which touches hardly on the one side upon powerful pecuniary, 

 and on the other upon powerful philanthropic interests. The 

 first rule, however, in Natural History and, I imagine, in 

 all other sound investigation, is to make yourself acquainted 

 with all the circumstances of the case, and in stating your 

 problem, at least to yourself, to omit from consideration no 

 condition which may in any way be relevant to the question of 

 causation. This rule is a little elementary, but it is also a good 

 deal neglected. Acting upon it, I will remark that the three 

 years in question which have seen the Gothenburg system in full 

 operation, besides being but three years, a sufficiently short time 

 to base even a B.A. degree upon, have been years of severe com- 

 mercial distress in Gothenburg as in England, with which country 

 the bulk of its trade is carried on. Now we are not here and 

 now so far removed from the memories of the cotton famine as to 

 have forgotten that certain evils, such as that of excessive infant 

 mortality, to say nothing of drunkenness, diminished greatly in 

 England during that period. But nobody ascribed the diminu- 

 tion of that mortality to any other cause than the very obvious 

 vera ac sufficiens causa, which shut up the mills and left the 

 mothers to stay at home and look after their children. And I 

 cannot see why the same line of reasoning may not be applied 

 to the case of Gothenburg, with its three last years of hardship. 

 The analogy is mine, the explanation it suggests to your readers 

 was the one given me by my informant ; they can judge for 

 themselves which of the two antecedents has been the more or 

 the really operative one. But Descartes' rule as to an exhaustive 



