which statistics are vitiated by the unrecorded assumptions of
their interpreters. Their attention is too much occupied with the
cruder tricks of those who make a corrupt use of statistics for
advertizing purposes. There is, for example, the percentage
dodge. In some hamlet, barely large enough to have a name, two
people are attacked during a smallpox epidemic. One dies: the
other recovers. One has vaccination marks: the other has none.
Immediately either the vaccinists or the antivaccinists publish
the triumphant news that at such and such a place not a single
vaccinated person died of smallpox whilst 100 per cent of the
unvaccinated perished miserably; or, as the case may be, that 100
per cent of the unvaccinated recovered whilst the vaccinated
succumbed to the last man. Or, to take another common instance,
comparisons which are really comparisons between two social
classes with different standards of nutrition and education are
palmed off as comparisons between the results of a certain
medical treatment and its neglect. Thus it is easy to prove that
the wearing of tall hats and the carrying of umbrellas enlarges
the chest, prolongs life, and confers comparative immunity from
disease; for the statistics show that the classes which use these
articles are bigger, healthier, and live longer than the class
which never dreams of possessing such things. It does not take
much perspicacity to see that what really makes this difference
is not the tall hat and the umbrella, but the wealth and
nourishment of which they are evidence, and that a gold watch or
membership of a club in Pall Mall might be proved in the same way
to have the like sovereign virtues. A university degree, a daily
bath, the owning of thirty pairs of trousers, a knowledge of
Wagner's music, a pew in church, anything, in short, that implies
more means and better nurture than the mass of laborers enjoy,