ing, but treating these accomplishments with contempt. Go back not quite so far, and you find, along with a slight en couragement by authority of such learning as referred to Theology, a positive discouragement of all other learning; a joined with the belief that only for the clergy is learning of any kind proper. Go back a much smaller distance, and you find in the highest classes inability to spell tolerably, joined with more or less of the feeling that good spelling was a pedantry improper for ladies — a feeling akin to that named by Shakespeare as shown by those who counted it " a mean ness to write fair." Down even to quite modern times, well- to-do farmers and others of their rank were by no means all of them able to read and write. Education, spreading thus slowly during so many centuries, has during the last century spread with comparative rapidity. Since Raikes commenced Sunday-schools in 1771; since Lancaster, the Quaker, in 1796 set up the first of the schools that afterwards went by his name; since 1811, when the Church had to cease its opposi tion and become a competitor in educating poor children; the strides have been enormous. A degree of ignorance which had continued the rule during so many centuries, was made, in the course of half a century, the exception. And then in 1834, after this unobtrusive but speedy diffusion of knowl edge, there came along with a growing consciousness of the still-remaining deficiency, the system of State-subsidies; which, beginning with £20,000, grew, in less than thirty years, to more than a million. Yet now, after this vast progress at an ever-increasing rate, there has come the outcry that the nation is perishing for lack of knowledge. Any one not knowing the past, and judging from the statements of those who have been urging on educational organizations, would suppose that strenuous efforts are imperative to save the people from some gulf of demoralization and crime into which ignorance is sweeping them.
How testimonies respecting objective facts are thus per verted by the subjective states of the witnesses, and how we have to be ever on our guard against this cause of vitiation in sociological evidence, may indeed be inferred from the illu sions that daily mislead men in their comparisons of past with present. Returning after many years to the place of his boy- 72 THE STUDY OF SOCIOLOGY.
hood, and finding how insignificant are the buildings he re membered as so imposing, every one discovers that in this case it was not that the past was so grand, but that his im pressibility was so great and his power of criticism so small He does not perceive, however, that the like holds generally; and that the apparant decline in various things is really due to the widening of his experiences and the growth of a judg ment no longer so easily satisfied. Hence the mass of wit nesses may be under the impression that there is going on a change just the reverse of that which is really going on; as we see, for example, in the notion current in every age, that the size and strength of the race have been decreasing, when, as proved by bones, by mummies, by armour, and by the ex periences of travellers in contact with aboriginal races, they have been on the average increasing.
Most testimony, then, on which we have to form ideas of sociological states, past and present, has to be discounted to meet this cause of error; and the rate of discount has to be varied according to the epoch, and the subject, and the witness.
Beyond this vitiation of sociological evidence by general subjective states of the witnesses, thei'e are vitiations due to more special subjective states. Of these, the first to be noted are of the class which foregone conclusions produce.
Extreme cases are furnished by fanatical agitators, such as members of the Anti-Tobacco Society; in the account of whose late meeting we read that " statistics of heart-disease, of insan ity, of paralysis, and the diminished bulk and stature of the population of both sexes proved, according to the Report, that these diseases were attributable to the use of tobacco." But without making much of instances so glaring as this, we may find abundant proof that evidence is in most cases uncon sciously distorted by the pet theories of those who give it.
Early in the history of our sanitary legislation, a leading officer of health, wishing to show the need for those measures he advocated, drew a comparison between the rate of mortality in some salubrious village (in Cumberland, I think it was) and the rate of mortality in London; and then, pointing out the marked difference, alleged that this difference was due to "preventible causes" — to causes, that is, which good sanitary OBJECTIVE DIFFICULTIES. 73 administration would exclude. Ignoring the fact that the carbonic acid exhaled by nearly three millions of people and by their fires, caused in the one case a vitiation of the air which in the other case did not exist — ignoring the fact that most city-occupations are of necessity indoor, and many of them sedentary, while the occupations of village life are out- of-door and active — ignoring the fact that in many of the Lon doners the activities are cerebral in a degree beyond that to which the constitution of the race is adapted, while in the vil lagers the activities are bodily, in a degree appropriate to the constitution of the race; he set down the whole difference in the death-rate to causes of the kind which laws and officials might get rid of.
A still more marked example of this effect of a cherished hypothesis in vitiating evidence, was once unconsciously yielded to me by another enthusiast for sanitary regulation. Producing his papers, he pointed out the great contrast be tween the number of deaths per annum in the small town near London where he lived, and the number of deaths per annum in a low district of London — Bermondsey, or Lam beth, or some region on the Surrey side. On this great con trast he triumphantly dilated, as proving how much could be done by good drainage, ventilation, &c. On the one hand, he passed over the fact that his suburban place was, in large measure, inhabited by a picked population — people of means, well fed and clothed, able to secure all appliances for comfort, leading regular lives, free from over- work and anxiety. On the other hand, he passed over the fact that this low region of London was, by virtue of its lowness, one out of which all citizens pecuniarily able to take care of themselves escaped if they could, and into which were thrust great numbers whose poverty excluded them from better regions — the ill-fed, the drunken, the dissolute, and others on the highway to death. Though, in the first case, the healthiness of the locality obvi ously drew to it an excess of persons otherwise likely to live long; and though, in the second case, the unhealthiness of the locality made it one in which an excess of those not likely to live long were left to dwell, or hid themselves to die; yet the whole difference was put down to direct effects of pure air and impure air respectively.
74 THE STUDY OP SOCIOLOGY.
Statements proceeding from witnesses whose judgments are thus warped — statements republished by careless sub editors, and readily accepted by the uncritical who believe all they see in print, diffuse erroneous prepossessions; which, again, tend to justify themselves by drawing the attention to confirmatory facts and away from facts that are adverse. Throughout all past time vitiations of evidence by influences of this nature have been going on in degrees varying with each people and each age; and hence arises an additional ob stacle to the obtainment of fit data.
Yet another, and perhaps stronger, distorting influence ex isting in the medium through which facts reach us, results from the self-seeking, pecuniary or other, of those who testify. We require constantly to bear in mind that personal interests effect most of the statements on which sociological conclusions are based, and on which legislation proceeds.
Everyone knows this to be so where the evidence concerns mercantile affairs. That railway -enterprise, at first prompted by pressing needs for communication, presently came to be prompted by speculators, professional and financial; and that the estimates of cost, of traffic, of profits, &c., set forth in pros- pectiises were grossly misleading; many readers have been taught by bitter experience. That the gains secured by schemers who float companies have fostered an organized sys tem which has made falsification of data a business, and which, in the case of bubble Insurance Companies, has been worked so methodically that it has become the function of a journal to expose the frauds continually repeated, are also familiar facts: reminding us how, in these directions, it is needful to look very sceptically on the allegations put before us. But there is not so distinct a consciousness that in other than business-enterprises, self-seeking is an active cause of mis representation.
Like the getting-up of companies, the getting-up of agita tions and of societies is, to a considerable extent, a means of advancement. As in the United States politics has become a profession, into which a man enters to get an income, so here there has grown up, though happily to a smaller extent, a pro fessional philanthropy, pursued with a view to position, or to OBJECTIVE DIFFICULTIES. 75 profit, or to both. Much as the young clergyman in want of a benefice, feeling1 deeply the spiritual destitution of a suburb that has grown beyond churches, busies himself in raising funds to build a church, and probably does not, during his canvass, understate the evils to be remedied; so every here and there an educated man with plenty of leisure and small income, greatly impressed with some social evil to be remedied or benefit to be achieved, makes himself the nucleus to an in stitution, or the spur to a movement. And since his success depends mainly on the strength of the case he makes out, it is not to be expected that the evils to be dealt with will be faintly pictured, or that he will insist very strongly upon facts adverse to his plan. As I can personally testify, there are those who, having been active in getting up schemes for alleged beneficial public ends, consider themselves aggrieved when not after wards appointed salaried officials. The recent exposure of the " Free Dormitory Association," which, as stated at a meeting of the Charity-Organization Society, was but one of a class, shows what this process may end in. And the vitiation of evidence is an inevitable concomitant. One whom I have known during his thirty years' experience of Leagues, Alli ances, Unions, &c., for various purposes, writes: — "Like re ligious bodies, they [Associations] form creeds, and every ad herent is expected to cry up the shibboleth of his party...All facts are distorted to the aid of their own views, and such as cannot be distorted are suppressed." " In every association with which I have had any connection, this fraud has been practised."
The like holds in political agitations. Unfortunately, agencies established to get remedies for crying evils, are liable to become agencies maintained and worked in a con siderable degree, and sometimes chiefly, for the benefit of those who reap incomes from them. An amusing instance of this was furnished, not many years ago, to a Member of Parliament who took an active part in advocating a certain radical measure which had for some years been making way, and which then seemed not unlikely to be carried. Being a member of the Association that had pushed forward this measure, he happened to step into its offices just before a debate which was expected to end in a majority for the bill, Y6 THE STUDY OP SOCIOLOGY.
and he found the secretary and his subs in a state of conster nation at the prospect of their success: feeling, as they ob viously did, that their occupation was in danger.
Clearly, then, where personal interests come into play, there must be, even in men intending to be truthful, a great readiness to see the facts which it is convenient to see, and such reluc tance to see opposite facts as will prevent much activity in seek ing for them. Hence, a large discount has mostly to be made from the evidence furnished by institutions and societies in justification of the policies they pursue or advocate. And since much of the evidence respecting both past and present social phenomena comes to us through agencies calculated thus to pervert it, there is here a further impediment to clear vision of facts.
That the reader may fully appreciate the difficulties which these distorting influences, when combined, put in the way of getting good materials for generalization, let him contemplate a case.
All who are acquainted with such matters know that up to some ten years since, it was habitually asserted by lecturers when addressing students, and by writers in medical journals, that in our day, syphilis is a far less serious evil than it was in days gone by. Until quite recently this was a commonplace statement, called in question by no one in the profession. But just as, while a decrease of drunkenness has been going on, Temperance-fanatics have raised an increasing outcry for strenuous measures to put down drunkenness; so, while ve nereal disease has been diminishing in frequency and severity, certain instrumentalities and agencies have created a belief that rigorous measures are required to check its progress. This incongruity would by itself be a sufficient proof of the extent to which, on the one side or the other, evidence must have been vitiated. What, then, shall we say of the incon gruity on finding that the first of these statements has recently been repeated by many of the highest medical authorities, as one verified by their experience? Here are some of their tes timonies.
The Chairman of the late Government Commission for inquiring into the treatment and prevention of syphilis, Mr.
OBJECTIVE DIFFICULTIES. 77 Skey, Consulting Surgeon to St. Bartholomew's Hospital, gave evidence before a House of Lords' Committee. Refer ring to an article expressing the views of the Association for promoting the extension of the Contagious Diseases Acts, he said it was — " largely overcharged," and " coloured too highly." " The disease is by no means so common or universal, I may say, as is represented in that article,...and I have had an opportunity since I had the summons to appear here to-day of communicating with several lead ing members in the profession at the College of Surgeons, and we are all of the same opinion, that the evil is not so large by any means as it is represented by the association."
Mr. John Simon, F.E.S., for thirty-five years a hospital surgeon, and now Medical Officer to the Privy Council, writes in his official capacity — " I have not the least disposition to deny that venereal affections constitute a real and great evil for the community; though I suspect that very exaggerated opinions are current as to their diffusion and malignity."
By the late Prof. Syme it was asserted that — " It is now fully ascertained that the poison of the present day (true syphilis) does not give rise to the dreadful consequences which have been mentioned, when treated without mercury...None of the serious effects that used to be so much dreaded ever appear, and even the trivial ones just noticed comparatively seldom present them selves. We must, therefore, conclude either that the virulence of the poison is worn out, or that the effects formerly attributed to it de pended on treatment." 3 The British and Foreign Medico-Chirurgical Review, which stands far higher than any other medical journal, and is friendly to the Acts as applied to military and naval sta tions, writes thus: — " The majority of those who have undergone the disease, thus far [including secondary manifestations] live as long as they could other wise have expected to live, and die of diseases with which syphilis has no more to do than the man in the moon." 4..." Surely 455 persons suffering from true syphilis in one form or another, in a poor population of a million and a half [less than 1 in 3000]...can not be held to be a proportion so large as to call for exceptional action on the part of any Government." 5 Mr. Holmes Coote, F.RC.S., Surgeon and Lecturer on Sur gery at St. Bartholomew's Hospital, says — 78 THE STUDY OF SOCIOLOGY.
" It is a lamentable truth that the troubles which respectable hard working married women of the working class undergo are more trying to the health, and detrimental to the looks, than any of the irregu larities of the harlot's career."
Again, it is stated by Mr. Byrne, Surgeon to the Dublin Lock Hospital, that '* there is not nearly so much syphilis as there used to be; " and, after describing some of the serious results that were once common, he adds: — " You will not see such a case for years — a fact that no medical man can have failed to remark." Mr. W. Burns Thompson, F.R.C.S., for ten years head of the Edinburgh Dispensary, testifies as. follows: — " 1 have had good opportunities of knowing the prevailing dis eases, and I can only say that the representations given by the advo cates of these Acts are to me perfectly unintelligible; they seem to me to be gross exaggerations."
Mr. Surgeon-Major Wyatt, of the Coldstream Guards, when examined by the Lords' Committee, stated that he quite concurred with Mr. Skey. Answering question 700, he said: — " The class of syphilitic diseases which we see are of a very mild character; and, in fact, none of the ravages which used formerly to be committed on the appearance and aspect of the men are now to be seen...It is an undoubted fact that in this country and in France the character of the disease is much diminished in intensity.— Question 708: I understand you to say, that in your opinion the venereal disease has generally, independent of the Act, become more mitigated, and of a milder type? Ansiver: Yes; that is the experi ence of all surgeons, both civil and military."
Dr. Druitt, President of the Association of the Medical Officers of Health for London, affirmed at one of its meet ings — " that, speaking from thirty-nine years' experience, he was in a posi tion to say that cases of syphilis in London were rare among the middle and better classes, and soon got over."
Even Mr. Acton, a specialist to whom more than to any other man the Acts are due, admitted before the Lords' Com mittee that "the disease is milder than it was formerly."
And then, most important of all, is the testimony of Mr. Jonathan Hutchinson, who is recognized as the highest au thority on inherited syphilis, and to whose discoveries, indeed, OBJECTIVE DIFFICULTIES. Y9 the identifications of syphilitic taint are mainly due. Though thus under a natural bias rather to over-estimate than under estimate the amount of inherited syphilis, Mr. Hutchinson, while editor of the British Medical Journal, wrote: — " Although there is an impression to the contrary, yet recent dis coveries and more accurate investigations, so far from extending the domain of syphilis as a cause of chronic disease, have decidedly tended to limit it...although we have admitted as positively syphilitic certain maladies of a definite kind not formerly recognized, we have excluded a far larger number which were once under suspicion We can identify now the subject of severe hereditary taint by his teeth and physiognomy; but those who believe most firmly in the value of these signs, believe also that they are not displayed by one in five thou sand of our population.* Like testimony is given by continental surgeons, among whom it was long ago said by Ambrose Pare, that the disease "is evidently becoming milder every day;" and by Auzias Turenne, that " it is on the wane all over Europe." Astruc and Diday concur in this statement. And the latest authority on syphilis, Lancereaux, whose work is so highly valued that it has been translated by the Sydenham Society, asserts that:— " In these cases, which are far from being rare, syphilis is but an abortive disease; slight and benignant, it does not leave behind any troublesome trace of its passage. It is impossible to lay too much stress upon this point. At the present day especially, when syphilis still inspires exaggerated fears, it should be known that this disease becomes dissipated completely in a great number of cases after the ces sation of the cutaneous eruptions, and perhaps sometimes even with the primary lesion." ' It will, perhaps, be remarked that these testimonies of med ical men who, by their generally high position, or their length ened experience, or their special experience, are so well quali fied to judge, are selected testimonies; and against them will be set the testimonies of Sir James Paget, Sir W. Jenner, and Mr. Prescott Hewett, who regard the evil as a very grave one. Possibly there will be quoted in reply an authoritative State- document, which, referring to the views of the three gentle men just named as having " the emphatic concurrence of nu merous practitioners," says that they "are hardly answered by a few isolated opinions that the evil has been exaggerated " — a 80 THE STUDY OF SOCIOLOGY.
somewhat inadequate description of the above-quoted testi monies, considering not only the general weight of the names, but also the weight of sundry of them as those of specialists. To gather accurately the consensus of medical opinion would be impracticable without polling the whole body of physicians and surgeons; but we have a means of judging which view most truly meets with " the emphatic concurrence of numer ous practitioners ": that, namely, of taking a local group of medical men. Out of fifty-eight physicians and surgeons re siding in Nottingham and its suburbs, fifty-four have put their signatures to a public statement that syphilis is " very much diminished in frequency, and so much milder in form that we can scarcely recognize it as the disease described by our fore fathers." And among these are the medical men occupying nearly all the ollicial medical positions in the town — Senior Physician to the General Hospital, Honorary Surgeon ditto, Surgeons to the Jail, to the General Dispensary, to the Free Hospital, to the Union Hospital, to the Lock Hospital (four in number), Medical Officers to the Board of Health, to the Union, to the County Asylum, &c., &c. Even while I write there comes to me kindred evidence in the shape of a letter published in the British Medical Journal for 20th July, 1872, by Dr. Carter, Honorary Physician to the Liverpool Southern Hospital, who states that, after several debates at the Liver pool Medical Institution, " a form of petition strongly condem natory of the Acts was written out by myself, and...in a few days one hundred and eight signatures [of medical men] were obtained." Meanwhile, he adds, "earnest efforts were being made by a number of gentlemen to procure medical sig natures to the petition in favour of the Acts known as the 'London Memorial,' — efforts which resulted in twenty-nine signatures only."
Yet notwithstanding this testimony, great in quantity and much of it of the highest quality, it has been possible so to present the evidence as to produce in the public mind, and in the Legislature, the impression that peremptory measures for dealing with a spreading pest are indispensable. As lately writes a Member of Parliament, — " We were assured, on what appeared unexceptionable testimony, that a terrible constitu tional disease was undermining the health and vigour of the OBJECTIVE DIFFICULTIES. §1 nation, and especially destroying innocent women and chil dren."
And then note the startling circumstance that while so erroneous a conception of the facts may be spread abroad, there may, by the consequent alarm, be produced a blindness to facts of the most unquestionable kind, established by the ever-accumulating1 experiences of successive generations. Un til quite recently, our forms of judicial procedure embodied the principle that some overt injury must be committed before legal instrumentalities can be brought into play; and con formity to this principle was in past times gradually brought about by efforts to avoid the terrific evils that otherwise arose. As a Professor of Jurisprudence reminds us, "the object of the whole complicated system of checks and guards provided by English law, and secured by a long train of constitutional conflicts, has been to prevent an innocent man being even mo mentarily treated as a thief, a murderer, or other criminal, on the mere alleged or real suspicion of a policeman." Yet now, in the state of groundless fright that has been g'ot up, " the concern hitherto exhibited by the Legislature for the personal liberty of the meanest citizen has been needlessly and reck lessly lost sight of." 8 It is an a priori inference from human nature that irresponsible power is sure, on the average of cases, to be grossly abused. The histories of all nations, through all times, teem with proofs that irresponsible power has been grossly abused. The growth of representative governments is the growth of arrangements made to prevent the gross abuse of irresponsible power. Each of our political struggles, end ing in a further development of free institutions, has been made to put an end to some particular gross abuse of irrespon sible power. Yet the facts thrust upon us by our daily expe riences of men, verifying the experiences of the whole human race throughout the past, are now tacitly denied; and it is tacitly asserted that irresponsible power will not be grossly abused. And all because of a manufactured panic about a de creasing disease, which kills not one-fifteenth of the number killed by scarlet fever, and which takes ten years to destroy as many as diarrhoea destroys in one year.
See, then, what we have to guard against in collecting so ciological data — even data concerning the present, and, still 7 82 THE STUDY OF SOCIOLOGY.
more, data concerning the past. For testimonies that come down to us respecting bygone social states, political, religious, judicial, physical, moral, &c., and respecting the actions of particular causes on those social states, have been liable to perversions not simply as great, but greater; since while the regard for truth was less, there was more readiness to accept unproved statements.
Even where deliberate measures are taken to obtain valid evidence on any political or social question raised, by sum moning witnesses of all classes and interests, there is difficulty in getting at the truth; because the circumstances of the in quiry tend of themselves to bring into sight some kinds of evidence, and to keep out of sight other kinds. In illustra tion may be quoted the following statement of Lord Lincoln on making his motion concerning the enclosures of com mons:— " This I know, that in nineteen cases out of twenty, committees sitting in this House on private bills neglected the rights of the poor. I do not say that they wilfully neglected those rights — far from it; but this I affirm, that they were neglected in consequence of the com mittees being permitted to remain in ignorance of the rights of the poor man, because by reason of his very poverty he is unable to come up to London to fee counsel, to procure witnesses, and to urge his claims before a committee of this House." — Hansard. 1 May, 1845. 9 Many influences of a different order, but similarly tending to exclude particular classes of facts pertinent to an inquiry, come into play. Given a question at issue, and it will very probably happen that witnesses on the one side may, by evi dence of a certain nature, endanger a system 011 which they depend for the whole or for part of their livelihood; and by evidence of an opposite nature may preserve it. By one kind of testimony they may offend their superiors and risk their promotion: doing the reverse by another kind. Moreover, witnesses not thus directly interested are liable to be indirectly swayed by the thought that to name certain facts they know will bring on them the ill-will of important persons in their locality — a serious consideration in a provincial town. And while such influences strongly tend to bring out evidence, say in support of some established organization, there may very OBJECTIVE DIFFICULTIES. 83