Furthermore, he appears to have
mixed various social classes and races together without distinction; and
he has made no distinction between parents, one of whom drank, and
parents, both of whom drank. Yet, this distinction, as we have pointed
out, is a critical one for such inquiries. Professor Laitinen's paper,
according to one believer in racial poisons, "surpasses in magnitude and
precision all the many studies of this subject which have proved the
relation between drink and degeneracy." As a fact, it proves nothing of
the sort as to race degeneracy.
Again, T. A. MacNicholl reported on 55,000 American school children,
from 20,147 of whom he secured information about the parents' attitude
to alcoholic drinks. He found an extraordinarily large proportion (58%)
of deficient and backward children in the group. But the mere bulk of
his work, probably, has given it far more prestige than it deserves; for
his methods are careless, his classifications vague, his information
inadequate; he seems to have dealt with a degenerate section of the
population, which does not offer suitable material for testing the
question at issue; and he states that many of the children drank and
smoked,--hence, any defects found in them may be due to their own
intemperance, rather than that of their parents.
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