PUBLIC OPINION by WALTER LIPPMANN TO FAYE LIPPMANN ...

decent grounds for saying it, how the workers of Sheffield were
equipped. They found, as we all find the moment we refuse to let our
first notion prevail, that they were beset with complications. Of the
test they employed nothing need be said here except that it was a
large questionnaire. For the sake of the illustration, assume that the
questions were a fair test of mental equipment for English city life.
Theoretically, then, those questions should have been put to every
member of the working class. But it is not so easy to know who are the
working class. However, assume again that the census knows how to
classify them. Then there were roughly 104,000 men and 107,000 women
who ought to have been questioned. They possessed the answers which
would justify or refute the casual phrase about the "ignorant workers"
or the "intelligent workers." But nobody could think of questioning
the whole two hundred thousand.
So the social workers consulted an eminent statistician, Professor
Bowley. He advised them that not less than 408 men and 408 women would
prove to be a fair sample. According to mathematical calculation this
number would not show a greater deviation from the average than 1 in
22. [Footnote: _Op. cit._, p. 65.] They had, therefore, to
question at least 816 people before they could pretend to talk about
the average workingman. But which 816 people should they approach? "We
might have gathered particulars concerning workers to whom one or
another of us had a pre-inquiry access; we might have worked through
philanthropic gentlemen and ladies who were in contact with certain
sections of workers at a club, a mission, an infirmary, a place of
worship, a settlement. But such a method of selection would produce
entirely worthless results. The workers thus selected would not be in
any sense representative of what is popularly called 'the average run
of workers;' they would represent nothing but the little coteries to
which they belonged.
"The right way of securing 'victims,' to which at immense cost of time
and labour we rigidly adhered, is to get hold of your workers by some
'neutral' or 'accidental' or 'random' method of approach." This they
did. And after all these precautions they came to no more definite
conclusion than that on their classification and according to their
questionnaire, among 200,000 Sheffield workers "about one quarter"
were "well equipped," "approaching three-quarters" were "inadequately
equipped" and that "about one-fifteenth" were "mal-equipped."
Compare this conscientious and almost pedantic method of arriving at
an opinion, with our usual judgments about masses of people, about the
volatile Irish, and the logical French, and the disciplined Germans,
and the ignorant Slavs, and the honest Chinese, and the untrustworthy
Japanese, and so on and so on. All these are generalizations drawn
from samples, but the samples are selected by a method that
statistically is wholly unsound. Thus the employer will judge labor by