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
the most troublesome employee or the most docile that he knows, and
many a radical group has imagined that it was a fair sample of the
working class.
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