THE DEADLY STATISTIC

Scatch a statistician and you find an alarmist. Almost everyone who makes a practise of collecting tables and figures, and argues therefrom, has his own per theory of what will happen to this unfortunate republic in another twenty years if something or other is not done at once, or if it keeps on increasing at its present rate.

The latest of these nervous persons who view with alarm is Vice President Frederick L. Hoffman of the Babson Institute, who should know better. Speaking in Ford Hall Sunday evening Mr. Hoffman made the hair rise on the heads of his listeners by informing them that whereas the murder rate had formerly been only seventy-two out of every million, it was now nearly eighty. The number of corpses, he darkly insinuated would, if place end to end, extend for nearly twenty miles; and in ten years, if business is good, the line would stretch from Cambridge to New Haven.

Mr. Hoffman has been pitiably wasteful with his material; he has contented himself with a mere outline, where an experienced sensationalist could have been really spectacular. For example, it would be interesting to know how large an excavation could be filled with the dirt removed from the ten thousand graves occupied each year by murderers and their victims; and also whether the knives and bullets extracted from the deceased would, if melted up in a large brass cauldron, be numerous enough to east into a life size status of Gyp the Hloon, to be placed at the entrance to Murder Alley.

These interesting lacis, while appatent by unimportant, have a very definite purpose. To tell a man that the murder rate is increasing by so many per so and so means relatively nothing; but if it is possible to conjure up before his mind's eye a picture of all the people killed last year cluttering up the roadway from Boston to Lowell, he becomes genuinely disturbed. And if he is disturbed he may do something about it.