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56 ECONOMIC INQUIRIES AND STUDIES
and consequently has a larger proportion of convictions
for drunkenness and a larger proportionate consumption
of alcoholic liquors-the two tests usually applied in
such comparisons-it has to be considered that the tests
themselves are not very good. The convictions for
drunkenness, it is plain, like convictions for crime
generally, may be very largely a matter of definition
and of police administration. Before comparisons can
be made, the state of legislation and of police adminis-
tration in the countries compared must be consic1ered.
As regards the consumption of alcoholic liquors, again,
I have never seen any statistics satisfactorily connect-
ing a relatively large consumption of alcoholic liquors
with drunkenness. On the contrary, the consumption
in every community is probably at aU times much more
largely the consumption of sober people than that of.
people who drink to excess, and you may have much
drunkenness among a people who, like the Americans,
are generally total abstainers, and little among a people
like the populations of the Southern States of Europe,
who are generally moderate drinkers. Thus the question
of drunkenness, or the reverse, in a population is not to
be easily treated by statistics.
The statistics of bankruptcy or insolvency again are
often quoted as a test of the comparative excellence of
commercial communities. Here again I have had in
my mind some recent comparisons at home between
certain of the Australian colonies and England as re-
gards insolvency. These colonies, we have been told,
have twice as many failures per head of population as
England, or some such proportion. But the traps in
dealing with bankruptcy statistics are innumerable.
Even in England it is not easy to compare one period
with another, owing to difference of legislation making
the conditions and record of official insolvency different
at one time from what they are at another. The law at
one time makes whitewashing so easy that debtors
readily avail themselves of the courts to make them-
selves officially insolvent, and so you have a large