A SPECTATOR'S NOTEBOOK
AN evening spent with Dr. Gallup, organiser of polls, who arrived in this country on Monday, is a stimulating experience. The public opinion test is by now an estab- lished institution in this country as well as in the United States, and though Dr. Gallup is very far from claiming it to be infallible, he does claim, and -is able to show, that over wide areas and long periods its conclusions have varied astonishingly little from the accomplished fact. What is surprising is the smallness of the sample on which conclusions regarding the whole are based. There are, for example, some 34,000,000 Parliamentary electors in this country. Yet it appears that to discover how a thousand of them intend to vote is to learn quite accurately how all the rest will vote. Proof of that, or something like proof, is provided by the fact that on various occasions when a thousand results have been examined, and then a second thousand, and then a third, the percentage figures at the end, of it all show quite negligible variations from the first thousand's percentage. Dr. Gallup mentioned incidentally an attempt in the United States td discover who the happiest people were. The conclusions indicated were that religious persons were happier than irreligious, married than unmarried, villagers than townsmen, people who live near mountains than people who live in plains. The norm, I suppose, would be the religious bachelor, living in a village in a plain. * * * *
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