The statistician as physician

If he should observe that the inequalities of wealth and opportunity are excessive—that the rich are too rich and too few and the poor too poor and too many—he knows that the body politic of that particular community is not well. However the majority of men are conscious or unconscious hypocrites; they are far more afraid of the publication of evil than of evil itself, and if they enjoy privileges which would not bear scrutiny they prefer darkness to light. Such people are very apt to mistake their own selfish interests for those of the community, to resent the diagnosis of a disease on which they have managed to thrive, and to browbeat the physician who exposes the evil and attempts to cure it.