J AM to discuss Professor Burgess' paper with respect to its general methodology. A personal reference, which will disclose my standpoint of interest, will perhaps be pardoned.. In a publication of i924, I endeavored to find a basis for predicting the future political behavior of farmers and workingmen with respect to each other. For this purpose I developed certain indices based on the previously recorded votes, of individuals of both classes in state legislatures.' In what I conceive to be their essentials, my method and that which Burgess has used in the paper of today are the same. We both have taken account of simple alternatives in behavior: an aye or vote in one instance; conformity with parole or its violation in the other. In neither case, that is, has the behavior measured been regarded as variable.2 We both have employed the percentage of individuals in a general group who comply with one of the alternatives as a normal expectancy, or probability ratio by which to compare the corresponding behavior tendencies of subgroups, as expressed by similar percentages within the latter. Thus I was able to show that farmers and workingmen tended in their votes on prohibition to swing in opposite directions from the norm established by the division within the common party to which both sub-groups belonged. In a particular instance, Republicans as a whole might be 6o per cent for prohibition, while Republican farmers were go per cent and Republican workingmen only zo per cent. Similarly, Professor Burgess finds, for example, that whereas all paroled men had a violation rate of 28.4 per cent, those among them who had no previous work record had a violation rate of 44.4 per cent while or those with a record of regular work the rate was iz.z per cent. Just as farmers and workingmen tend to swing in opposite directions on prohibition within their general party group, these two classes that Burgess has segregated tend to swing in opposite directions on parole violation, within the general group of paroled men. It should not be inferred that Professor Burgess is to be deprived of the credit for his invention. Almost precisely the method that I used in I924 had been employed within the same field in I9I6 by William F. Ogburn and Delvin Peterson in an article entitled The Political Thought of Social Classes.3 I discovered this to my surprise some eighteen months ago, whereupon my contribution seemed to be reduced to the addition of a name to a previously existing device. Professor Burgess seems to have arrived at a similar device quite independently, has employed it in a very different field from that of Ogburn, Peterson and myself, and has developed it further in a number of directions. In particular, his method of using the twenty-one sepjarate comparisons with 1 Rice, S. A. Farmers and Workers in American Politics (Columbia University Studies in History, Economics and Public Law), Chapter VI and Appendix B. 2 Actually, what is done in both of these instances is to throw a series of variables into one or the other of two discrete classes. Cf., Chapter VI of my Quantitative Methods in Politics (Knopf, I928) on The Distribution of Individual Political Attitudes, pp. 7I-9I. 3 Political Science Quarterly, Vol. 3I, pp. 300-3I7, June,i9i6.