... At last a book has appeared about the city of Beirut that treats the economic and social life of the Beirutis; but it was written in English, because its author is a foreign social scientist, Mr. Charles Churchill, professor of statistics and sociology at the American University of Beirut. Mr. Churchill and those who assisted him undertook this effort because he felt — as the Lebanese themselves have not felt — that they lack a modern social study of their capital, especially since previous studies were mostly concerned with the science of man (Anthropology) on the one hand, and confined to the villager on the other, those who conducted them supposing that he represents the majority of the population. In his introduction Mr. Churchill contradicts this view, observing that the number of city dwellers in Lebanon exceeds the number of villagers — and this without also taking into account the extent of the city's influence on the villages...

The author intended to carry out this effort with the help of the Economic Institute at the American University of Beirut... But no sooner had the Ministry of Social Affairs heard of the start of the project than it took an interest in the matter and asked to share in the fascinating work and to ease the researchers' approach to the inhabitants, since it is in the light of sound information (Data) that projects of social reform are built. So in 1952 the Ministry issued a decree affirming the validity of the study and specifying its various purposes — social, sanitary, cultural, and economic — and requiring that it include all the families living in Beirut, regardless of their nationality...

The research began with a re-examination of the map of

Beirut drawn up by the French in 1941. The employees of the Statistics Department were charged with this, devoting themselves to it after finishing their work at the department and examining it with care and precision: the map was divided into 68 sections, each of which was entrusted to a number of employees who corrected the positions of the roads and buildings and their heights within it. In the second step, before the interviews began, they divided the quarters of Beirut into points, each containing no more than a hundred buildings and no fewer than fifty,

and each was given a number... When the campaign of interviews began, those conducting them — most of them university students — numbered no more than two. But they later increased until they became 28 persons, divided into fourteen pairs — a young man and a young woman — who conduct the interview together. They go to the appointed family in the evening, so that they may be able to meet its various members, and after making sure of winning their confidence they begin questioning the head of the family and its mistress about their birthplaces, their nationalities, the composition of their family, their age at marriage, and about the rest of the family's members, children abroad and others deceased; then about their economic circumstances, the rent of

their houses, and about their edu

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