That is the story of Hubli; and, as it stands, it is almost incredible. The Commissioners, by very strict inquiry, reduced it to credibility without robbing it of glory. The inquiry brought out more instances of the immeasurable difficulty of the work. Natives who wished to avoid inoculation would escape through the back door at the sight of a plague officer: bribery, personation, sale or transfer of certificates of inoculation, concealment of cases and of deaths, were all practised by those who wished not to be inoculated, or to get the privileges of the inoculated without inoculation, or to save their infected houses from being disinfected and unroofed. Again, with the people dying like flies, and many of them bearing no mark of identification, and with the medical officers overworked past human endurance, the wonder is, not that the statistics were faulty, but that there are any statistics at all. Certainly, the Commission is well within the mark in saying, "It is quite clear that a very large number of lives must have been saved in Hubli by inoculations during the whole course of the epidemic there. _Moreover, we may note that an arithmetical estimate is not the only criterion by which we can appreciate the value of inoculations. And in Hubli their value is approved by the consensus of opinions of officers who have seen probably far more of this process and its results in practice than any other persons in India, and who, having every facility for forming a sound judgment as to its effect where plague was really virulent, are satisfied as to its great value._" Finally, as at Daman so at Hubli, there are lesser groups of statistics, of that kind which is _approved by the consensus of opinions of officers_. These are, (1) Lieutenant Keelan's house-to-house investigation; (2) the Southern Mahratta Spinning Mills; (3) the Southern Mahratta Railway employés. 1. Lieutenant Keelan made a house-to-house visitation of 200 houses, in each of which there were protected and unprotected persons living together, and in each of which there had been one or more cases of plague. The figures for 69 of these houses are appended to Captain Leumann's report. They are as follows:-- +----------------+----------+--------+---------+------------+ | | Inmates. | Cases. | Deaths. | Mortality. | +----------------+----------+--------+---------+------------+ | Inoculated | 336 | 11 | 4 | 1.19 | | Uninoculated | 144 | 84 | 80 | 55 | +----------------+----------+--------+---------+------------+ These 69 houses were selected: there was nothing unfair in the method of selection, still, they were "good houses"; they are not, therefore, exact for statistics; but, as the Commissioners say, they are "of interest as quite special examples of successful inoculation."