But before proceeding to discuss the statistical evidence set forth in the reports of the Commission, I have again the disagreeable task of showing that a very large portion of it, on which the Commissioners mainly rely to justify their conclusions, is altogether untrustworthy, and must therefore be rejected whenever it is opposed to the results of the great body of more accurate statistical evidence. I allude of course to the question of the comparative small-pox mortality of the VACCINATED and the UNVACCINATED. The first point to be noticed is, that existing official evidence of the greatest value has never been made use of for the purposes of registration, and is not now available. For the last sixteen years the Registrar-General gives the deaths from small-pox under three headings. Thus, in the year 1881 he gives for London (Annual Summary, p. xxiv.): Small-pox. Vaccinated 524 deaths. ” Not vaccinated 962 ” ” No statement 885 ” And in the year 1893, for England and Wales, the figures are (Annual Report, p. xi.): Small-pox. Vaccinated 150 deaths. ” Unvaccinated 253 ” ” No statement 1054 ” Now such figures as these, even if those under the first two headings were correct, are a perfect farce, and are totally useless for any statistical purpose. Yet every vaccination is officially recorded—since 1873 private as well as public vaccinations—and it would not have been difficult to trace almost every small-pox patient to his place of birth and get the official record of his vaccination if it exists. As the medical advisers of the Government have not done this, and give us instead partial and local statistics, usually under no official sanction and often demonstrably incorrect, every rule of evidence and every dictate of common sense entitle us to reject the fragmentary and unverified statements which they put before us. Of the frequent untrustworthiness of such statements it is necessary to give a few examples. In _Notes on the Small-pox Epidemic at Birkenhead_, 1877 (p. 9), Dr. F. Vacher says: “Those entered as not vaccinated were admittedly unvaccinated, or without the faintest mark. The mere assertions of patients or their friends that they were vaccinated counted for nothing.” Another medical official justifies this method of making statistics as follows: “I have always classed those as ‘unvaccinated,’ when no scar, presumably arising from vaccination, could be discovered. Individuals are constantly seen who state that they have been vaccinated, but upon whom no cicatrices can be traced. In a prognostic and a statistic point of view, it is better, and, I think, necessary, to class them as unvaccinated” (Dr. Gayton’s Report for the Homerton Hospital for 1871-2-3).