One more point may be referred to before quitting this part of the subject, which is, that the more recent official hospital-statistics themselves afford a demonstration of the non-protective influence of vaccination, and thus serve as a complete refutation of the conclusions drawn from the statistics we have just been dealing with. Dr. Munk stated before the Hospital Commission, that the percentage of vaccinated patients in the London small-pox hospital had increased from 40 per cent. in 1838 to 94⁶⁄₁₀ per cent. in 1879 (3rd Report of Royal Comm., Q. 9090). This evidence was given in 1882; but Mr. Wheeler stated that according to the Reports of the Highgate hospital, the vaccinated patients had long been over 90 per cent. of the whole, and are now often even 94 or 95 per cent. The hospitals of the Metropolitan Asylums Board, which take in mostly pauper patients, give a lower percentage—the Homerton hospital 85 per cent., the Deptford hospital 87 per cent., and the Hampstead hospital 75 per cent.—in the two latter cases adding the “doubtful” class to the vaccinated, as the facts already given prove that we have a right to do and still probably give too high a proportion of unvaccinated. As the proportion of the London population that is vaccinated cannot be over 90 per cent. (see Minority Report, pp. 173-4), and is probably much lower, and considering the kind of patients the unvaccinated include (see back, p. 29), there remains absolutely nothing for the effects of vaccination. We have already seen that the total case-mortality of these hospitals agrees closely with that of the last century; the two classes of facts taken together thus render it almost certain that vaccination has never saved a single human life. CHAPTER III THE GENERAL STATISTICS OF SMALL-POX MORTALITY IN RELATION TO VACCINATION Having thus cleared away the mass of doubtful or erroneous statistics depending on comparisons of the vaccinated and the unvaccinated in limited areas or selected groups of patients, we turn to the only really important evidence, those “masses of national experience” which Sir John Simon, the great official advocate of vaccination, tells us we must now appeal to for an authoritative decision on the question of the value of vaccination; to which may be added certain classes of official evidence serving as test cases or “control experiments” on a large scale. Almost the whole of the evidence will be derived from the Reports of the recent Royal Commission.