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CHAP. III for centuries. They are always densely crowded owing to the value of situations as near as possible to the shipping. Hence there is always a large population living under the worst sanitary conditions, with bad drainage, bad ventilation, abundance of filth and decaying organic matter, and all the conditions favourable to the spread of zymotic diseases and their exceptional fatality. Such populations have maintained to our day the insanitary conditions of the last century, and thus present us with a similarly great small-pox mortality, without any regard to the amount of vaccination that may be practised. In this case they illustrate the same principle which so well explains the very different amounts of small-pox mortality in Ireland, Scotland, England, and London, with hardly any difference in the quantity of vaccination.

The Royal Commissioners, with all these facts before them or at their command, have made none of these comparisons. They give the figures of smallpox mortality, and either explain them by alleged increase or decrease of vaccination, or argue that, as some other disease—such as measles—did not decrease at the same time or to the same amount, therefore sanitation cannot have influenced small-pox. They never once compare small-pox mortality with general mortality, or with the rest of the group of zymotics, and thus fail to see their wonderfully close agreement—their simultaneous rise and fall, which so clearly shows their subjection to the same influences and proves that no special additional influence can have operated in the case of small-pox.