HUBLI 



225 



the work. Natives who wished to avoid inocula- 

 tion would escape through the back door at the 

 sight of a plague officer : bribery, personation, 

 sale or transfer of certificates of inoculation, con- 

 cealment 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 inocula- 

 tion, 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, (i) Lieutenant Keelan's house-to-house 

 investigation ; (2) the Southern Mahratta Spin- 



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