6.1What had to be fixed
The two texts give overlapping answers to the article's question. Both had to decide what kind of death they were counting: Graunt by judging the searchers' categories one by one and restoring plague deaths placed under other names; the 1858 report by grouping deaths into zymotic, chest and tubercular, and other, so that each group could be laid to a sanitary cause (the passage read here does not say how each cause was first recorded). Both had to decide who belonged to the population at risk. Graunt could not count the living, and argued for the christenings as their stand-in; the 1858 report could count its soldiers, but had to decide when a soldier stopped being one. Both had to choose a standard: for Graunt, ordinary years against plague years, and any country where "more then ſeven of the 100 live beyond 70."; for the 1858 report, civilians of the same ages, then healthy districts, then Manchester, and the hospitals against themselves over time. And both said whom the result was for: Graunt the Lord Privy Seal and "all men", the 1858 report a royal commission and anyone who could read a picture.
6.2Trust or the state
The debate laid out in Section 2 offered two predictions. On Porter's side, the definitions should be stated as rules for strangers, by authors whose standing was weak. On the side of Desrosières and Scott, they should be acts of classification that make a population governable and that override local knowledge.
Graunt's text supports both predictions, in different passages. His preface is a close fit for the weak or contested expert of Porter's account: not a man of letters, he publishes his tables so that anyone can correct him. His dedication fits Desrosières's account of statistics bound up with the making of states: the uses he lists are a poll tax, armies, the plague orders and the growth of the capital. In the document the two do not pull apart. The open tables are the reason the councillors should accept the positions.
Scott's prediction fits Graunt least. The categories were not imposed from above on local knowledge; they were the searchers' own, kept where they served and corrected where they failed, by comparisons among the searchers' own totals. Whether the plague orders that appointed the searchers overrode the knowledge of the households they shut up is another question. Slack's history of resistance and division over isolation suggests it is a real one (Slack 1985). Graunt's text does not answer it, though his dedication sides with those who doubted the seclusions were worth their cost.
The 1858 report fits Desrosières more closely than Porter. It makes no plea of the kind Graunt makes in his preface, and the passage read here says nothing of its author's standing. Its method is still Porter's in one respect: every comparison is spelled out so that an official who did not trust the author could follow it, and the invaliding correction is stated as a rule, with the direction in which it would move the comparison.
Together the two documents suggest a narrower conclusion than either side of the debate. In both, the definitions were settled openly, inside the text, and addressed at once to holders of power and to any reader. Neither passage reports what the authorities then did, so the documents cannot show whether the counts persuaded anyone.
6.3Persuasion and discovery
Cohen's account of statistics as a tool of persuasion aimed at officials (Cohen 1984) fits the 1858 report's announced purpose and its graphic forms. Small's account of an understanding reached after the war through the analysis of mortality statistics (Small 1998) fits the report's date and its treatment of Scutari as a problem of the buildings. The report is both: a persuasive document whose argument is an analysis. It cannot show the order of the two in its author's thinking, and it does not say who drew which diagram.
6.4What the modern summaries keep
The two platform records are not summaries of the arguments read here. They describe library copies and say what must be kept apart: edition from first edition, publication from observation, classification from cause, original report from reprint, holding from authorship. They give no figure from either book. The parent study's ledger reflects this: for Graunt's Bills of Mortality the two codings differed on the count, and for Army Mortality 1858 they agreed that the record gives none. A reader of the records alone would not learn that the 1858 report rests on rates per thousand at matched ages, or that Graunt raised the plague count by a quarter.
What the records keep is the warning. The Army Mortality 1858 record's question about aligning denominators names the decisions the report spends its pages making; the Graunt record's list of separations names the classification that Graunt judges. In both cases the modern summary states as a caution part of what the old text carried out as a method: Graunt had already set the searchers' classification apart from the cause of death, and the 1858 report had already matched its populations and periods, in print.
6.5What the evidence cannot carry
The article reads two documents and cannot say how typical either is of the counts of its time. It reads the 1858 report only in paraphrase, and only its description of the diagrams, not the tables or the Commission's report. It reads Graunt in his first edition, while the platform's record describes the fourth. It cannot say whether any authority acted on either work. The works on the debate are used only as their reading notes describe them, and their application to these texts is this article's own. Nothing here judges whether Graunt's correction or the report's comparisons were right.