These figures refer only to deaf children who are actually under instruction, not to the whole deaf population.
While it is gratifying to find that so much is being done in the way of educating this class of the community, the number of schools in most parts of the world is still lamentably inadequate. For instance, taking the school age as from seven to sixteen, which is now made compulsory by Act of Parliament in Great Britain, and assuming that 20% of the deaf population are of that age, as they are in England, there should be 40,000 deaf pupils under instruction in India alone, whereas there are but seventy-three. There are 200,000 deaf of all ages in India. And what an enormous total should be in schools in China instead of forty-three! The whole of the rest of Asia, with the exception of Japan, has apparently not a single school. There must be many thousands of thousands of deaf (hundreds of thousands, if not thousands of thousands of whom are of school age) in that continent, unless indeed they are destroyed, which is not impossible. What are we to say of Africa, where only 100 pupils are being taught; of South America, with its paltry 200, and Australia's 300? To come to Europe itself, Russia should have many times more pupils than her 1700. Even in Great Britain the education of the deaf was not made compulsory till 1893, and there are many still evading the law and growing up uneducated. Mr Payne of Swansea estimated (_Institution Report_, 1903-1904) from the 1901 census, that there must be approximately 204 deaf of school age in South Wales and Monmouthshire, while only 144 were accounted for in all the schools in that district according to Dr Hitz's statistics.
Dr Kerr Love (_Deaf Mutism_, p. 217) gives the following table, which shows the number of deaf people in proportion to the population in the countries named:--
Switzerland 1 in 408 Austria " 765 Hungary " 792 Sweden " 977 Prussia " 981 Finland " 981 Canada " 1003 Norway " 1052 Germany (exclusive of Prussia) " 1074 Portugal " 1333 Ireland " 1398* India " 1459 United States " 1514 Denmark " 1538 Greece " 1548 France " 1600 Italy " 1862 Scotland " 1885* Cape Colony " 1904 England " 2043* Spain " 2178 Belgium " 2247 Australasia " 2692 Holland " 2985 Ceylon " 4328