ation to the community. To these gentlemen I replied that as
my studies had been directed towards the effects of vaccination in
individual instances only, the argument was one upon which I preferred
not to enter.

Had I spoken the truth, indeed, I should have confessed my inability to
support the anti-vaccinationist case, since in my opinion few people who
have studied this question with an open and impartial mind can deny
that Jenner's discovery is one of the greatest boons--perhaps, after the
introduction of antiseptics and anaesthetics, the very greatest--that
has ever been bestowed upon suffering humanity.

If the reader has any doubts upon the point, let him imagine a time
when, as used to happen in the days of our forefathers, almost everybody
suffered from smallpox at some period of their lives, those escaping
only whose blood was so fortified by nature that the disease could not
touch them. Let him imagine a state of affairs--and there are still
people living whose parents could remember it--when for a woman not to
be pitted with smallpox was to give her some claim to beauty, however
homely might be her features. Lastly, let him imagine what all this
means: what terror walked abroad when it was common for smallpox to
strike a family of children, and when the parents, themselves the
survivors of similar catastrophes, knew well that before it left the
house it would take its tithe of those beloved lives. Let him look
at the brasses in our old churches and among the numbers of children
represented on them as kneeling behind their parents; let him note what
a large proportion pray with their hands open. Of these, the most, I
believe, were cut off by smallpox. Let him search the registers, and
they will tell the same tale. Let him ask old people of what their
mothers told them when they were young of the working of this pestilence
in their youth. Finally, let him consider how it comes about, if
vaccination is a fraud, that some nine hundred and ninety-nine medical
men out of every thousand, not in England only, but in all civilised
countries, place so firm a belief in its virtue. Are the doctors of
the world all mad, or all engaged in a great conspiracy to suppress the
truth?

These were my real views, as they must be the views of most intelligent
and thoughtful men; but I did not think it necessary to promulgate them
abroad, since to do so would have been to deprive myself of such means
of maintenance as remained