ble seizure and re-vaccination of
children left to answer the door, can be prevented simply by abolishing
the half-crown and all similar follies, paying, not for this or that
ceremony of witchcraft, but for immunity from disease, and paying, too,
in a rational way. The officer with a fixed salary saves himself trouble
by doing his business with the least possible interference with the
private citizen. The man paid by the job loses money by not forcing his
job on the public as often as possible without reference to its results.

THE TECHNICAL PROBLEM

As to any technical medical problem specially involved, there is none.
If there were, I should not be competent to deal with it, as I am not a
technical expert in medicine: I deal with the subject as an economist, a
politician, and a citizen exercising my common sense. Everything that I
have said applies equally to all the medical techniques, and will hold
good whether public hygiene be based on the poetic fancies of Christian
Science, the tribal superstitions of the druggist and the vivisector, or
the best we can make of our real knowledge. But I may remind those
who confusedly imagine that the medical problem is also the scientific
problem, that all problems are finally scientific problems. The notion
that therapeutics or hygiene or surgery is any more or less scientific
than making or cleaning boots is entertained only by people to whom
a man of science is still a magician who can cure diseases, transmute
metals, and enable us to live for ever. It may still be necessary for
some time to come to practise on popular credulity, popular love and
dread of the marvellous, and popular idolatry, to induce the poor
to comply with the sanitary regulations they are too ignorant
to understand. As I have elsewhere confessed, I have myself been
responsible for ridiculous incantations with burning sulphur,
experimentally proved to be quite useless, because poor people are
convinced, by the mystical air of the burning and the horrible smell,
that it exorcises the demons of smallpox and scarlet fever and makes it
safe for them to return to their houses. To assure them that the real
secret is sunshine and soap is only to convince them that you do not
care whether they live or die, and wish to save money at their expense.
So you perform the incantation; and back they go to their houses,
satisfied. A religious ceremony--a poetic blessing of the threshold, for
instance--would be much