ssue notices to
the public. There is at present, it would seem, not a single person in
authority there who has the faintest notion of what the immense majority
of possible British recruits are thinking about. The results have been
beyond description ludicrous and dangerous. Every proclamation is
urgently worded so as to reassure recruits with L5,000 a year and repel
recruits with a pound a week. On the very day when the popular Lord
Kitchener, dropping even the _et rex meus_ of Wolsey, frankly asked the
nation for 100,000 men for his army, and when it was a matter of life
and death that every encouragement should be held out to working men to
enlist, the War Office decided that this was the psychological moment to
remind everybody that soldiers on active service often die of typhoid
fever, and to press inoculation on the recruits pending the officially
longed-for hour when Sir Almroth Wright's demand for compulsion can be
complied with. I say nothing here about the efficacy of inoculation.
Efficacious or not, Sir Almroth Wright himself bases his demand for
compulsion on the ground that it is hopeless to expect the whole army to
submit to it voluntarily. That being so, it seems to me that when men
are hesitating on the threshold of the recruiting station, only a German
spy or our War Office (always worth ten thousand men to our enemies)
would seize that moment to catch the nervous postulant by the sleeve and
say, "Have you thought of the danger of dysentery?" The fact that the
working class forced the Government, very much against its doctor-ridden
will, to abolish compulsory vaccination, shews the extent to which its
households loathe and dread these vaccines (so called, but totally
unconnected with cows or Jenner) which, as they are continually reminded
by energetic anti-inoculation propagandists in largely circulated
journals and pamphlets, not to mention ghastly photographs of disfigured
children, sometimes produce worse effects than the diseases they are
supposed to prevent. Indifferent or careless recruits are easily induced
to submit to inoculation by little privileges during the ensuing
indisposition or by small money bribes; and careful ones are
proselytized by Sir Almroth's statistics; but on the whole both
inoculation and amateur medical statistics are regarded with suspicion
by the poor; and the fact that revaccination is compulsory in the
regular army, and that the moral pressure applied to secure both typhoid