Jenner in a letter to Moore from Berkeley, 28th February, 1810, thus refers to Squirrel

John Gale Jones, I see, has at length succeeded in obtaining the situation for which he has long been a candidate. This fellow had once the impudence to desire a man to call on me in Bedford Place to say, that he, Jones, would advise me immediately to quit London, for there was no knowing what an enraged populace might do. He was the writer of Squirrel's book, the long antivaccine columns in the Independent Whig, and many of the most violent papers in the Medical Observer. I was held up in his Forum for several nights as an object of derision; but I silenced him by the same weapon as I have others-contempt.*

Jenner's contempt was of a miraculous quality, operating insensibly upon those to whom it was applied. Some might fancy it was his idleness and others his cowardice; but he knew that it was his contempt, and that it blasted his adversaries in much the same way that vaccination blasted smallpox.

There is the woeful monotony of truth in these old pamphlets, not merely in the occurrence of smallpox after vaccination, but in the sadder stories of acute and chronic blood-poisoning. We recognise the narratives as true, for they are reproduced among us continuously by the same means, with the same miseries and agonies, and with the same death for grateful release.

It is clear from the testimony of Moseley, Rowley and Squirrel, confirmed too by others and by the Jennerites themselves, that the extension of vaccination met with a decided check in London. It was proved to many in a fashion that did not admit of dispute, that vaccination conferred no security from smallpox, whilst it was attended with dangers to health, certain if as yet undefinable. Variolous inoculation was again reverted to, but by diminished numbers; for that practice never had prevailed with popular good-will, but through sedulous medical persuasion as duty of dire necessity. Vaccination afforded excuse for hesitation, and, between rival claims, many contrived to elude either form of

* Baron's Life of Jenner, vol. ii., p. 367.

pollution. Thus indirectly as it were, vaccine inoculation set aside variolous, and when in 1840 the latter was forbidden by law, there was little of the practice left, whilst at the same time the majority of the population existed without Jennerian protection.

It is not to be forgotten that the early resistance to vaccination proceeded entirely from inoculators with smallpox. It was as yet unimagined that smallpox and other fevers were preventible, that their causes lay within control, and that health was the best defence of health. The world as yet lay in darkness as to those truths which we now recognise as laws of health, hygiene, and sanitary science; nor has the darkness rolled away, but is rolling away, and the time is not distant when to be vaccinated in order to be safe from smallpox will be accounted the drollest of absurdities.

Going back to the Edinburgh Review, we remark with curious interest how the chief position then asserted was the abiding efficacy of vaccination. Inoculators were ready to concede that it might possess a temporary prophylaxy, inasmuch as until one blood fever had subsided another was unlikely to supervene; but this view Jeffrey declined to entertain

It seems contrary to all analogy, and all rules of reasoning to suppose, a priori, that an immunity which is found to subsist for a certain time in the usual and healthful state of the system, will gradually and insensibly wear away without any apparent cause, or any sensible change to indicate its extinction; and the facts which bear at all upon the question, so far from suggesting or supporting such a supposition, seem, in our apprehension, completely to refute and discredit it.

Yet what in 1806 was accounted "contrary to all analogy," and "completely refuted and discredited by facts," is precisely what vaccinators now admit. Hence their cry for re-vaccination-septennially, triennially, annually. Dr. Lionel Beale, a great authority in the matter, recently owned to having been vaccinated ten times, and in terror of an epidemic was about to be vaccinated once more a striking exemplification of

contemporary theory and practice. To have foreseen such an issue would have confounded the early vaccinators. When re-vaccination was mentioned to Dr. Pearson, he denied its possibility; "for," said he, "Vaccination is equivalent to smallpox, which cannot recur. If a child can be re-vaccinated, then it can take smallpox; ergo vaccination is not an equivalent for smallpox; and where then is the good of it?" Where indeed!

The Edinburgh reviewer was sufficiently impartial to recognise violence alike among Cowpoxers and Smallpoxers, and specified John Ring, Jenner's bully, as an offender, describing his Treatise on Cowpox as "one thousand and forty chaotic pages in defence of the new practice." Ring verified the criticism by issuing a pamphlet, The Beauties of the Edinburgh Review alias the Stink-Pot of Literature; reminding us of the man who writing to his wife from an inn-parlour remarked, "I must conclude, for an unmannerly Irishman is looking over my shoulder and reading every word I write;" an observation that was immediately clenched with, "You are a liar, sir; a liar!"

CHAPTER XXII.

WILLIAM COBBETT.

EVERYBODY appeals to common-sense, but what is common-sense? It is a question difficult to answer; and yet, as I propose to show that Cobbett's opposition to vaccination was justified by common-sense, I am bound to give some definition of the term.

Common-sense is reason as evolved from common experience. What the multitude of men have found to be true in the course of life, that is common-sense, which to question or resist is folly or fanaticism. This vulgar and vigorous rationality is often summoned to service where it has no vocation. For example, when it

was first taught that the earth was a sphere and that its inhabitants had antipodes, the revelation was denounced as contrary to common-sense; but it is obvious that in such a case (which represents myriads) it was wrongly invoked; the form of the earth being at the time outside common cognisance. As soon, however, as it was realised by experience that the earth was spherical and inhabited in all its quarters, then its rotundity became incorporated in the constitution of

common-sense.

The realm of common-sense I therefore hold to be limited by its origin in common experience, and in matters above or beyond that experience, its dicta are illegitimate, and synonyms for presumption and prejudice.

William Cobbett was essentially a man of commonsense. His power lay in his community with the experience and reason of his countrymen; and, like all of us, he had the defects of his virtue. He continually applied his vulgar judgment to the criticism of men and matters beyond the range of his competence, and the result was a luxuriance of arrogance and contempt for which at this day we must resort to Mr. Ruskin for a parallel.

Such being the case, we have to inquire, What was the worth of Cobbett's opinion in the matter of vaccination? The attempt is sometimes made by vaccinators to withdraw their practice from popular discussion. They say it is a medical question for medical men; but the assertion provokes suspicion rather than confidence, for mystery is an invariable note of imposture. It is fair, I allow, to say of any abstruse knowledge that it can only be apprehended by those whose faculties are trained for its apprehension; but what is there abstruse about vaccination? With little trouble, everybody may know as much about it as anybody. It is the simplest of surgical operations. It is almost as easy as taking pillsinstead of putting poison down the throat it is inserted into the skin. The operation may result in any number of pathological complications, but whether such complica

tions be admitted or denied, what vaccination is prescribed for, namely, the prevention of smallpox, comes within the range of common observation. What, therefore, I have to answer is, that Cobbett's common-sense was competent to deliver judgment upon vaccination.

Moreover, the circumstances of the time compelled an opinion: silence or neutrality was impossible. England was swarming with vaccinators. All the fussy folk who had a taste for doing much good at little cost were plying the cowpox lancet. Encouraged by Jenner, they got vaccine, inoculated a victim, and propagated the virus from arm to arm. Here I may let Cobbett speak for himself

This nation is fond of quackery of all sorts; and this particular quackery having been sanctioned by King, Lords, and Commons, it spread over the country like a pestilence borne by the winds. Speedily sprang up the Royal Jennerian Institution, and branch institutions issuing from the parent trunk, set instantly to work, impregnating the veins of the rising generation with the beastly matter. Gentlemen and ladies made the commodity a pocket companion; and if a cottager's child was seen by them on a common (in Hampshire at least) and did not quickly take to its heels, it was certain to carry off more or less of the disease of the Cow. One would have thought that half the cows in the country had been tapped to get such a quantity of stuff.*

Nor was vaccination merely forced on Cobbett's attention as a popular craze. He had to deal with it as a possible compulsory infliction. At a public meeting in 1803, Wilberforce and Dr. Clarke advocated the prohibition of smallpox inoculation and the enforcement of vaccination; and Cobbett, in a letter addressed to Wilberforce, rebuked the arbitrary project in a strain impressive and dignified as that of Burke himself. He wrote

It seems there are prejudices against cowpox which it is necessary to destroy by force. That there are prejudices, and very strong ones too, I am ready to allow, but I cannot agree that these prejudices should be eradicated by force; nor is it perhaps fair to use the degrading term as expressive of the dislike which so large a portion of the community entertain to the practice you are so

Advice to Young Men. London, 1837. Sec. 262.