That the Act of 1853 was a failure, in the sense of not securing the vaccination of the people, was untruethough necessarily true as concerned the prevention of smallpox. The assertion of failure in 1867 was an artifice to overcome the apathy of Parliament. It was assumed that there was a population to be vaccinated, and vaccinated in a new and superior fashion, if only better pay were provided. More money was wanted to work the Vaccination Mill. In the words of Lord Robert Montagu

On the birth of a child being registered, the Registrar is bound to give notice to the parent, and to supply him with proper forms, whether for public or private Vaccination. He will enter in a book the name of the child, with the means of identification. After Vaccination, the Public Vaccinator will send the certificate of successful Vaccination to the Registrar, who will enter it in his book. Thus the Registrar will know which children have been registered in his district and which have not; which children are liable to Smallpox and which are not liable. [O Credulitas!] Then it is made the interest of all concerned to work the system and enforce its checks. It is the interest of every Local Registrar to hunt up every birth, because for every entry he has 1s. It is his interest to obtain the certificate of successful Vaccination, for entering which he has 3d. It is the interest of the Public Vaccinator to operate on as many children as possible, because for each successful operation he has at least 1s. 6d., and for first class work an extra ls. It is the interest of the parent to have his child vaccinated, for he is otherwise subject to legal proceedings and a penalty of 20s.

Colonel Barttelot objected, saying

There are about 750,000 births annually in this country, and the parents of the majority surely deserve some consideration. 250,000 of them can neither read or write, yet they are liable to a fine of 20s. if they do not comply with the printed forms of this Act. It would be much better to send doctors to the homes of the children than collect mothers and infants in crowds at vaccination stations.

Mr. Bruce replied that it was proposed to do nothing

new

Compulsory Vaccination on the same terms has been the law of the land since 1853. The present bill lays down no new principle. It merely collects the scattered provisions of the law, and supplies machinery found necessary after much experience.

The observation was, no doubt, ingenuous on the part.

of the speaker; but, misled himself, he assisted to mislead the House. The bill, Section 31, ran as follows

If any Registrar, or any Officer appointed by the Guardians to enforce the provisions of this Act, shall give information in writing to a Justice of the Peace, that he has reason to believe that any child under the age of 14 years, being within the Union or Parish for which the informant acts, has not been successfully vaccinated, and that he has given notice to the parent or person having the custody of such child to procure its being vaccinated, and that this notice has been disregarded, the Justice may summon such parent or person to appear with the child before him at a certain time and place, and upon the appearance, if the Justice shall find, after such examination as he shall deem necessary, that the child has not been vaccinated, nor has already had the Smallpox, he may, if he see fit, make an order under his hand and seal directing such child to be vaccinated within a certain time; and if, at the expiration of such time, the child shall not have been so vaccinated, or shall not be shown to be then unfit to be vaccinated, or to be insusceptible of Vaccination, the person upon whom such an order shall have been made shall be proceeded against summarily, and, unless he can show some reasonable ground for his omission to carry the order into effect, shall be liable to a penalty not exceeding 208.

Yet, said Mr. Bruce, it was proposed to do nothing new! Here was a development of compulsion subjecting a parent to prosecution during fourteen years of the life of his child, and it was nothing new! What resulted from this aggravation of the law, devised with craft and enacted with indifference, remains to be seen.

The bill was opposed by Sir J. Clarke Jervoise, Mr. Thomas Chambers, and Mr. Barrow. Mr. Chambers prophesied―

I am persuaded that when the bill is passed an agitation will commence which will never cease until the Act is repealed.

The carelessness and indifference of the House were, however, insuperable. It was legislation for "the lower orders," and concerned "respectable folk" not at all. The bill was read a third time without opposition, slipped through the Lords unopposed, and received the Royal assent, 12th August, 1867, as 30 and 31 VICTORLE, Cap. 84-An Act to consolidate and amend the Laws relating to Vaccination.

As another example of the advocacy with which this bill was commended to the House of Commons, I take the following from the close of the speech of Lord Robert Montagu, when introducing it to committee, 14th June, 1867. He said

Smallpox differs from other epidemics in this, that it is one of the worst, but is absolutely preventible. In other diseases all that can be done by the removal of predisposing conditions is to mitigate their virulence; but Smallpox may be altogether prevented. If, then, one who raises his hand against another and kills him is guilty of murder, of what shall he be guilty who, by voice or vote in this House, endeavours to prevent the passing of a measure which will make it absolutely certain that Smallpox shall no longer kill 7,000 a-year in this country!

This absurd adjuration was too much for Mr. Henley, who observed

The somewhat formidable close of the noble Lord's speech made it difficult to know whether I ought not to walk out of the House and leave the responsibility of the measure to others. He said those who objected to the bill would be guilty of the deaths of those who died of Smallpox.

Lord ROBERT MONTAGU-I said that Smallpox was so far preventible that those who stopped the adoption of Vaccination would be guilty of the deaths of 7,000 children a-year.

Mr. HENLEY-I understood the noble Lord to say that they would incur that guilt if they objected to the machinery of the bill. Lord ROBERT MONTAGU-No; not to its machinery.

Mr. HENLEY-Then I do not know precisely what the noble Lord does mean.

In short, the bill was neither honestly advocated or seriously considered. On the one hand, members of Parliament were prejudiced, ignorant and credulous, and careless as to legislation that did not affect their families or those of their influential constituents. On the other hand there was a knot of medical officials eager for power and the aggrandisement of their profession, who did not disdain to practise upon the prejudice, the ignorance, and the credulity of Parliament. The result was an insufferable outrage upon the rights of every nonconformist an outrage which, if perpetrated on the theological instead of the scientific conscience, would have roused Englishmen to fever heat.

CHAPTER XLII.

THE GATHERING MOVEMENT-1867-70.

SECTION 31 of the Act of 1867 implied the doom of Vaccination. It was bad enough to fine a parent for refusing to vaccinate his child; it was, however, a circumscribed annoyance; but to make of refusal a continuous offence until a child attained the age of fourteen was to set up a cause of quarrel that had to be fought out. Slavery in the United States is abolished, but slavery might have endured to this day had the Southerners been more forbearing; but, in the arrogance of their power, they imposed on the Union the Fugitive Slave Law, compelling the people of the North to surrender runaway negroes. This triumph of the slaveholders determined the fate of slavery. In like manner the arrogance of the vaccinators overcame their prudence. Resolved to subdue resistance to their rite, they drove resistance to extremity, and set up an irreducible insurrection. As a medical prescription accepted at discretion, vaccination might have survived unquestioned and paid for; but its transition into an aggressive statute removed it from the safe realm of professional mystery into the jurisdiction of common sense, common observation, and every man's business.

Sec. 31, Act '67, was quickly turned to account by the medical officials who had devised and imposed it upon the indifference of Parliament. They had, of course, to operate through local poor-law authorities-a painful necessity; but guardians were occasionally as fanatical as themselves, and exasperated, too, that their petty authority should be set at naught, and especially by parents in humble life. Consequently, here and there over the country continued prosecutions for refusing to vaccinate were initiated, stirring up strife, begetting sympathy with the prosecuted, and gradually converting

vaccination into a living political question. Whatever may be thought of Sec. 31, Act '67, all will allow that it drew a line and established irritation and conflict. Opposition to vaccination had hitherto to contend with nothing so deadly as apathy, but from that drawback it was now delivered. On the other hand, in many parishes, Sec. 31, Act '67 was allowed to make no difference. Those who disliked vaccination were warned, or prosecuted once, and then let alone; but this leniency served to accentuate the severity practised elsewhere, and to render the law still more odious by reason of the flagrant inequality of its administration.

The scientific opposition to vaccination, initiated by Mr. John Gibbs in 1855, had for some years few accessions, and it required faith in truth in full measure to persist in its advocacy. The Jennerian tradition was so rooted in the public mind that to question it savoured of paradox or profanity. There were occasional manifestations of scepticism when smallpox attacked the vaccinated, but doubt was crushed down as impious and dangerous to established confidence. Mr. Herbert Spencer, for example, in Social Statics, published in 1851, observed

The measures enjoined by the Vaccination Act of 1840 were to have exterminated Smallpox; yet the reports of the RegistrarGeneral show that deaths from Smallpox have been increasing.

To such matter-of-fact criticism, any answer must have taken form in the style of the bewildered divine, who exclaimed, "Dear brethren, what theology can we enjoy if such objections be entertained!"

Dr. Charles T. Pearce was one of the first to unite with Mr. Gibbs in his labours. As editor of a medical journal, he happened to receive an article from Mr. Gibbs which set him thinking, and as the result of his inquiries, he came out an enthusiastic anti-vaccinator. He made the question of vaccination completely his own, and lectured on the subject throughout the country, eager and ready for combat. In Northampton, in 1860, he held his first public debate, and under his influence.