mere verbal accident that penalties were made continuous. The Bill was introduced too late in the session (6th July, 1870) to be carried, but it led to discussion and a promise from Government that the question would be remitted to a Committee next year, 1871.

CHAPTER XLIII.

HOUSE OF COMMONS COMMITTEE, 1871.

ON 13th February, 1871, Mr. W. E. Forster moved that a Select Committee be appointed to inquire into the operation of the Vaccination Act of 1867, and to report whether such Act should be amended. Mr. Forster's remarks on the occasion are noteworthy, as manifesting the prevalent prejudice. He said

I make the motion in compliance with a promise made to the Member for Sunderland last session, who had brought in a Bill to relax the punishment for refusal to permit Vaccination. I do not imagine that Mr. Candlish, more than any other member of the House, has the slightest doubt of the utility and necessity of Vaccination, and that it is necessary not only to encourage the practice, but to make it compulsory. Opposition to Vaccination is not heard in the House of Commons; but it is found, I am sorry to say, among certain persons in the country, who have carried their resistance to an extent that has been injurious to health and destructive to life. [Evolution this from Forster's fancy.] These people must have forgotten the state of the country before Vaccination was introduced.

Then followed the usual fabulous matter of rote-the awful mortality prior to vaccination, the reduction of that mortality by vaccination, the extraordinary immunity enjoyed by the vaccinated and revaccinated, and so forth uttered and accepted as indisputable.

The Government do not entertain any doubt of the efficacy and advantages of Vaccination, nor of the necessity of enforcing it. They have to contend with opposition-the opposition of ignorance, and also, I am sorry to say, with the opposition arising from interested motives [What possibly could they be?] preying upon tha ignorance; and lastly, with the great neglect arising from apathy

Sir Charles Adderley opposed the appointment of the Committee. Accepting Mr. Forster's statement as valid, he demanded—

What is there to inquire about? Inquiry that is superfluous may be mischievous. Nothing can be more dangerous than to affect doubtfulness concerning legislation as to which there is not only no doubt, but a call for more rigorous administration.

Apparently the Government were of the same mind as Sir Charles, and the Committee was conceded in fulfilment of an inadvertent pledge. Mr. Forster assured the House

The Government do not propose this Committee with the slightest doubt about the principle of Vaccination, or the necessity of Compulsory Vaccination; and I need not say we have no intention of relaxing the operation of the law during the deliberations of the Committee.

The Committee was nominated as follows on 16th February

Dr. BREWER, Colchester.

Mr. JACOB BRIGHT, Manchester.
Mr. JOHN CANDLISH, Sunderland.
Mr. R. M. CARTER, Leeds.

Mr. STEPHEN CAVE, Shoreham.

Sir SMITH CHILD, West Staffordshire.

Sir DOMINIC CORRIGAN, Dublin.

Mr. W. E. FORSTER, Bradford.

Mr. J. T. HIBBERT, Oldham.

Mr. J. M. HOLT, North-East Lancashire.
Lord ROBERT MONTAGU, Huntingdonshire.
Mr. P. H. MUNTZ, Birmingham.

Dr. LYON PLAYFAIR, Edinburgh University.
Mr. W. H. SMITH, Westminster.

Mr. P. A. TAYLOR, Leicester.

The first witness examined was Mr. Candlish, himself a member of the Committee and promoter of the inquiry. Whilst professing a limited faith in vaccination, and willing to exercise a degree of pressure sufficient to overcome mere apathy, Mr. Candlish was strongly opposed to the compulsion of parents who seriously objected to

vaccination, and especially to their persecution by repeated penalties and imprisonment.

Dr. W. J. Collins, the next witness, opened the entire question of vaccination, and by a variety of experience showed that the vaccine disease neither superseded nor mitigated smallpox, whilst it was frequently a severe ailment and the means of exciting and conveying other diseases.

Dr. C. T. Pearce followed suit. The purpose of the Committee (limited to the consideration of the compulsory law) was apparently forgotten, and Dr. Pearce delivered a comprehensive discourse, in which the history, claims, failure, fallacies, and disasters of vaccination were freely displayed; and in the cross-examination which followed made good the positions he had assumed.

Sir Jervoise Clarke Jervoise, Bart., formerly M.P. for South Hants, disputed the common notions of infection as confused with contagion, and pointed out that it was absurd to draw comparisons between the vaccinated and unvaccinated unless their pecuniary status were at the same time defined: cases of smallpox in Belgravia were not to be likened to cases in Clerkenwell. Smallpox was not mitigated by vaccination: he had two relatives vaccinated by Jenner himself who subsequently had confluent smallpox so severely that "their own father did not know them." Nor if smallpox had diminished was there any reason to ascribe it to vaccination: Jenner's cowpox had ceased out of the land, and the cause of its cessation might equally apply to smallpox.

Dr. Garth Wilkinson gave evidence with the characteristic wisdom of the physician of genius who sees with his own eyes. He showed how, endowed and lucrative, the futility and mischief of vaccination were concealed or denied, and how, considered all sufficient against smallpox, the causes of the disease were overlooked, and the introduction of improved methods of treatment were unattempted or discouraged.

Mr. George S. Gibbs contested the right of the State to inflict vaccination, or to interfere between parent and

child. Having a faculty for statistics, he had applied himself to the records of smallpox before and since the practice of vaccination, at home and abroad, and showed that smallpox was the same at present as in the past, neither more mortal nor less mortal, while there was reason to believe that vaccination was a breeder of smallpox as well as a source and excitant of other maladies.

Mr. Aaron Emery related in vigorous English how an infant of his had been vaccinated from a healthy-looking child on 31st May, 1869; how erysipelas followed; how it gradually got worse; how "the little fellow had no rest night nor day from 9th June to 4th July, when death put an end to his sufferings." Then he told the difficulty he had to obtain a true certificate of death from the vaccinator; how he forced an inquest; how a verdict was returned, "Died from erysipelas caused by vaccination"; and how its terms were subsequently altered by Coroner Lankester and registered as altered at Somerset House. Up to the time of this fatality, Mr. Emery had been an unsuspicious believer in vaccination; but his sorrow led him to acquaintance with numerous cases like his own, screened from public recognition, any artifice being accounted laudable which seemed necessary to preserve vaccination from reproach.

Mr. F. Covington, secretary of the Northampton AntiVaccination League, described injuries from vaccination in his family and among his acquaintance; the distrust and dislike of the practice in Northampton with widespread resistance to the compulsory law.

Mrs. E. Kemp brought her baby, and told how it had been vaccinated without examination, although there was a sore on the side of its head. As the vaccination began to take, the child's face and ears broke out, until through the mass of eruption "you could only see its little eyes."

Mr. Thomas Baker, barrister, had been engaged in the Board of Health from 1849 to 1854, and officially connected with several sanitary inquiries. In his opinion.

what were called epidemics were fevers with a common origin, against which cleanliness was the efficient prophylactic, and to which his friend, Dr. Southwood Smith, held smallpox was equally amenable. As a shareholder in the Metropolitan Association for the Improvement of the Dwellings of the Industrial Classes, he knew that residents in wholesome houses, even in insanitary neighbourhoods, enjoyed remarkable exemption from epidemic maladies.

Mr. W. J. Addison testified that his perfectly healthy child had had syphilis invaccinated, and had died in consequence after horrible suffering. The facts of the case were beyond question. One hospital doctor had the temerity to ask the mother, "Whether is it not better for one in a thousand to die like this than have smallpox raging about our towns." "Possibly," replied the poor woman, "but it is strange that my child should be the thousandth."

His

The Rev. Wm. Hume-Rothery said his attention was first drawn to vaccination by the operation on his own child, his wife observing instinctively, "This is an unnatural and wrong thing." Investigation confirmed his wife's judgment, and he became an open opponent of the practice, writing and lecturing against it. acquaintance with the people in Lancashire had led him to the conviction that the majority disliked and distrusted vaccination they were coerced to its observance, and evaded it when possible. He himself was opposed to vaccination because there was nothing in nature, human nature, or revelation to justify it. This assertion of principle over and above practice led to considerable discussion as to divine law, providence, and the nature of things, and the right of conscience to withstand corporate dictation.

Mr. R. B. Gibbs, secretary of the Anti-Compulsory Vaccination League, referred to the origin of vaccination, as attested by Jenner, in the production of cowpox from the contagion of horsegrease, and subsequently to the use of horsepox, by which equination was substituted for