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of mere neglect or indifference. It is important to consider how
it has come about that whereas in many parts of the country there
is no serious objection to vaccination, in other places the objection
is so acute and widespread that the opponents of the practice are
enabled to elect gaurdians pledged to abstain from enforcing it.
We believe that it has largely arisen from the attempt to compel
parents to vaccinate their children who conscientiously believe that
vaccination is of little or no advantage as a protection against
Small-Pox, and that it involves a serious risk of injury to the
health of the vaccinated child. Symptoms of injury following
vaccination, and really or apparently connected with it, have
occurred in the case, it may be, of an elder child of the same
parent, or in the case of a neighbour's child; this immediately
arouses hostility to vaccination, and induces the parent to resolve
that his child shall remain unvaccinated. If the attempt be made
to compel a parent, in this attitude of mind, to have his child
vaccinated, it meets with determined opposition, and, where the
penalty is repeated, the hostility is often intensified without any
progress being made towards the vaccination of the child. Such
a parent has often become a focus of hostility to the vaccination
laws; his neighbours and friends take his side; he is regarded as
a martyr; and he and they frequently become active agitators
against the vaccination laws. There are, indeed, a central
association and local associations which advocate the abolition of
compulsory vaccination, and denounce the practice altogether;
but it is local circumstances, such as we have described, which
stimulate the creation of these local associations and give them
their vitality, and which add to the force of the central association.
It is often said that the opposition to vaccination is the
work of agitators. This may be true; but the agitation, though
it may be afterwards intensified from without, in our belief, has
its origin, almost invariably, in a particular locality. It is this,
we think, which accounts for the phenomena to which we have
called attention that the acute opposition to vaccination is confined
to a limited number of localities, and that it seems usually tospread
from a local centre.