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Guardians) to institute repeated prosecutions of the parent
who refuses to allow his child to be vaccinated, pecuniary
fines and imprisonment being the alternative penalties for
disobedience. It may be remembered that in a fifth interim
report, published in 1892, the Commission advised that the
practice of repeated prosecutions, and the infliction of multiple
penalties, should cease. This report had the effect of greatly
stimulating the neglect of vaccination in places where the
people, brought under the influence of anti-vaccination
speech and literature, had already begun to doubt the efficacy
of the method as a protection against smallpox. Practically,
the final report, if translated into law, would have the effect of
abolishing compulsion, seeing that the Commission would
permit any parent to deprive his child of the benefits of
Tenner's immortal discovery by making a statutory declaration
that he had a conscientious objection to vaccination. The
making of such a delaration would involve a little trouble, as
much, perhaps, as getting the child vaccinated, and it may be
that this fact would, in many cases, prevent resort to the
police-court, or elsewhere, as an alternative to attendance at
the vaccination station. The Commission are of opinion that
the mild measures they recommend would prove as effective
for securing the general acceptance of vaccination, as the
more stringent measures of the present compulsory law;
especially if the Scotch system were adopted in England, viz.,
by the sending of a medical practitioner to the home of the
defaulter to vaccinate the child, and subsequently to inspect
the vaccination, and if required, to attend the child during
any ailment which might arise in what may be termed the
vaccination month. The ("ommission would extend the
period within which vaccination must be performed, to the
age of six months, instead of three months, as at present; and
they deprecate the practice, alleged to be common in workhouses,
&c., of vaccinating, within a few days of birth, the
children born at such institutions. One of the most drastic
of the changes they recommend would have the effect of con-