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eavy atmosphere of the factory amid the ceaseless din of
nachinery. These children worked at a monotonous occusation
for twelve, fourteen, or even eighteen hours a day.
Government at length intervened between parent and child,
and the Factory Acts were passed. Under the parental
control of the State, resulting in restricted hours of labour,
he physical condition of the manufacturing population
improved. In standing between the ignorance of the parent
and the helplessness of the child, the State cannot honestly
e accused of having narrowed the bounds of freedom.
But Small Pox inflicts upon the unprotected infant populaion
a more serious injury than that resulting from the
jxactions of a hard factory master. And the State, when
insisting that the child shall enjoy the protection which
accination affords, is again only assuming that parental
control essential for the protection of a helpless section of
he community.
There is another reason rendering the intervention of the
State desirable. The person unprotected by vaccination
may at any moment become a source of danger to the '
community. The effects of a single operation, it has already
been shown, are not of a permanent character, and since
evaccination is only submitted to by a fractional proporion
of the population, there exists at all times a large
imount of inflammable material. The unvaccinated element
s like so much dry tinder interspersed throughout the mass,
eady to ignite when brought into contact with the smallest
park of infection. Some of our large epidemics are
raceable in their origin to this cause. In our own parish, at
/auxhall, an outbreak, including in its range several hundreds
>f victims, made its first appearance in an unvaccinated
nfant. The parents of the child were opposed to the principle
>f vaccination. They had been successful in evading the