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gence than the rest seeking to direct a number of
persons more or less ignorant or disposed to mock
at all received truth. It is no use to say leave
these people to themselves, as they are doing much
mischief, especially amongst the careless ignorant,
who are easily persuaded not to do a thing that gives
them any trouble. It is perhaps worth while to
answer two objections raised to Vaccination. First,
it is said to be useless.
There is something so extraordinary in this
statement to those who have studied the question,
that they are generally inclined to charge the persons
who maintain this point, with being ignorant, and
epithets are freely applied. The argument which
these persons use is that you cannot say that, if
people had not been vaccinated, the small pox would
not still have retired. As well might an argument
be used against taking food, on the ground that
the experiment had not been tried on a sufficient
scale to prove that people would not live without it.
What we know from statistical facts, that permit of
no contradiction, is that before the introduction of
vaccination at the end of the Eighteenth Century
upwards of forty-five millions of persons died of
this disease alone. We know that up to the middle
of the present century that not one tenth of this
number have died in the whole civilised world.