THE LATE EPIDEMIC OF SMALLPOX. 565 



would seem scarcely necessary to appeal to statistics at this late hour 

 of the scientific day. But surely so long as we have the poor with us, we 

 shall have with them a class of men whose minds are so curiously con- 

 stituted that they will select for study the nether side of the social 

 fabric, the weakness of the best of governments, and the minor defects 

 in the character of the world's heroes. 



Even as late as the month of April in the first year of the new 

 century one of the largest and most widely read of the daily papers 

 of the country published over the name of a well-known anti-vaccina- 

 tionist a statement apparently made in good faith to the effect that 

 vaccination counted more victims than smallpox, and that the prac- 

 tice was a relic of barbarism, asking that a halt be called upon the 

 passage of compulsory laws looking to the protection of the people by 

 any such measures. These singular protests against the operation of 

 the most beneficent of life-saving devices will probably be repeated so 

 long as there is a law on any statute book. Their starveling and dis- 

 torted figures, garnered from the refuse heaps of mortality, must ever 

 and again furnish forth the tables on which these purblind reasoners 

 rely. They close their eyes to the latest signal victory of science in 

 this field. The Island of Porto Eico, according to the report of 

 Surgeon-General Hoff, in the year 1896 harbored no fewer than three 

 thousand cases of smallpox. Imagine a State of the Union of similar 

 size exposed to such an extent to the ravages of the disease ! After the 

 establishment, however, of a government vaccine-farm, "eight hundred 

 thousand natives were vaccinated, at a cost of about four cents for each 

 individual, with the result that by October, 1899, no case of smallpox 

 was known either to the military or civil authorities anywhere in the 

 island." This was a fine illustration of the carrying of '^the white 

 man's burden.' Porto Eico bombarded us with a filth-germ and in 

 revenge we made her clean ! 



In the year 1867 vaccination was made compulsory for school chil- 

 dren in the city of Chicago, and for twenty years after there 

 was practical immunity from smallpox for this important class of the 

 population; while the police of the same city, exposed to every form 

 of infectious disease in their surveillance of its several districts, since 

 vaccination was made compulsory also for them, have never developed a 

 case of the disease. 



Dr. Buchanan, medical officer of the local government board (Eng- 

 land), in 1881 prepared a table of comparative smallpox death rates 

 among Londoners, vaccinated and unvaccinated respectively, for the 

 fifty-two weeks ending May 29, 1881, calculating that the vaccinated 

 persons of all ages living in London, in the twelve months concerned, 

 Avere 3,620,000, and the unvaccinated of all ages 190,000 in number. 

 Tliis table reads: 



