PREFACE. 



than half the volume. But this was inevitable, for the 

 very obvious reason that, whereas the successes are uni- 

 versally admitted and had only to be described, the fail- 

 ures are either ignored or denibd, and therefore required 

 to be proved. It was thus necessary to give a tolerably 

 full summary of the evidence in every case in which an 

 allegation of failure has been made. The Yaccinatioii 

 question has been discussed at the greatest length for 

 several reasons. It is the only surgical operation that, 

 in our country, has ever been universally enforced by 

 law. It has been recently inquired into by a Royal 

 Commission, whose Majority Report is directly opposed 

 to the real teaching of the official and national statistics 

 presented in the detailed reports. The operation is, ad- 

 mittedly, the cause of many deaths, and of a large but 

 unknown amount of permanent injury; the only really 

 trustworthy statistics on a large scale prove it to be 

 wholly without effect as a preventive of small-pox ; many 

 hundreds of persons are annually punished for refusing 

 to have their children vaccinated; and it will undoubt- 

 edly rank as the greatest and most pernicious failure of 

 the century. I claim that the evidence set forth in this 

 chapter, with the diagrams which illustrate it, demon- 

 strate this conclusion. It is no longer a question of 

 opinion, but of science; and I have the most complete 

 confidence that the result I have arrived at is a statis- 

 tical, and therefore a mathematical certainty. 



Of even greater importance, though less special to the 

 century, is the perennial problem of wealth and poverty. 

 In dealing with this question I have adduced a body of 

 evidence showing that, accompanying our enormous in- 

 crease of wealth, there has been a corresponding increase 



