270 THE WONDERFUL CENTURY. CHAP. xvra. 



them or at their command, have made none of these com- 

 parisons. They give the figures of small-pox mortality, 

 and either explain them by alleged increase or decrease 

 of vaccination, or argue that, as some other disease 

 such as measles did not decrease at the same time or to 

 the same amount, therefore sanitation cannot have influ- 

 enced small-pox. They never once compare small-pox 

 mortality with general mortality, or with the rest of the 

 group of zymotics, and thus fail to see their wonderfully 

 close agreement their simultaneous rise and fall 

 which so clearly shows their subjection to the same influ- 

 ences and proves that no special additional influence can 

 have operated in the case of small-pox. 



IV. 



TWO GREAT EXPERIMENTS WHICH ARE CONCLUSIVE 

 AGAINST VACCINATION. 



THOSE who disbelieve in the efficacy of vaccination to 

 protect against small-pox are under the disadvantage 

 that, owing to the practice having been so rapidly 

 adopted by all civilized people, there are no communi- 

 ties which have rejected it while adopting methods of 

 general sanitation, and which have also kept satisfactory 

 records of mortality from various causes. Any such 

 country would have afforded what is termed a " control " 

 or test experiment, the absence of which vitiates all the 

 evidence of the so-called " variolous test " in Jenner's 

 time, as was so carefully pointed out before the Com- 

 mission by Dr. Creighton and Professor Crookshank. 

 We do, however, now possess two such tests on a limited, 

 but still a sufficient, scale. The first is that of the town 



