314 THE WONDERFUL CENTURY. CHAP. xvm. 



tion, and by untruths. And now a Royal Commission, 

 which one would have supposed would have striven to be 

 rigidly impartial, has presented a Report which is not 

 only weak, misleading, and inadequate, but is also palp- 

 ably one-sided, in that it omits in every case to make 

 those comparisons by which alone the true meaning can 

 be ascertained of those " great masses of national experi- 

 ence " to which appeal has been made by the official 



-L -I- */ 



advocate of vaccination par excellence Sir John Simon. 



I venture to think that I have here so presented the 

 best of these statistical facts as to satisfy my readers of 

 the certain and absolute uselessness of vaccination as a 

 preventive of small-pox; while these same facts render it 

 in the highest degree probable that it has actually in- 

 creased susceptibility to the disease. The teaching of 

 the whole of the evidence is in one direction. Whether 

 we examine the long-continued records of London mor- 

 tality, or those of modern registration for England, Scot- 

 land, and Ireland; whether we consider the " control 

 experiment " or crucial test afforded by unvaccinated 

 Leicester, or the still more rigid test in the other direc- 

 tion of the absolutely revaccinated Army and Navy, the 

 conclusion is in every case the same: that vaccination is 

 a gigantic delusion ; that it has never saved a single life ; 

 but that it has been the cause of so much disease, so 

 many deaths, such a vast amount of utterly needless and 

 altogether undeserved suffering, that it will be classed 

 by the coming generation among the greatest errors of 

 an ignorant and prejudiced age, and its penal enforce- 

 ment the foulest blot on the generally beneficent course 

 of legislation during our century. 



