THE ANTI-VACCINATION CRUSADE 373 



through the thickets of the Commissioners' contradictory Re- 

 ports, but I have long learnt in controversies involving facts, 

 to take more account of the style of the controversialists, and 

 their apparent regard for truth, than of their assertions and 

 references to other people, and the final balance of voting. 

 Specially I had to do so in the somewhat similar controversy 

 in the Times which lasted several months in 1887-8 in which, 

 from the accident of being put in the chair of a hospital 

 meeting that had been called to turn out some doctors for 

 homoeopathic heresy, I had gradually to take a leading part, 

 being helped by information from the experts on both sides 

 as the dispute went on. Finally the Times pronounced that I 

 had completely proved the charges of medical conspiracy and 

 tyranny, which the ' orthodox ' party had been called upon 

 at the meeting to answer, and declined to attempt, except by 

 their own dicta. 



" Such letters as that of Dr. Bond, even without the 

 answers to it, always go a long way to persuade me that the 

 author has no solid case; and I regard them as mere con- 

 troversial fireworks, throwing no real light on the subject of 

 discussion. In most controversies involving facts, it soon 

 becomes apparent to competent judges, after hearing the 

 professed experts, on which side is the balance of truth and 

 honesty, as it is very clearly in one of a very different kind 

 which has been going on in the Times for two months, on 

 what is called clerical and episcopal lawlessness, in which the 

 writers on one side think themselves at liberty to assert 

 anything that is ' necessary for their position ' (as their great 

 founder avowed fifty years ago), and take their chances of 

 being refuted. 



" In your dispute, as in that, the really decisive facts are 

 becoming more and more extant from the intolerable mass of 

 assertions and references to other people's writings which are 

 worth very little in the face of current genuine evidence, such 

 as you and other writers on your side have produced in 

 manageable form, and which the other side have now had 

 plenty of time to refute if they can, but certainly have not. 

 In such a case neither past nor present majorities go for much. 



