wealth certain customs have grown apace which have distinctly favoured vicious tendencies. Legislation, however, can do something; for it may do much to keep the incentives and temptations to evil from the rising generation; voluntary effort, represented by organised and wisely administered benevolence and assisted by legislation, can give the poor a purer life, more wholesome surroundings, and more elevated thought; but both benevolence and legislation are at present terribly hampered by powerful baneful influences and habits which, as long as they remain unchecked, must continue to poison the moral nature and retard the advancement of the English poor.

There is not the remotest doubt that the prevalence of the gambling spirit is largely due to the fact that it is fashionable. The aristocracy and the wealthy classes generally commencing to indulge in it as a so-called pastime, gradually make it the business of their lives, its fascination takes possession of the mind and diverts it from other nobler aims and objects. Racing, as a sport, has, it is true, the useful tendency of promoting a high breed of horses, but it can be dissociated from the low and pernicious adjuncts of turf gambling which have promoted wholesale ruin and so often brought ruin and disgrace on men of old and respected lineage.1 Were a decided action taken against gambling by the leaders of society, the example would be quickly followed by the various underlying strata of the community, and legislation would find a powerful auxiliary in its efforts against one of the most serious evils which afflict our country. The leisured, cultured, and moneyed sections of society have at their command every possible form of field sports and outdoor pastimes, the pleasures of society, of travel in distant lands for those fond of adventure, and every species of intellectual resource are at their command. Our wealthy classes would not therefore have much to resign in taking the above course, for in no country in the world do families of wealth and influence possess a wider field of varied enjoyments, or a greater scope of usefulness than in England. Gambling can at most be called a very spurions pleasure, and is, in fact, a dangerous, feverish, unwholesome form of mental excitement, involving distress which far outbalances any occasional satisfaction at an infrequent stroke of luck, and every tendency of which points to moral decadence.

During the first quarter of last century the nobles and squires indulged in cock-fighting as an amusement, but by degrees public opinion turned against the practice, and the best members of society considered it common and vulgar. For a period it was then indulged in by the very low and uneducated, being considered highly disreputable, until at last legislation forbade it altogether. In like

Mr. Justice Lawrence: "If you could get rid of the Ring, horse-racing might become what it once was-a noble sport."

manner were the more thoughtful and far-seeing of our aristocracy to recognise the evils of turf gambling and to set their faces against it, their patriotic example would speedily be followed by others, an upper class anti-gambling league would probably be formed, the healthy impetus would continually receive fresh strength, and backed up, as it would be, by legislation, one of the worst plague spots of English society becoming unfashionable, would gradually disappear.

CHARLES ROLLESTON.

IS VACCINATION A DISASTROUS

DELUSION?

HUNTING the truth through a jungle of conflicting statistics is a form of sport to which most people exhibit a very reasonable repugnance, and it is doubtless because an elaborate balancing of disputed figures appears to them an indispensable preliminary to a sound decision on the vaccination controversy that so many persons are ready to announce emphatically that they know, and want to know, nothing about it.

It is the object of this article to show that a judgment adverse to vaccination may be grounded immovably on recognised principles of common sense, drawing only upon facts of common knowledge and general admission. It is only necessary in the first place to ask the reader to throw off the hypnosis which an established tradition imposes even upon intelligent minds, so that the facts may be viewed from the right focus and the issues allowed to dispose themselves in their just and natural perspective.

The first thing to claim remark about vaccination is the unique position it occupies as the only medical prescription enforced by law and involving the surgical inoculation of disease upon healthy bodies. On this account it is, or should be, perfectly obvious that the practice stands in need of a moral and scientific sanction which should be unique like itself—which should, in fact, be absolutely overwhelming.

If this is not obvious to every one now, when the rite has surrounded itself with the artificial respect always accorded in some measure to an established institution, it was clear enough to most people when, fifty years ago, it was first proposed to associate legal compulsion with vaccination.

It was felt that the least that could be asked of vaccination was that it should involve no risk and confer a complete and enduring immunity from small-pox, and it was mainly on the strength of the assurance to that effect readily proffered by the high priests of medicine of that day that opposition in Parliament was overcome.

Some people thought then, and some people (including the writer) think now, that much more even than this is needed to justify legal compulsion in the matter. It should be shown that small-pox is a much more pressing and universal danger than in fact it is or ever

was, and that it cannot be fought by the hygienic and sanitary methods which have proved effectual in all kindred diseases, and have the advantage of strengthening the resistance of the constitution not against one infection but against all. Even if all this could be shown, the reason for compulsion is still to seek, for if vaccination were an effectual prophylactic, the vaccinated can stand in no danger from the unvaccinated, and if these latter have not enough intelligence to take an obvious precaution, it would seem entirely desirable that they should be permitted to perish out of the land.

When, therefore, we remember that all the claims and pretensions on which vaccination originally established itself, so far from having been strengthened in the lapse of years and the spread of scientific thought and research, have been either in part or in whole gradually surrendered, surrendered after obstinate and prolonged resistance to overmastering accumulations of adverse evidence; when we remember that it is now officially on record that risk attaches to vaccination and that its protective efficacy is limited both in time and in degree, we are left to wonder how the propriety of its legal enforcement can still be thought admissible even to argument. As, however, numbers of otherwise reasonable people do in fact find it nowise outrageous or inadmissible, we have to deal with their tacit assumption that the risk attending vaccination is very small and the advantage very great.

The question of risk has the first and by far the larger claim on our attention, for if the operation were merely useless we might regard with equanimity or even philosophic amusement the curious fervour which the medical hierarchy and, by sympathy, the legislature have evinced in its favour. In this aspect, however, the subject is really too serious even for satire. We have travelled a long way from the days when Sir John Simon claimed that "against the vast gain of vaccination there was no loss to count." It is no longer a question in any responsible quarter whether vaccination is dangerous. The question is, how dangerous? Keeping as far as possible to the rule of using vaccinist and medical evidence so as to avoid peddling with particular statistics, we may turn first to the Royal Commission, whose majority report (countered effectively and in detail by the minority report) is on its face a prolonged special pleading for vaccination. We find the following admissions : (Sec. 399) "It is not open to doubt that there have been cases in which injuries and death have resulted from vaccination."

(Sec. 410) "It is established that lymph contains organisms, and may contain those which under certain conditions may be productive of erisipelas."

(Sec. 417) "It may indeed easily be the fact that vaccination

does occasionally serve as an exciting cause of a scrofulous

outbreak." In Sec. 413 we discover that vaccination may become exceptionally risky through special circumstances, such as the prevalence of disease in the neighbourhood; and finally, that (Secs. 420, 421), though formerly denied, it was no longer open to doubt that "it is possible to convey syphilis in the act of vaccination."

A parent who has lost a child in any of these ways can hardly be expected to derive solace from Sec. 419, which tells us that “it could only be attributed to what is known as idiosyncracy on the part of the child, a peculiarity of health attended by exceptional susceptibility to the specific virus of vaccinia.”

The majority Commissioners, while admitting the risk, suggest that it may as reasonably be disregarded as many other risks universally taken, such, for instance, as railway travelling, and quote figures showing one death to 1400 vaccinations. But railway fatalities in this country are about one in 50,000,000, and even if there were no difference between 1400 and 50,000,000 there is much difference between a risk enforced by law and a risk willingly undertaken. Moreover, there is clamant cause to question the accuracy of the above estimate of vaccinal fatalities, for it represents only the deaths officially returned by medical men as due to vaccination, and it is notorious that few doctors will return a death to that cause if they can ascribe it to any other, which it is usually quite easy to do. They need only name the affection set up by the operation, and ignore the direct or indirect origin of it. This method of "saving vaccination from reproach" has not only been recommended in a medical journal, but has been openly professed by a medical officer of health (Dr. May, of Aston) at a medical conference, with a candour that argued full confidence in the approval of his colleagues. It is, therefore, not wonderful that since 1881, when the entry of deaths under this heading began to the present time (when the entry has been, ominously, discontinued), the general register shows only an average of fifty deaths a year from vaccination. It is not surprising that the deaths after vaccination, so frequently recorded in the daily papers, turn out (after a strenuous argument between coroner and aggrieved relatives) to be due not to vaccination but to pneumonia, septicemia, meningitis, or some other of the many diseases which the unhappy idiosyncrasy of the deceased invited. Of the number and variety of these diseases some notion may be gleaned from the report of Dr. Makuna's medical committee of inquiry, instituted shortly before the last Royal Commission, with the view of reassuring the public as to the innocence of vaccination, but which signally failed to do so. Its results ought to be better known. Four thousand medical practitioners were circularised on the subject. The question which concerns us, asked what diseases the witness had, in his experience, known to result from vaccination. To this there were only 370 answers, and it is a fair assumption that those readiest to reply would