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CHAP. V from small-pox than at any other age. Yet the Commissioners say the unvaccinated might as well be chosen at random, or by the colour of their clothes so far as any liability to small-pox is concerned. One stands amazed at the hardihood of a responsible body of presumably sensible and truth-seeking men who can deliberately record as a fact what is so obviously untrue.

Hardly less important is it that the bulk of the unvaccinated, those who escape the vaccination officers, are the very poor, and the nomad population of the country—tramps, beggars and criminals, the occupants of the tenement houses and slums of our great cities, who, being all weekly tenants, are continually changing their residence. Such were referred to, in the Report of the Local Government Board for 1882 (p. 309), as constituting the bulk of the thirty-five thousand of default, under the heading—"Removed, not to be traced, or otherwise accounted for."

One of the Commission's official witnesses, Dr. MacCabe, Medical Commissioner for Ireland, distinctly affirms this. He says (2nd Report, Q. 3,073) that he formerly had charge of the Dublin district, and that u out of a population of a quarter of a million, 100,000 live in tenement-houses, that is to say, houses that are let out in single rooms for the accommodation of a family. It is amongst that class, to a very great extent, that the defaulters exist. The relieving officer, when he goes to the tenement -dwelling where the birth occurred, finds that the parents have gone to some other tenement-dwelling and there is no trace of them. . . A great number of these defaulters occur in this way."

Now weekly tenants do not live in the best and most sanitary parts of towns, and the records of every epidemic show that such insanitary districts have an enormously greater proportion of the small-pox deaths than the healthier districts. Yet the Commissioners declare that there is "absolutely no difference between the vaccinated and the unvaccinated" except in