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CHAP. VI incapacity to conduct such an inquiry and the utter worthlessness of their Final Report.

This is a matter upon which it is necessary to speak plainly. For refusing to allow their children's health, or even their lives, to be endangered by the inoculation into their system of disease-produced matter, miscalled " lymph," hundreds and probably thousands of English parents have been fined or imprisoned and treated as criminals, while certainly thousands of infants have been officially done to death, and other thousands injured for life. And all these horrors on account of what Dr. Creighton has well termed a " grotesque superstition," which has never had a rational foundation either of physiological doctrine or of carefully tested observations, and is now found to be disproved by a century's dearly bought experience. This disgrace of our much-vaunted scientific age has been throughout supported by concealment of facts telling against it, by misrepresentation, 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 palpably 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 experience " to which appeal has been made by the official 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