against a danger which is probably little greater than the danger of being struck by lightning. How these laws came upon the statute, books, anti-vaccinationists explain by citing illustrations of activity on the part of the lobbyists maintained by the virus makers. They say school children are being vaccinated to sell virus. Now this movement is costing a large amount of money. This society feels that pressure must be brought to bear on legislatures throughout the United States in order to modify the laws. These laws rest on the implied scientific knowledge that vaccination is efficacious in a degree sufficient to justify a wholesale application of the remedy to the people, and that the danger of smallpox is sufficient to justify the application and that no other remedy is available against the danger so desirable as the remedy called for by the compulsory vaccination laws.
We should remember that these laws were made by legislatures of states, and that the legislatures passed the laws on the recommendations of committees composed of men of average intelligence who could not have had scientific knowledge of the issue without expert testimony. Now, such laws as these are apt to be passed without careful consideration, and it is doubtful whether this scientific knowledge has been sufficiently determined. We must as scientists differentiate between traditional scientific knowledge and scientific knowledge based on evidence which is conclusive enough to stand the test of a court of science. Who would not like to see a case brought against the custom of vaccination in a supreme court of science before a grand jury consisting of twenty-five scientific and engineering experts drawn from the various walks of the scientific professions. Let such a case be argued by legal counsel and all evidence introduced by experts on both sides be subject to cross examination. In a comparatively short time and at a relatively small expense, society would be in a position to know whether in the judgment of a jury of impartial experts trained to the weighing of real scientific facts, the evidence justified the position that vaccination is clearly efficacious to a degree sufficient to justify a wholesale vaccination of little children in the schools throughout the country, and even if efficacious in such degree whether the danger of smallpox is sufficient to justify the application of the precaution, and further that no other remedy, less dangerous and less costly or more efficacious exists, such, for instance, as effective quarantine, which is considered by the anti-vaccinationists to be the more desirable. In such a way, this question, which has disturbed us for forty years or more and will furnish a running agitation for a decade or two longer in all probability, could be settled once for all with dispatch.
Before such a court of science, all interested parties could appear with experts; on the one side the virus manufacturers, the physicians
