that anybody who tried to inoculate another with small-pox would be liable to a month's imprisonment. In 1853 they managed to pass that Compulsory Vaccination Act which we are here to protest against to-night. (Cheers.) I think one of the most serious complaints against the whole system is this: They dare not trust it to its own merits. Do people want small-pox? If the system is any good it will speak for itself; if it is bad they have no right to enforce it.
You may ask, "Why was compulsion necessary?" The reason was simply this the people were beginning to find out it was no good; they were beginning to clamour again for inoculation, and the working classes, who reason more by the hard facts of experience than by medical dogmas, found that it was not the slightest use for protecting people. against small-pox. In 1811 there had occurred a notable instance of failure. Lord Robert Grosvenor, ten years of age, who had been vaccinated by Jenner himself, was now taken with small-pox, and lay hovering between life and death. Jenner sat by the bedside of his illustrious patient, and when at last the boy began to turn and get better Jenner turned to the father with "What a lucky job he was vaccinated. If he had not he would surely have died." Thus Jenner started the glorious doctrine of mitigation, which has been handed down as the heirloom of the medical vaccinists ever since.
SMALL-POX OF THE COW.
Another reason why the doctors accepted it was this: Jenner gave a brand new name to cow-pox that had not been heard of before. He called cow-pox small-pox of the cow, or Variola Vaccina, but you may search in vain for any attempt upon his part to prove it. He might as well have called it diphtheria of the cow, for all the analogy it bore. It gave a scientific air to the whole thing, although there was just as much science in it as in the heads of the old women of Gloucestershire. (Laughter). The theory was this: Cow-pox is small-pox of the cow; therefore if you give a person this cow-pox it is the same as small-pox, only in a very mild form, and it is not infectious. Sir John Simon, the great high priest of the vaccine cult in England. for many years, said that the reason cow-pox prevents small-pox is because it is small-pox, and that a person who has had cow-pox has really passed through small-pox. And Jenner himself absolutely declared that it is not that cow-pox is a preventive of small-pox but it is small-pox itself. Look at the incongruity of the whole thing. Someone has remarked that "the law's a hass," and I am sure it is in the present instance. By the Act of 1840 anyone who gave another small-pox was liable to a month's imprisonment; by the Act of 1853 if you don't give another small-pox—which is what cow-pox is supposed to be—you are liable to a fine of £1 and costs. So that between the two things, as Mr. Alfred Milnes has said, "a man is about as happy as a Jew in Russia." (Laughter.)
COMPARE THE TWO THINGS.
What is cow-pox? It is a disease which occurs on the teats of cows; it only occurs when they are in milk; only in one part of the body, and naturally only in the female animal; it results in an ugly chancre;
