ulation, and in zymotic death-rate; the small-pox deathrate increasing in the same order and to an enormous extent, quite regardless of the fact that the last three have had practically complete vaccination during the whole period of the comparison; while Ireland alone, with the lowest small-pox death-rate by far, has, on official testimony, the least amount of vaccination. And yet the majority of the Commissioners still pin their faith on vaccination, and maintain that the cumulative force of the testimony in its favour is irresistible! And further, that "sanitary improvements" cannot be asserted to afford "an adequate explanation of the diminished mortality from small-pox."
It will now be clear to my readers that these conclusions, set forth as the final outcome of their seven years' labours, are the very reverse of the true ones, and that they have arrived at them by neglecting altogether to consider, in their mutual relations, "those great masses of national statistics " which alone can be depended on to point out true causes, but have limited themselves to such facts as the alleged mortalities of the vaccinated and the unvaccinated, changes of age-incidence, and other matters of detail, some of which are entirely vitiated by untrustworthy evidence while others require skilled statistical treatment to arrive at true results, a subject quite beyond the powers of untrained physicians and lawyers, however eminent in their own special departments.[1]
Small-pox and Vaccination on the Continent
Before proceeding to discuss those special test-cases in our own country which still more completely show the impotence of vaccination, it will be well to notice
- ↑ As an example of the Commissioners' statistical fallacies in treating the subject of changed age-incidence, see Mr. Alexander Paul's A Royal Commission's Arithmetic (King & Son, 1897), and, especially, Mr. A. Milnes' Statistics of Small-pox and Vaccination in the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, September, 1897.
