where a large default in vaccination was followed by a very severe epidemic of small-pox. The Majority Eeport refers to this in par. 373, intending to hold it up as a warning, but strangely enough in so important a document, say the reverse of what they mean to say, giving to it "very little," instead of "very much" small-pox. This case, however, has really nothing whatever to do with the question at issue, because, although anti-vaccinators maintain that vaccination has not the least effect in preventing or mitigating small-pox, they do not maintain that the absence of vaccination prevents it. What they urge is, that sanitation and isolation are the effective and only preventives, and it was because Leicester attended thoroughly to these matters, and Gloucester wholly neglected them that the one suffered so little and the other so much in the recent epidemic. On this subject every enquirer should read the summary of the facts given in the Minority Report, paragraph 261.
To return to the Majority Report. Its references to Leicester are scattered over 80 pages, referring separately to the hospital staff, and the relations of vaccinated and un vaccinated to small-pox; while in only a few paragraphs (par. 480–486) do they deal with the main question and the results of the system of isolation adopted. These results they endeavour to minimise by declaring that the disease was remarkably " slight in its fatality," yet they end by admitting that "the experience of Leicester affords cogent evidence that the vigilant and prompt application of isolation . . . is a most powerful agent in limiting the spread of small-pox." A little further on (par. 500) they say, when discussing this very point—how far sanitation may be relied on in place of vaccination—"The experiment has never been tried." Surely a town of 180,000 inhabitants which has neglected vaccination for twenty years, is an experiment. But a little further on we see the reason of this refusal to consider Leicester a test experiment. Par. 502 begins thus: "The question we are now discussing must, of
