It is unnecessary to make any comment on this effusion. It may simply be remarked that the arguments which Mr. Burdett uses on behalf of voluntary hospitals apply equally strongly on behalf of the system of slavery, and apply much more strongly in favour of general mendicancy. It is now generally acknowledged that almsgiving, though at present it may often be necessary, is unwholesome in its effect on both parties; whilst the plea for injustice to the poor in order that the welldisposed rich may occasionally have an opportunity of airing their consideration and charity, is scarcely likely to commend itself to rational people. Unless the defenders of the voluntary system have some stronger arguments than those of Mr. Burdett, we may surely hope for the early attainment of the reforms advocated in this pamphlet. WHAT IT COSTS TO BE VACCINATED. WHAT it costs to be vaccinated? Why surely, some lawabiding Englishman will say, it costs no more than an ordinary doctor's fee, and if you are poor, the public vaccinator will do it for nothing; but, of course, if you defy the law, you may be fined or imprisoned. That is true; but unfortunately it is an error to suppose that vaccination, even public vaccination, is entirely gratuitous. You may depend on it that whenever anyone, child or man, is vaccinated, it costs somebody something. Pecuniary cost is not the only thing, nor by any means the chief thing, to be considered; there are considered; there are other costs than those which are paid in money. There is the cost of parents' self-respect and happiness, when they are compelled, as is often the case, to submit their childrens' health and purity of blood to what they believe to be a foul and stupid contamination. There is the cost of the ill-health that is induced in the child, which frequently shows itself in a permanent injury to the system. There is the moral cost, to the nation, of allowing its statutebook to be disfigured by a law which has always been intolerable to the instincts and good sense of the people. And, finally, there is the cost of the countless sufferings inflicted on the lower animals by the twin sciences of Vaccination and Vivisection; for we may be sure that for every human who is compulsorily vaccinated, some non human has been the subject of murderous experimentation. Yes, certainly, it costs something to be vaccinated; and it is the object of this pamphlet to indicate what are these pains and penalties of a cruel and tyrannical law. A CIVILISED HEATHENISM. In all ages the epidemic diseases, which come and go, and which at times are so terribly in excess of their usual visitation, have been considered as suitable for the application of superstitious preventives or remedies. Thus charms, and potions, and vows, and sacrifices of human and non-human beings-and from the earliest times down to the present day inoculation comes under the head of these procedures—have been used as more or less powerful means of appeasing the gods who sent the epidemics. But as civilisation spread and deepened, the superstitious means employed were all outgrown, excepting the practice of inoculation, which, curious to relate, has of recent years, in its various forms, more than ever been pressed by the medical profession. But this unique form of old world medication, this dangerous relic of ruder and savage times, this, too, is destined soon to follow the rest of its kind into oblivion. The theory of inoculation for disease is wrong in science as it certainly is in morals. Society can only escape from disease by removing the causes; these are drunkenness, impurity, slums, dirt, injustice that makes men work for starvation wages, and through which they drag down with them their wives and children. The humanitarian reformer has vast fields for work in this direction, and if he will only be in earnest he will, in striking at these evils, remove disease thereby. Meanwhile Sir Benjamin |