Is that really so?  Is vaccination actually a preventive of smallpox?  This seems very doubtful when the advocates of vaccination themselves do not believe it.  “What,” I hear them say, “we do not believe in our own theory?” Evidently you do not, my friends.  If you believe that vaccination protects you against smallpox, why are you afraid of catching it from those who are not vaccinated?  If you are thoroughly protected, as you claim to be, how can you catch the disease from those who are not protected?  Why do you not allow the other fellow to have his fill of smallpox and then enjoy a good laugh on him?  The fact of the matter is you know full well that you are not safe, that you can catch the disease just as readily as the unprotected.

German statistics are more reliable than those of any other country.  In the years of 1870-71 smallpox was rampant in the Fatherland.  Over 1,000,000 persons had the disease, and 120,000 died.  Ninety-six percent of these had been vaccinated and only four percent had not been protected.  Most of the victims were vaccinated, once at least, shortly before they took the disease.

In 1888 Bismarck sent an address to the governments of all the German states in which it was admitted that numerous eczematous diseases, even those of an epidemic nature, were directly attributable to vaccination and that the origin and cure of smallpox were still unsolved problems.

In this message to the various legislatures the great statesman said:  “The hopes placed in the efficacy of the cowpox virus as a preventive of smallpox have proved entirely deceptive.”

Realizing this to be a fact, most of the German governments have modified or entirely relinquished their compulsory vaccination laws.

“But,” our opponents insist, “you cannot deny that smallpox has greatly diminished since the almost universal adoption of vaccination.”

Certainly the disease has diminished.  But so have diminished and, in fact, nearly disappeared the plague, the Black Death, cholera, the bubonic plague, yellow fever and numerous other epidemic pests which only recently decimated entire nations.

Not one of these epidemics was treated by vaccination.  Why, then, did they abate and practically disappear?

Not vaccination, but the more universal adoption of soap, bathtubs, all kinds of sanitary measures, such as plumbing, drainage, ventilation and more hygienic modes of living generally have subdued smallpox as well as all other plagues.

Many of us remember how the yellow fever raged in Havanna during the Spanish occupancy.  Within two months after the energetic Yankees took possession and gave the filthy city a good scouring, yellow fever had entirely disappeared—­without any yellow fever vaccination.

The question is now in order why, of all the dreaded plagues of the past, smallpox alone survives to this day.

The answer is:  on account of vaccination.  If scrofulous and syphilitic poisons were not artificially kept alive in human blood by vaccination, smallpox would by this time be as rare as cholera and yellow fever.