here, let’s understand each other.  If you have any doubts about this matter, say so, and we will have done with it, for, remember, once you are on the platform you’ve got to go the whole hog; none of your scientific finicking, but appeals to the people to rise up in their thousands and save their innocent children from being offered to the Moloch of vaccination, with enlarged photographs of nasty-looking cases, and the rest of it.”

I listened and shivered.  The inquiry into rare cases of disease after vaccination had been interesting work, which, whatever deductions people might choose to draw, in fact committed me to nothing.  But to become one of the ragged little regiment of medical dissenters, to swallow all the unscientific follies of the anti-vaccination agitators, to make myself responsible for and to promulgate their distorted figures and wild statements—­ah! that was another thing.  Must I appear upon platforms and denounce this wonderful discovery as the “law of useless infanticide”?  Must I tell people that “smallpox is really a curative process and not the deadly scourge and pestilence that doctors pretend it to be”?  Must I maintain “that vaccination never did, never does, and never can prevent even a single case of smallpox”?  Must I hold it up as a “law (!) of devil worship and human sacrifice to idols”?

If I accepted Strong’s offer it seemed that I must do all these things:  more, I must be false to my instincts, false to my training and profession, false to my scientific knowledge.  I could not do it.  And yet—­when did a man in my position ever get such a chance as that which was offered to me this day?  I was ready with my tongue and fond of public speaking; from boyhood it had been my desire to enter Parliament, where I knew well that I should show to some advantage.  Now, without risk or expense to myself, an opportunity of gratifying this ambition was given to me.  Indeed, if I succeeded in winning this city, which had always been a Tory stronghold, for the Radical party I should be a marked man from the beginning, and if my career was not one of assured prosperity the fault would be my own.  Already in imagination I saw myself rich (for in this way or in that the money would come), a favourite of the people, a trusted minister of the Crown and perhaps—­who could tell?—­ennobled, living a life of dignity and repute, and at last leaving my honours and my fame to those who came after me.

On the other hand, if I refused this offer the chance would pass away from me, never to return again; it was probable even that I should lose Stephen Strong’s friendship and support, for he was not a man who liked his generosity to be slighted, moreover he would believe me unsound upon his favourite dogmas.  In short, for ever abandoning my brilliant hopes I condemned myself to an experience of struggle as a doctor with a practice among second-class people.