[*] Since the above was written the author has read in the press that in Yorkshire a single bench of magistrates out of the hundreds in England has already granted orders on the ground of “conscientious objection,” under which some 2000 children are exempted from the scope of the Vaccination Acts.  So far as he has seen this statement has not been contradicted.  At Ipswich also about 700 applications, affecting many children, have been filed.  To deal with these the Bench is holding special sessions, sitting at seven o’clock in the evening.

At first the magistrates refused to accept these forms, but after a while, when they found how impossible it was to dive into a man’s conscience and to decide what was or what was not “conscientious objection,” they received them as sufficient evidence, provided only that they were sworn before some one entitled to administer oaths.  Many of the objectors did not even take the trouble to do as much as this, for within five years of the passing of the Act, in practice the vaccination laws ceased to exist.  The burden of prosecution rested with Boards of Guardians, popularly elected bodies, and what board was likely to go to the trouble of working up a case and to the expense of bringing it before the court, when, to produce a complete defence, the defendant need only declare that he had a conscientious objection to the law under which the information was laid against him?  Many idle or obstinate or prejudiced people would develop conscientious objections to anything which gives trouble or that they happen to dislike.  For instance, if the same principle were applied to education, I believe that within a very few years not twenty-five per cent. of the children belonging to the classes that are educated out of the rates would ever pass the School Board standards.

Thus it came about that the harvest was ripe, and over ripe, awaiting only the appointed sickle of disease.  Once or twice already that sickle had been put in, but always before the reaping began it was stayed by the application of the terrible rule of isolation known as the improved Leicester system.

Among some of the natives of Africa when smallpox breaks out in a kraal, that kraal is surrounded by guards and its inhabitants are left to recover or perish, to starve or to feed themselves as chance and circumstance may dictate.  During the absence of the smallpox laws the same plan, more mercifully applied, prevailed in England, and thus the evil hour was postponed.  But it was only postponed, for like a cumulative tax it was heaping up against the country, and at last the hour had come for payment to an authority whose books must be balanced without remittance or reduction.  What is due to nature that nature takes in her own way and season, neither less nor more, unless indeed the skill and providence of man can find means to force her to write off the debt.