A DECOROUS UNANIMITY.
Such are the leading varieties of virus used for vaccination—starting with Jenner’s horsegrease cowpox, then cowpox, then horsepox, then smallpox cowpox, and finishing with cowpox revived; each of them inscrutably modified in transit from child to child and from beast to beast. We are continually hearing of miracles wrought by vaccination in the past and present—especially the past, at home and abroad—especially abroad, the assumption being that vaccination is, and has been, everywhere the same. On the contrary, the condition precedent to serious consideration of any vaccine miracle is a definition of the variety of vaccination practised. It is, we admit, convenient for the administrators of the rite that it should pass for uniform, however multiform; for the practice has become a great and lucrative business—a world-wide poll-tax; and whatever the internal differences of the priesthood, it is their obvious interest to exhibit a decorous unanimity in presence of their customers. Hence the uneasiness recently excited by indiscreet advocates of “pure lymph from the calf” has been judiciously allayed, not by resistance, but by concession and damnation with faint praise; the commercial instinct dictating caution, for if the public did get behind the professional screen, and discovered the mysteries of pox, what might not befall the craft of vaccination!