Doctor Therne

by H. Rider Haggard

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.

Five days after my encounter with the red-headed vagrant, the following paragraph appeared in one of the local papers: “Pocklingham. In the casual ward of the Union house for this district a tramp, name unknown, died last night. He had been admitted on the previous evening, but, for some unexplained reason, it was not noticed until the next morning that he suffered from illness, and, therefore, he was allowed to mix with the other inmates in the general ward. Drs. Butt and Clarkson, who were called in to attend, state that the cause of death was the worst form of smallpox. The body will be buried in quicklime, but some alarm is felt in the district owing to the deceased, who, it is said, arrived here from Dunchester, where he had been frequenting various tramps’ lodgings, having mixed with a number of other vagrants, who left the house before the character of his sickness was discovered, and who cannot now be traced. The unfortunate man was about forty years of age, of medium height, and red-haired.”

The same paper had an editorial note upon this piece of news, at the end of which it remarked, as became a party and an anti-vaccination organ: “The terror of this ‘filth disease,’ which in our fathers’ time amounted almost to insanity, no longer afflicts us, who know both that its effects were exaggerated and how to deal with it by isolation without recourse to the so-called vaccine remedies, which are now rejected by a large proportion of the population of these islands. Still, as we have ascertained by inquiry that this unfortunate man did undoubtedly spend several days and nights wandering about our city when in an infectious condition, it will be as well that the authorities should be on the alert. We do not want that hoary veteran—the smallpox scare—to rear its head again in Dunchester, least of all just now, when, in view of the imminent election, the accustomed use would be made of it by our prejudiced and unscrupulous political opponents.”

“No,” I said to myself as I put the paper down, “certainly we do not want a smallpox scare just now, and still less do we want the smallpox.” Then I thought of that unfortunate red-headed wretch, crazy with the torment of his disease, and of his hideous laughter, as he hunted and caught the children who made a mock of him—the poor children, scarcely one of whom was vaccinated.

A week later I opened my political campaign with a large public meeting in the Agricultural Hall. Almost up to the nomination day no candidate was forthcoming on the other side, and I thought that, for the fourth time, I should be returned unopposed. Of a sudden, however, a name was announced, and it proved to be none other than that of my rival of many years ago—Sir Thomas Colford—now like myself growing grey-headed, but still vigorous in mind and body, and as much respected as ever by the wealthier and more educated classes of our community. His appearance in the field put a new complexion on matters; it meant, indeed, that instead of the easy and comfortable walk over which I had anticipated, I must fight hard for my political existence.

In the course of my speech, which was very well received, for I was still popular in the town even among the more moderate of my opponents, I dwelt upon Sir Thomas Colford’s address to the electorate which had just come into my hands. In this address I was astonished to see a paragraph advocating, though in a somewhat guarded fashion, the re-enactment of the old laws of compulsory vaccination. In a draft which had reached me two days before through some underground channel, this paragraph had not appeared, thus showing that it had been added by an afterthought and quite suddenly. However, there it was, and I made great play with it.

What, I asked the electors of Dunchester, could they think of a man who in these modern and enlightened days sought to reimpose upon a free people the barbarous infamies of the Vaccination Acts? Long ago we had fought that fight, and long ago we had relegated them to limbo, where, with such things as instruments of torment, papal bulls and writs of attainder, they remained to excite the wonder and the horror of our own and future generations.

Well would it have been for me if I had stopped here, but, led away by the subject and by the loud cheers that my treatment of it, purposely flamboyant, never failed to evoke, forgetful too for the moment of the Red-headed Man, I passed on to deductions. Our opponents had prophesied, I said, that within ten years of the passing of the famous Conscience Clause smallpox would be rampant. Now what were the facts? Although almost twice that time had gone by, here in Dunchester we had suffered far less from smallpox than during the compulsory period, for at no one time during all these eighteen or twenty years had three cases been under simultaneous treatment within the confines of the city.