William Cobbett was essentially a man of common-sense. His power lay in his community with the experience and reason of his countrymen; and, like all of us, he had the defects of his virtue. He continually applied his vulgar judgment to the criticism of men and matters beyond the range of his competence, and the result was a luxuriance of arrogance and contempt for which at this day we must resort to Mr. Ruskin for a parallel.
Such being the case, we have to inquire, What was the worth of Cobbett’s opinion in the matter of vaccination? The attempt is sometimes made by vaccinators to withdraw their practice from popular discussion. They say it is a medical question for medical men; but the assertion provokes suspicion rather than confidence, for mystery is an invariable note of imposture. It is fair, I allow, to say of any abstruse knowledge that it can only be apprehended by those whose faculties are trained for its apprehension; but what is there abstruse about vaccination? With little trouble, everybody may know as much about it as anybody. It is the simplest of surgical operations. It is almost as easy as taking pills—instead of putting poison down the throat it is inserted into the skin. The operation may result in any number of pathological complications, but whether such complications be admitted or denied, what vaccination is prescribed for, namely, the prevention of smallpox, comes within the range of common observation. What, therefore, I have to answer is, that Cobbett’s common-sense was competent to deliver judgment upon vaccination.
Moreover, the circumstances of the time compelled an opinion: silence or neutrality was impossible. England was swarming with vaccinators. All the fussy folk who had a taste for doing much good at little cost were plying the cowpox lancet. Encouraged by Jenner, they got vaccine, inoculated a victim, and propagated the virus from arm to arm. Here I may let Cobbett speak for himself—
This nation is fond of quackery of all sorts; and this particular quackery having been sanctioned by King, Lords, and Commons, it spread over the country like a pestilence borne by the winds. Speedily sprang up the Royal Jennerian Institution, and branch institutions issuing from the parent trunk, set instantly to work, impregnating the veins of the rising generation with the beastly matter. Gentlemen and ladies made the commodity a pocket companion; and if a cottager’s child was seen by them on a common (in Hampshire at least) and did not quickly take to its heels, it was certain to carry off more or less of the disease of the cow. One would have thought that half the cows in the country had been tapped to get such a quantity of stuff.[180]
Nor was vaccination merely forced on Cobbett’s attention as a popular craze. He had to deal with it as a possible compulsory infliction. At a public meeting in 1803, Wilberforce and Dr. Clarke advocated the prohibition of smallpox inoculation and the enforcement of vaccination; and Cobbett, in a letter addressed to Wilberforce, rebuked the arbitrary project in a strain impressive and dignified as that of Burke himself. He wrote—
It seems there are prejudices against cowpox which it is necessary to destroy by force. That there are prejudices, and very strong ones too, I am ready to allow, but I cannot agree that these prejudices should be eradicated by force; nor is it perhaps fair to use the degrading term as expressive of the dislike which so large a portion of the community entertain to the practice you are so anxious to compel them to adopt. The charge of prejudice has been preferred but too often, and with but too fatal success against every one opposed to change. The truth is that whoever has been found to object to innovation, however wild in itself, however destructive in its consequences, has constantly been accused of prejudice; and as prejudice thus used implies a mixture of ignorance and perverseness, and as few persons are willing to be thought ignorant and perverse, the imputation is employed to coerce assent where reason hesitates.
He then aptly applied the repudiated recommendation of inoculation with smallpox as cause for hesitation in assenting to inoculation with cowpox—
There was, you must well remember, a strong and general objection, which for a long time prevailed, against Inoculation with Smallpox; and you cannot have forgotten that this objection was termed prejudice, and the persons entertaining it were regarded as illiterate, ignorant, or perverse; yet it now appears from the Address of your Royal Jennerian Society that it would have been well for the human race if the prejudices of those illiterate, ignorant, or perverse persons had universally obtained; for you now tell us that “Inoculation by spreading the contagion has considerably increased the mortality of Smallpox.” With an example like this before our eyes, Ought we not to be very cautious how we adopt your new system of Inoculation with Cowpox?
Then turning upon Wilberforce in his favourite character of constitutional Englishman, he proceeded—
Give me leave to ask you, Sir, how you reconcile a proposition to enforce this novel practice with the spirit of that Constitution of which you profess to be so great an admirer, and with that freedom of which you wish to be regarded as one of the principal supporters? What I am opposed to, and what I am alarmed at, is the proposition to obtain an Act of Parliament which would in its operation be nothing short of compulsion on every man to suffer the veins of his child to be impregnated with the disease of a beast—a measure to be adopted in no country where the people are not vassals or slaves.