I am glad to perceive that the Ministry took care to intimate their decided hostility to any law for propagating Cowpox by force, by the aid of pains and penalties. This being the case, I care little about Mr. Rose and his Cowpox Institution. Those who choose to have their children impregnated from that shop, will be at liberty to do so; and those who wish to avoid it, may. This is all right; though it may be very foolish for Government to interfere in such a matter. I think we may thank the events at Ringwood for the ministerial protest against compulsory measures. It would have been curious enough to see people paying penalties for being so obstinate as not to consult their own health, or that of their children.

What Cobbett thought would be “curious enough” we witness daily. English liberty, if it has advanced in some directions, has gone back in others since Cobbett wrote. Parents are now haled before magistrates, fined and imprisoned, because (knowing that vaccination cannot avert smallpox, whilst it may seriously injure the health of their children, and even cost them their lives) they refuse to submit to the infliction. Never, perhaps, was there a more impious invasion of liberty than compulsory vaccination, and yet we have free and enlightened Englishmen who excuse and defend it! These are the Pharisees of Liberalism, blatant over tyranny, extinct or foreign, but dull to similar tyranny within their own domain. They garnish the sepulchres of the prophets of freedom, but (in their petty measure) repeat the deeds of those who persecuted and slew them.

Lastly, in the article from which I have been quoting, Cobbett assumed that the resort to the House of Commons for money was evidence that the enthusiasm for vaccination was abating. He wrote—

The present application to Parliament is a pretty good proof that Cowpox is beginning to be blowed upon. The Royal Jennerian Society wants funds. The subscribers have fallen off; and so application to the public purse has become necessary. Why have the subscribers fallen off? Their humanity has not waxed cold. It were slander, indeed, to suppose that. But I suspect that their faith has waxed cold; and when that is the case, zeal soon slackens its operations, more especially when these operations consist chiefly in the expenditure of money.

The fact was, that as vaccination failures multiplied, Jenner tried, more suo, to make a scape-goat of Walker, the Resident Inoculator of the Royal Jennerian Society. There was a dreadful row, and a secession of the better part of the members with Walker, who set up the London Vaccine Institution. Those who adhered to Jenner were not of the philanthropic and subscribing order, but they had political influence, and used it to get rid of their liabilities, first in obtaining a vote of £20,000 for Jenner, and second in the establishment of a National Vaccine Establishment with a subsidy of £3,000 a year.

So far Cobbett in his Register, where he had no occasion to discuss vaccination again; but toward the end of his life, 1829-30, he produced a series of papers entitled Advice to Young Men, in which he reiterated and enforced his protest against the Jennerian imposture—

I contend [he wrote] that the beastly application could not, in nature, be efficacious in preventing Smallpox, the truth of which assertion has now been proved in thousands upon thousands of instances. For a long time, for ten years, the contrary was boldly and brazenly asserted.... But Smallpox, in its worst form, broke out at Ringwood, and carried off, I believe (I have not the account at hand), more than a hundred persons, young and old, every one of whom had had the Cowpox “so nicely.” And what was then said? Was the quackery exploded? Not at all: the failure was imputed to unskilful operators: to the staleness of the matter: to its not being of the genuine quality. Admitting all this, the scheme stood condemned; for the great advantages held forth were, that anybody might perform the operation, and that the matter was everywhere abundant and cost free.

But these were paltry excuses: the mere shuffles of quackery; for what do we know now? Why, that in hundreds of instances, persons Cowpoxed by Jenner himself, have taken the real Smallpox afterwards, and have either died from the disorder or narrowly escaped with their lives! I will mention two instances. The first is Sir Richard Phillips, whose son, several years after Jenner had given him the insuring matter, had a very hard struggle for life, under the hands of the old-fashioned, seam-giving, and dimple-dipping Smallpox. The second is Philip Codd, Esq., of Rumstead Court, near Maidstone, whose son had a very narrow escape under the real Smallpox, and who also had been Cowpoxed by Jenner himself. Mr. Codd I have known, and have most sincerely respected, from the time of our both being eighteen years of age. When the young gentleman, his son, was very young, I, having him on my knee one day, asked his kind and excellent mother whether he had been inoculated. “Oh, no!” said she, “we are going to have him vaccinated.” Whereupon I, going into the garden to the father, said, “I do hope, Codd, that you are not going to have that beastly cow-stuff put into that fine boy.” “Why,” said he, “you see, Cobbett, it is to be done by Jenner himself.” What answer I gave, what names and epithets I bestowed upon Jenner and his quackery, I will leave the reader to imagine.

Now, here are instances enough; but every reader has heard of, if not seen, scores of others. Young Mr. Codd caught Smallpox at a school; and if I recollect rightly, there were several other vaccinated youths who did the same at the same time. Quackery, however, has always a shuffle left. Now that Cowpox has been proved to be no guarantee against Smallpox, it makes it milder when it comes! A pretty shuffle, indeed, this! You are to be all your life in fear of it, having as your sole consolation, that when it comes (and it may overtake you in a camp or on the seas) it will be milder! It was not too mild to kill at Ringwood, and its mildness, in the case of young Mr. Codd, did not restrain it from blinding him for a suitable number of days.

I shall not easily forget the alarm and anxiety of Mr. and Mrs. Codd on this occasion—both of them the best of parents, and both of them punished for having yielded to fashionable quackery. I will not say justly punished; for affection for their children, in which respect they were never surpassed by any parents on earth, was the cause of their listening to the danger-obviating quackery. This, too, is the case with other parents; but parents should be under the influence of reason and experience, as well as under that of affection; and now, at any rate, they ought to set this really dangerous quackery at naught.