[CHAPTER XLII.]
THE GATHERING MOVEMENT—1867-70.
Section 31 of the Act of 1867 implied the doom of Vaccination. It was bad enough to fine a parent for refusing to vaccinate his child; it was, however, a circumscribed annoyance; but to make of refusal a continuous offence until a child attained the age of fourteen was to set up a cause of quarrel that had to be fought out. Slavery in the United States is abolished, but slavery might have endured to this day had the Southerners been more forbearing; but, in the arrogance of their power, they imposed on the Union the Fugitive Slave Law, compelling the people of the North to surrender runaway negroes. This triumph of the slaveholders determined the fate of slavery. In like manner the arrogance of the vaccinators overcame their prudence. Resolved to subdue resistance to their rite, they drove resistance to extremity, and set up an irreducible insurrection. As a medical prescription accepted at discretion, vaccination might have survived unquestioned and paid for; but its transition into an aggressive statute removed it from the safe realm of professional mystery into the jurisdiction of common sense, common observation, and every man’s business.
Sec. 31, Act ’67, was quickly turned to account by the medical officials who had devised and imposed it upon the indifference of Parliament. They had, of course, to operate through local poor-law authorities—a painful necessity; but guardians were occasionally as fanatical as themselves, and exasperated, too, that their petty authority should be set at naught, and especially by parents in humble life. Consequently, here and there over the country continued prosecutions for refusing to vaccinate were initiated, stirring up strife, begetting sympathy with the prosecuted, and gradually converting vaccination into a living political question. Whatever may be thought of Sec. 31, Act ’67, all will allow that it drew a line and established irritation and conflict. Opposition to vaccination had hitherto to contend with nothing so deadly as apathy, but from that drawback it was now delivered. On the other hand, in many parishes, Sec. 31, Act ’67 was allowed to make no difference. Those who disliked vaccination were warned, or prosecuted once, and then let alone; but this leniency served to accentuate the severity practised elsewhere, and to render the law still more odious by reason of the flagrant inequality of its administration.
The scientific opposition to vaccination, initiated by Mr. John Gibbs in 1855, had for some years few accessions, and it required faith in truth in full measure to persist in its advocacy. The Jennerian tradition was so rooted in the public mind that to question it savoured of paradox or profanity. There were occasional manifestations of scepticism when smallpox attacked the vaccinated, but doubt was crushed down as impious and dangerous to established confidence. Mr. Herbert Spencer, for example, in Social Statics, published in 1851, observed—
The measures enjoined by the Vaccination Act of 1840 were to have exterminated Smallpox; yet the reports of the Registrar-General show that deaths from Smallpox have been increasing.
To such matter-of-fact criticism, any answer must have taken form in the style of the bewildered divine, who exclaimed, “Dear brethren, what theology can we enjoy if such objections be entertained!”
Dr. Charles T. Pearce was one of the first to unite with Mr. Gibbs in his labours. As editor of a medical journal, he happened to receive an article from Mr. Gibbs which set him thinking, and as the result of his inquiries, he came out an enthusiastic anti-vaccinator. He made the question of vaccination completely his own, and lectured on the subject throughout the country, eager and ready for combat. In Northampton, in 1860, he held his first public debate, and under his influence the town became a centre of resistance to the compulsory law, so that Mr. Charles Gilpin, M.P. for the borough, addressing his constituents in 1870, thus expressed himself—
I have always thought that when we try to enforce one of the ever-changing opinions of medical men, we touch upon the liberty of the subject and the rights of human nature. I find that a number of parents are fined because they are convinced that Vaccination is useless and injurious. I ask, What is the character of those parents? Are they idle? Are they dissolute? Are they drunken? Are they careless of the welfare of their children? The answer is emphatically, No! They are thoughtful, they are industrious, they are sober. They are men who look into the reasons of things, and who decline to be driven into any course of conduct which they do not rationally approve. When I was in business in the City of London I had my goods seized almost every year for Church rates. I objected to the law, and with a free heart and a firm voice, I said I will endure the penalty. I would not obey a law which I knew to be wrong. Therefore it is that I sympathise with those who are persuaded that Vaccination is wrong; and for their encouragement and consolation let me say, that as compulsory Church rates were abolished because of the stedfast testimony borne against them by Nonconformists, so will compulsion as applied to Vaccination, if resistance is consistently and seriously maintained. As the Society of Friends has demonstrated, no law can survive under the persistent protest of conscience.
Tenacity was the distinction of Dr. Pearce. Undismayed by whatever odds, he maintained his position with deliberation and patience, and by neither historical, statistical, or physiological data was it possible to circumvent him. When he entered into the controversy in 1856, fool and fanatic was the summary designation of whoever ventured to dispute the salvation wrought by vaccination; but, living until 1883, he witnessed such epithets received with amusement as denoting the ill-humour and impotence of those who employed them.