million on the average number in the Asylum, and concludes by saying: "The preceding facts appear to offer most conclusive proofs of the value of vaccination." But he gives no comparison with other boys of about the same age and living under equally healthy conditions, but who had not been so uniformly or so recently vaccinated ; for it must be remembered that, as this was long before the epoch of compulsory vaccination, a large proportion of the boys would be unvaccinated at their entrance, and would therefore have the alleged benefit of a recent vaccination. But when we make the comparison, which both Dr. Balfour and Sir John Simon failed to make, we find that these well vaccinated and protected boys had a greater small-pox mortality than the imperfectly protected outsiders. For in the First Report of the Commission (p. 114, Table B) we find it stated that in the period of optional vaccination (1847–53) the death-rate from small-pox of persons from ten to fifteen years[1] was 94 per million! Instead of offering "most conclusive proofs of the value of vaccination," his own facts and figures, if they prove anything at all, prove not only the uselessness but the evil of vaccination, and that it really tends to increase small-pox mortality. And this conclusion is also reached by Professor Adolf Vogt, who, in the elaborate statistical paper sent by him to the Royal Commission, and printed in their Sixth Report, but not otherwise noticed by them, shows by abundant statistics from various countries that the small-pox death-rate and fatality have been increased during epidemics occurring in the epoch of vaccination.
One more point deserves notice before leaving this part of the inquiry, which is the specially high small-pox mortality of great commercial seaports. The following table, compiled from Dr. Pierce's Vital Statistics for the Continental towns and from the
- ↑ This almost exactly agrees with the ages of the boys who are admitted between nine and eleven, and leave at fourteen. (See Low's Handbook of London Charities.)
