the last century, and which the general improvement in health would certainly have favoured. It may be admitted that the increasing employment of women in factories is also a contributory cause of infant mortal, but there is no proof that a less proportion of women have been thus employed during the last twenty years, while it is certain that there has been a great diminution of vaccination, which is now admitted to be a vera causa of infant mortality.
Before leaving the case of Leicester it will be instructive to compare it with some other towns of which statistics are available. And first as to the great epidemic of 1871-2 in Leicester and in Birmingham. Both towns were then well vaccinated, and both suffered severely by the epidemic. Thus:
| Leicester. | Birmingham. | |
| S.P. cases per 10,000 population | 327 | 213 |
| S.P.„ deaths per„ 10,000„population„ | 35 | 35 |
But since then Leicester has rejected vaccination to such an extent that in 1894 it had only seven vaccinations to ten thousand population, while Birmingham had 240, or more than thirty times as much, and the proportion of its inhabitants who have been vaccinated is probably less than half those of Birmingham. The Commissioners themselves state that the disease was brought into the town of Leicester on twelve separate occasions during the recent epidemic, yet the following is the result:
| 1891–4. | Leicester. | Birmingham. |
| S.P. cases per 10,000 population | 19 | 63 |
| S.P.„ deaths per„ 10,000„ population„ | 1.1 | 5 |
Here we see that Leicester had less than one-third the cases of small-pox, and less than one-fourth the deaths in proportion to population than well- vaccinated Birmingham; so that both the alleged protection from attacks of the disease, and mitigation of its severity when it does attack, are shown, not only to be absolutely untrue, but to apply really, in this case, to the absence of vaccination!
