der to appreciate the value of vaccination, it is only necessary to
consider what small-pox was before its discovery,--to look at that
disease through the eyes of our fathers and grandfathers. Until the
close of the last century it was the most terrible of all the ministers
of death. It filled the churchyards with corpses. When Jenner published
his great discovery, about seventy years ago, the annual death-rate from
small-pox in England was estimated at three thousand in the million of
population. In other countries of Europe the rate reached as high as
four thousand in the million. And these fatal cases must be multiplied
by five or six, to give the entire number of persons annually attacked
by the disease. It spared neither high nor low. Macaulay informs us that
Queen Mary, the wife of William III., fell a victim to it. Those in whom
the disease did not prove fatal, carried about with them the hideous
traces of its malignity; for it 'turned the babe into a changeling at
which the mother shuddered,' and made 'the eyes and cheeks of the
betrothed maiden objects of horror to the lover.' Few escaped being
attacked by this fell disease. Nearly one-tenth of all the persons who
died in London during the last century died of this one cause. Children
were peculiarly its victims. In some of the great cities of England more
than one-third of all the deaths among children under ten years of age
arose from small-pox. Two-thirds of all the applicants for relief at
the Hospital for the Indigent Blind had lost their sight by small-pox.
The number of hopeless deafened ears, crippled joints, and broken-down
constitutions from the same cause cannot be accurately computed, but was
certainly very large. Vaccination is all that now stands between us and
all these horrors of the last century.

Is the strength of this barrier doubted?--Its efficacy is readily
proved. In England, during the twelve years (1854-1865) in which
vaccination has been to a certain extent compulsory, the average annual
rate of deaths by small-pox has been two hundred and two in the million
of population. Contrast this with the annual death-rate of three
thousand to the million, which was the average of thirty years previous
to the introduction of vaccination. Mr. John Simon, medical officer of
Her Majesty's Privy Council, one of the best statisticians in England,
has collected a formidable array of figures, 'to doubt which would be to
fly in the face of the multiplica