261.  This is the place to state my opinions, and the result of my experience, with regard to that fearful disease the SMALL-POX; a subject, too, to which I have paid great attention.  I was always, from the very first mention of the thing, opposed to the Cow-Pox scheme.  If efficacious in preventing the Small-Pox, I objected to it merely on the score of its beastliness.  There are some things, surely, more hideous than death, and more resolutely to be avoided; at any rate, more to be avoided than the mere risk of suffering death.  And, amongst other things, I always reckoned that of a parent causing the blood, and the diseased blood too, of a beast to be put into the veins of human beings, and those beings the children of that parent.  I, therefore, as will be seen in the pages of the Register of that day, most strenuously opposed the giving of twenty thousand pounds to JENNER out of the taxes, paid in great part by the working people, which I deemed and asserted to be a scandalous waste of the public money.

262.  I contended, that this beastly application could not, in nature, be efficacious in preventing the Small-Pox; and that, even if efficacious for that purpose, it was wholly unnecessary.  The truth of the former of these assertions has now been proved in thousands upon thousands of instances.  For a long time, for ten years, the contrary was boldly and brazenly asserted.  This nation is fond of quackery of all sorts; and this particular quackery having been sanctioned by King, Lords and Commons, it spread over the country like a pestilence borne by the winds.  Speedily sprang up the ‘ROYAL Jennerian Institution,’ and Branch Institutions, issuing from the parent trunk, set instantly to work, impregnating the veins of the rising and enlightened generation with the beastly matter.  ‘Gentlemen and Ladies’ made the commodity a pocket-companion; and if a cottager’s child (in Hampshire at least), even seen by them, on a common, were not pretty quick in taking to its heels, it had to carry off more or less of the disease of the cow.  One would have thought, that one-half of the cows in England must have been tapped to get at such a quantity of the stuff.

263.  In the midst of all this mad work, to which the doctors, after having found it in vain to resist, had yielded, the real small-pox, in its worst form, broke out in the town of RINGWOOD, in HAMPSHIRE, 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 cow-pox ‘so nicely!’ And what was now said?  Was the quackery exploded, and were the granters of the twenty thousand pounds ashamed of what they had done?  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