We have just seen in the preceding chapter that high medical authorities positively assure us that vaccination gives no protection against smallpox unless it is done freshly once a year and is also then done _repeatedly_, “_until it no longer takes_,” which will surely require at least two successive vaccinations and may require from two to three, four or more successive vaccinations each year! Now let us seriously ask here: How many persons are there in the civil population or in the Army and Navy who have ever been, or are now, vaccinated in this way, viz., regularly once a year and then vaccinated repeatedly until the condition of _vaccinal saturation_ is reached where “_it no longer takes_”? I firmly believe that no well informed doctor, student or statistician will deny that _not five per cent._ of the civil population or of the Army and Navy has ever been vaccinated according to this rule and system which the experts assure us is the only safe and certain rule for vaccinal protection from smallpox! What, then, keeps the general population and the men of the Army and Navy so free from smallpox that for the generation past there are ordinarily less annual deaths from smallpox than from lightning? Surely it can not be vaccination that is responsible for this freedom from smallpox in modern times when not five per cent. of the population is vaccinated so that it can have any protection from smallpox! The extreme pro-vaccinator has, however, long and loudly claimed, and has deceived himself and the trusting public with this false claim, that general vaccination is practically the sole and only thing that has brought about the modern reduction of smallpox or that can ever reduce smallpox! But this claim is obviously absurd and false on its face when we have already seen that not five per cent. of the population is vaccinated in such a way as can give any protection, and that ninety-five per cent. of the vaccinated population has no effective vaccinal protection whatever! This false claim that vaccination has been the chief cause of the reduction in smallpox in modern times is further positively disproved by the flagrant fact that countries which are most extensively vaccinated have had the worst epidemics in modern times, such as the case of Japan cited on page 53; and that as a rule in all smallpox epidemics the great majority of cases always occur in well vaccinated subjects and the minority in unvaccinated subjects as officially acknowledged in the last epidemic in New York City in 1901 and 1902, cited on page 204.