But it was an emotional time, remember, and Roux, and the Congress of Buda-Pesth were not assembled to serve truth but to discuss and to plan and to celebrate the saving of lives. They cared little for figures then; they cared less for annoying objectors who carped about comparing figures; they were swept away by Roux’s report of how the serum cooled fevered brows. Then, Roux could have answered such annoying critics (with the applause of his famous audience): “What if twenty-six out of a hundred did die--you must remember that for years before this treatment _fifty_ out of a hundred died!” And yet--I, who believe in this antitoxin, I say this, twenty years after--diphtheria is a disease having strange ups and downs of viciousness. In some terrible decades it kills its sixty out of a hundred; then some mysterious thing happens and the virus seems to weaken and only ten children are taken where sixty died before. So it was, in those brave days of Roux and Behring, for in a certain hospital in England, in those very days, the death rate from diphtheria had gone down from forty in a hundred to twenty-nine in a hundred--before the serum was ever used! But the doctors at Buda-Pesth did not think of figures and they carried home the tidings of the antitoxin to all corners of the world, in a few years the antitoxin treatment of diphtheria became orthodox, and now there is not one doctor out of a thousand who will not swear that this antitoxin is a beautiful cure. Probably they are right. Indeed, there is evidence that when antitoxin is given on the first day of the disease, all but a few babies are saved--and if there is delay, many are lost.... Surely, any doctor should be called guilty, in the light of what is known, who did not give the antitoxin to a threatened child. I would be quick to call a doctor to give it to one of my own children. Why not, indeed? Perhaps the antitoxin cures. But it is not completely proved, and it is too late now to prove it one way or another to the hilt, because, since all the world believes in the antitoxin, no man can be found heartless enough or bold enough to do the experiment which science demands. Meanwhile the searchers, believing, are busy with other things--and I can only hope, if another wave of the dreadful diphtheria of the eighties sweeps over the world again, I can only hope that Roux was right.