So that the table shows that since 1880 in Great Britain the deaths from smallpox per million per year have declined until they are only about 1/14th of their original number. The natural inference from these figures, viewed in the light of the history of smallpox in Great Britain, is that compulsory vaccination has been steadily eradicating the disease; but this is not Mr. Coleridge's conclusion: He says it is due to the large number of persons who have refused to be vaccinated! This would be laughable if it were not really serious; it is sad and serious that a man of Mr. Coleridge's education and social position should so consistently mislead the uncritical readers of the Contemporary Review to whose pages he has unfortunately very free access. If Mr. Coleridge really believes these things he is either very stupid or very ignorant; if he knows them to be otherwise, but wilfully deceives the public, he is immoral. He suffers from the worst form of bias, the anti-scientific. {the end of long footnote} There is still that group of persons who object to everything--anti-vivisection, anti-meat eating, anti-breakfast, anti-hats and of course also anti-vaccination. They are anti the usual and the normal that are quite good enough for the most of people. They generally also believe that the earth is flat; they are past praying for, all we can do with them is to look them, like the difficulty of Jonah and the whale, "full in the face and pass on." Many people at the present time allow themselves to be persuaded into being anti-vaccinators because neither they nor their deluders have ever known what an epidemic of smallpox is, have never seen with their own eyes the awful spectacle of a person suffering from smallpox in any of its forms--discrete, confluent or hemorrhagic. Thanks to this very Jenner, the world has now for 100 years been almost free from epidemic, virulent smallpox and most perfectly so in the vaccinated countries, so that millions, the majority, of Englishmen, have never seen a case of smallpox at all. Not knowing the awful danger they have escaped, through Great Britain having had compulsory vaccination since 1853, they have become lax in their belief in the necessity for the continuance of that precaution. "They jest at scars that never felt a wound." Towns such as Gloucester in England, in which a large number of children have been allowed to grow up unvaccinated, have always been visited sooner or later by a serious outbreak of smallpox. It must be so; the laws of natural phenomena can not be changed to suit the taste of those persons who are mentally incapable of understanding them. They can not be evaded; ignorance of the law is no more an excuse in the realm of natural than of man-made law.