Our quarantine regulations are extremely strict, and rightly so, on the subject of smallpox; but is it not a farce to take so much trouble about the health of our immigrants when inside the city we are all the time encouraging a high degree of receptivity towards this very disease? I should call this a very clear case of straining at the international gnat and swallowing the municipal camel. The community at present is at the mercy of its least instructed members. A most sensible suggestion is that if an outbreak of smallpox occurs in Halifax, the cost of it should be borne by the unvaccinated and by the anti-vaccinators. The fact is we have forgotten what smallpox is like. In 1796 before Jennerian vaccination, the death-rate from smallpox in England was 18.5 per cent. of deaths from all causes; in London between 1838 and 1869 it was 1.4 per cent., while in 1871--the worst year for smallpox since vaccination became compulsory--the deaths from smallpox were barely 4.5 per cent. of deaths from all causes, a proportion which was exceeded 93 times in the eighteenth century. At the present moment the deaths from smallpox in London constitute a little under 0.24 per cent. of deaths from all causes, or 77 times less than in pre-Jennerian times. According to MacVail, in the pre-vaccination period smallpox was nine times as fatal as measles and seven and one half times as fatal as whooping cough. To-day in the vaccinated community its fatality is negligable, in the unvaccinated it is as high as it was in the Middle Ages. In the city of Berlin, where vaccination is absolutely compulsory, there is no smallpox hospital at all; the cases of smallpox in that city being only a few unvaccinated foreigners. In 1912 the deaths in New York City were as follow: 671 from measles, 614 from scarlatina, 500 from typhoid fever, 187 from whooping cough and 2 from smallpox. In London there were in 48 years of the seventeenth century no less than 10 epidemics of smallpox; in the whole of the eighteenth, 19; and in the nineteenth no epidemic at all during which smallpox was responsible for more than one tenth of the deaths from all causes in any one year. In Sweden, the highest death-rate before vaccination was 7.23 per 1,000 persons, the lowest 0.30; under permissive vaccination the highest was 2.57, the lowest 0.12; under compulsory vaccination the highest was 0.94, the lowest 0.0005.