It is necessary to enter into these details if we would know what manner of people the Londoners were who suffered from smallpox, and what sort of place London was wherein they suffered. Londoners have been taken for the standard of 18th century smallpox, in forgetfulness of the fact that there did not then exist in England a town of a hundred thousand inhabitants--perhaps only two or three of fifty thousand; whilst the rural population bore a far larger proportion to the urban than is the case at this day. In so far as the sanitary conditions of Bristol, Norwich, or York resembled those of London, the analogy between them held good; but to convert the London rate of smallpox into the common rate of England, of Europe, and of the world, and to use the appalling result as a whip of terror wherewith to enforce universal inoculation, and afterwards vaccination, was sheer absurdity, if not something worse. Whilst smallpox was always present in London, its appearance in the country was irregular and usually epidemic. The Bills of Mortality of towns as large as Northampton were sometimes clear of smallpox for years. Sir Gilbert Blane, in his advocacy of Vaccination _versus_ Inoculation, said, that previous to the practice of inoculation there were many parts of the country where smallpox was unknown for periods of twenty, thirty, and even forty years. Mr. Connah, a surgeon of Seaford, Sussex, with a population of 700, informed Dr. Haygarth in 1782, that one person had died of smallpox in Seaford about eleven years before, and he could not ascertain that any other death from the disease had occurred subsequently; and that there was reason to believe that a like immunity prevailed throughout the smaller towns and villages of the southern counties. Wherever we inquire, we are driven to the conclusion that the prevalence and fatality of smallpox in the 18th century were grossly exaggerated by quacks and panicmongers. Nor should we forget in this connection how Professor Waterhouse, of Boston, an ardent inoculator, had to write in 1787-- I do not believe there is at present a single person infected by smallpox in all the four New England Governments; that is, not one in a million of people.