Nor was vaccination merely forced on Cobbett’s attention as a popular craze. He had to deal with it as a possible compulsory infliction. At a public meeting in 1803, Wilberforce and Dr. Clarke advocated the prohibition of smallpox inoculation and the enforcement of vaccination; and Cobbett, in a letter addressed to Wilberforce, rebuked the arbitrary project in a strain impressive and dignified as that of Burke himself. He wrote-- It seems there are prejudices against cowpox which it is necessary to destroy by force. That there are prejudices, and very strong ones too, I am ready to allow, but I cannot agree that these prejudices should be eradicated by force; nor is it perhaps fair to use the degrading term as expressive of the dislike which so large a portion of the community entertain to the practice you are so anxious to compel them to adopt. The charge of prejudice has been preferred but too often, and with but too fatal success against every one opposed to change. The truth is that whoever has been found to object to innovation, however wild in itself, however destructive in its consequences, has constantly been accused of prejudice; and as prejudice thus used implies a mixture of _ignorance_ and _perverseness_, and as few persons are willing to be thought ignorant and perverse, the imputation is employed to coerce assent where reason hesitates. He then aptly applied the repudiated recommendation of inoculation with smallpox as cause for hesitation in assenting to inoculation with cowpox-- There was, you must well remember, a strong and general objection, which for a long time prevailed, against Inoculation with Smallpox; and you cannot have forgotten that this objection was termed _prejudice_, and the persons entertaining it were regarded as _illiterate_, _ignorant_, or _perverse_; yet it now appears from the Address of your Royal Jennerian Society that it would have been well for the human race if the prejudices of those illiterate, ignorant, or perverse persons had universally obtained; for you now tell us that “Inoculation by spreading the contagion has considerably increased the mortality of Smallpox.” With an example like this before our eyes, Ought we not to be very cautious how we adopt your new system of Inoculation with Cowpox? Then turning upon Wilberforce in his favourite character of constitutional Englishman, he proceeded--