Whilst Cobbett could not arrest the action of Parliament, he was short-sighted in considering that the proposed endowment of vaccination was merely a question of the loss of a few thousands a year. We are saddled with vaccination at this day, its costs and mischiefs, by reason of the vote for the National Vaccine Establishment in 1808. As soon as an annual subsidy is placed on the estimates, interests are created, which not only perpetuate themselves, but constantly tend to enlargement; and such interests, once created, can only be got rid of when proved useless by agitation out of doors and persistent pressure on the House of Commons. Referring to a notorious outbreak of smallpox among a vaccinated population at Ringwood in Hampshire, Cobbett continued-- I should like to have heard Mr. Rose’s statement of the circumstances at Ringwood, whence, he says, it is evident that the failure arose “from the use of _improper matter_.” That many persons, who had been inoculated with Cowpox, caught Smallpox and died at Ringwood, is a fact that even the Royal Jennerian Society cannot deny; and this being the case, what man in his senses will put any faith in the efficacy of Cowpox as a preventive of Smallpox? _The thing is done._ It _has failed_, and it is vain to endeavour to prop up its reputation; for, in a few years, it will become proverbial as humbug. A prophecy, it will be said, that has not been fulfilled. True: but in Cobbett’s time it advanced far to fulfilment. All the unqualified promises under which vaccination was brought into practice, were one by one surrendered under the compulsion of experience. The mass of the people remained unvaccinated; the zeal for vaccinating the poor abated; and the practice continued among the middle and upper classes on the humblest pretexts--as something that might hinder or mitigate smallpox, and in any case do little harm. We have to recollect that the mania for vaccination which now prevails is a revival of a prescription which our forefathers had tested and found wanting. Vaccination fell into neglect, not because there was indifference to smallpox, but because it did not prevent that disease. The excuse for the first failures of vaccination was, that spurious cowpox must have been employed--spurious cowpox being the artful invention of Jenner to cover disasters; artful, and yet absurd, for how could cowpox exist spuriously any more than smallpox? The precise fact, that spurious cowpox was the dodge of an unscrupulous quack was unknown to Cobbett, but he was sharp enough to recognise imposture, and thus wrote--