The resistance to Vaccination was almost entirely confined to the resistance of inoculators, who were too deeply compromised by their own disloyalty to Nature, to make effective resistance. They were steadily borne down by the vaccinators, many of whom had been energetic inoculators, and displayed the usual ardour of apostates in condemning what they had formerly approved. Indeed, when we consider how Inoculation was commended for its efficiency and harmlessness by the same medical authorities who, within a year or two after Jenner’s appearance, denounced the practice for its difficulties and dangers, their tergiversation appears little short of shameless. Dr. Lettsom had been an inoculator, yet on 2nd July, 1805, he felt warranted in writing-- What have not the abettors of Variolous Inoculation to answer for? To shoot a dozen or two innocent people in the public streets of London would not be half so injurious as allowing the murderers to kill the rising generation, the future hope of the State. Nothing can show the supineness and ignorance of the Government more than legalising these Variolous Murders. How far the conquest of the inoculators by the vaccinators had advanced, appeared in a debate in the House of Commons in 1806, when Wilberforce urged that Inoculation should be suppressed, or at least that those who insisted on Inoculation should be compelled to place their patients in quarantine. Mr. Windham admitted the scandal of wretched and miserable subjects of Inoculation being carried about in the streets, but he hesitated to recommend coercive legislation until persuasion had been fully tried and had failed. Dr. Matthews, M.P. for Hereford, took occasion at the same time to run with the hounds. Inoculation, he said, was a frequent cause of disfigurement and of death in its most awful form; it was a magazine of the most dreadful evils; a magnifier of mortality; and a means of introducing scrofula, a more dangerous and pernicious disorder than smallpox itself--facts which it would have been more creditable to have proclaimed when Inoculation was in fashion. It is so easy to kick when a foe has fallen, and where all are kicking. Human nature is never so despicable as when thus engaged. The question of restraining Inoculation came again before the House of Commons in 1807, when the practice of inoculating out-patients at the London dispensaries and hospitals was energetically condemned. “I think that the legislature,” said Mr. Sturges Bourne, “would be as much justified in taking a measure to prevent this evil by restraint, as a man would be in snatching a fire-brand out of the hands of a maniac just as he was going to set fire to a city.” No one was more eager to suppress Inoculation by force than Jenner himself, and in July 1807, he sought an interview with the Premier for the purpose. In a letter to Dr. Lettsom he thus describes his mortification--