This brief exposition of medical and official misstatements of facts and figures, always in favour of vaccination, might have been largely increased, but it is already sufficient to demonstrate the position I take, which is, that in this matter of Official and Compulsory Vaccination, both doctors and Government officials, however highly placed, however eminent, however honourable, are yet utterly untrustworthy. Beginning in the early years of the century, and continuing to our own times, we find the most gross and palpable blunders in figures—but always on the side of vaccination—and, on the testimony of medical men themselves, a more or less continuous perversion of the official records of vaccinal injury “in order to save vaccination from reproach.” Let this always be remembered in any discussion of the question. The facts and figures of the medical profession, and of Government officials, in regard to the question of vaccination, _must never be accepted without verification_. And when we consider that these misstatements, and concealments, and denials of injury, have been going on throughout the whole of the century; that penal legislation has been founded on them; that homes of the poor have been broken up; that thousands have been harried by police and magistrates, have been imprisoned and treated in every way as felons; and that, at the rate now officially admitted, a thousand children have been certainly killed by vaccination during the last twenty years, and an unknown but probably much larger number injured for life, we are driven to the conclusion that those responsible for these reckless misstatements and their terrible results have, thoughtlessly and ignorantly but none the less certainly, been guilty of a crime against liberty, against health, and against humanity, which will, before many years have passed, be universally held to be one of the foulest blots on the civilization of the nineteenth century.[4] CHAPTER II MUCH OF THE EVIDENCE ADDUCED FOR VACCINATION IS WORTHLESS We will now proceed to discuss the alleged value of vaccination by means of the best and widest statistical evidence at our command; and in doing so we shall be able to show that the medical experts, who have been trusted by the Government and by the general public, are no less deficient in their power of drawing accurate conclusions from the official statistics of vaccination and small-pox mortality than they have been shown to be in their capacity for recording facts and quoting figures with precision and correctness.