To return to the Majority Report. Its references to Leicester are scattered over 80 pages, referring separately to the hospital staff, and the relations of vaccinated and unvaccinated to small-pox; while in only a few paragraphs (par. 480-486) do they deal with the main question and the results of the system of isolation adopted. These results they endeavour to minimise by declaring that the disease was remarkably “slight in its fatality,” yet they end by admitting that “the experience of Leicester affords cogent evidence that the vigilant and prompt application of isolation ... is a most powerful agent in limiting the spread of small-pox.” A little further on (par. 500) they say, when discussing this very point—how far sanitation may be relied on in place of vaccination—“The experiment has never been tried.” Surely a town of 180,000 inhabitants which has neglected vaccination for twenty years, is an experiment. But a little further on we see the reason of this refusal to consider Leicester a test experiment. Par. 502 begins thus: “The question we are now discussing must, of course, be argued on the hypothesis that vaccination affords protection against small-pox.” What an amazing basis of argument for a Commission supposed to be enquiring into this very point! They then continue: “Who can possibly say that if the disease once entered a town the population of which was entirely or almost entirely unprotected, it would not spread with a rapidity of which we have in recent times had no experience?” But Leicester _is_ such a town. Its infants—the class which always suffers in the largest numbers—are almost wholly unvaccinated, and the great majority of its adults have, according to the bulk of the medical supporters of vaccination, long outgrown the benefits, if any, of infant-vaccination. The disease has been introduced into the town twenty times before 1884, and twelve times during the last epidemic (_Final Report_, par. 482 and 483). The doctors have been asserting for years that once small-pox comes to Leicester it will run through the town like wild-fire. But instead of that it has been quelled with far less loss than in any of the best vaccinated towns in England. But the Commissioners ignore _this_ actual experiment, and soar into the regions of conjecture with, “Who can possibly say?”—concluding the paragraph with—“_A priori_ reasoning on such a question is of little or no value.” Very true. But _a posteriori_ reasoning, from the cases of Leicester, Birmingham, Warrington, Dewsbury, and Gloucester, _is_ of value; but it is of value as showing the utter uselessness of vaccination, and it is therefore, perhaps, wise for the professional upholders of vaccination to ignore it. But surely it is _not_ wise for a presumably impartial Commission to ignore it as it is ignored in this Report.[14] THE ARMY AND NAVY AS A CONCLUSIVE TEST