OUR SYDNEY LETTER.

Waikato Times, Volume XXXII, Issue 2612, 9 April 1889, Page 2

OUR SYDNEY LETTER.

Tim pressure of equally balanced parties is forcing the hand of the Government to an extent which must be very unpleasant and embarrassing. In the first place the Premier has discovered from the representations of Mr John Haynes, that the agricultural interest is in such deep distress that it is absolutely necessary that grants of seed wheat shall be made to the impoverished farmers. I wonder what the Premier would have said to such a proposition when he had his two-thirds majority behind him. All through the election campaign, too, it was the habit of his own party to represent agriculture as being in a prosperous condition through the beneficient operation of a so-called Freetrade policy. Circumstances, however, alter cases as well with Freetraders as with Protectionist.-. But if it was the fashion to represent agriculture as flourishing, much more was it the habit to condemu the taxing of the community tor the benefit of any distressed industry. The step which the Government are now taking is a virtual surrender of their Freetrade position. They tax the public to buy seed wheat for the farmers. Had they protected agriculture by a reasonable tariff such as is imposed by nearly every civilised state in the world, there would be 110 need for almsgiving. By their present action they state now that they have no objection to tax the community for the benefit of a class. The only stipulation they make is that it shall be done in the way of pauperisation, and not as a measure of sound common sense administration. On the pauperisation question the farmers themselves have not quite made up their minds. If they can obtain the seed wheat without any sacrifice of dignity they will gladly go for it. But if it involves any surrender of that feeling of an honest man which glories m the consciousness of paying twenty shillings in the pound, they are not at ail certain whether they will accept it. They want to find out how to receive a dole, and yet maintain the erect and independent position of people who don't require it. This is a problem which, I imagine, they will find tolerably hard to solve Another concession made to the situation of parties is Mr Brunker's mission to the west, avowedly for the purpose of finding out sufficient of the position of Crown leaseholders to justify him in bringing in a measure which shall catch their votes. This ought not to be so very difficult. But whether the measure aforesaid will also catch the votes of those members who have some regard for the public interests in the matter is more than doubtful. My remarks on vaccination in last week's letter have elicited a medical defence of the practice. Dr. Thane, in tlia Yass Tribnnc, cavils at my authority, which, as I said before", is the last edition of the Encyclopaedia Grittanica. No expense haa been spared to render that publication a worthy exponent of the latest science of the day, and willi all due deference to the worthy doctor I prefer to believe it rather than accept the objections which he urges from evidently interested motives. One reason why Ido this the more gladly is because the one statement appears in accordance with reason, the other does not. What sober-minded man would expect anything but disease from the wholesale dissemination of disease ? What is euphemistically termed vaccination is m reality cow-pox. Had it always been known under its true name 1 question whether it would have over imposed on the credulity of the civilised world. Cow-pox itself is a bestial disease, and as such it does not commend itself very strongly to men and women of unperverted tastes. But worse than this people can't get even their cow-pox pure and unadulterated. Iu its passage through the b (vine or human constitutions from which thb virus is collected it gathers all the iuoculablo tamts with which it conies in contact. When your children are being "vaccinated," Auglice " cowpoxed," as a preventative against smallpox, they may at the same time be getting erysipelas or syphilis. They may get a disease that shall shorten their lives or make them a misery ; they may get one that shall make short work upon them. They may get_ a blood poisoning that shall cause their bodies to swell up and turn black before your very eyes. They may get one that shall make them dwindle and pine away. Only one thins; they can't possibly get, and that is health.

All these otli n- contingencies, be it noted, as well as the injection of the poison itself, will bring more or less grist to the medical mill. I don't believe that many of the innumerable medical advocates of vaccination are so ntterably lost t« human feelintr as to keep this fact i-onstantly before their eyes. But it is a fact, nevertheless, and it is one which honest legislators and wise parents cannot afford to ignore. Mobbos, that quaint old philosopher, says that if it were more advantageous to the human race for 2 and 2 to make 5 than that they should make -t, 2 and 2 would make and no person who was interested would have the slightest doubt about it. x\.nd we may be certain that the interested persons a foresaid would give a "long rope and a short shrift" to anyone who was so impiously daring as to suggest a doubt.

What doctors really think and know of the practice, would be soon ascertained if they were asked to make themselves responsible for the results. Every vaccination or inoculation is a blind experiment, and to the conscientious doctor or parent is a source of grave anxiety until it has run its course. What the epidemiology is now telling us is, that the source of all 'this anxiety is useless, nay, more, that it is possibly fatal and always dangerous, and that it does not sceutc the protection which is hoped for.

Finally, Dr Thane tells his readers that it is purely a question of statistics. Is it a question of statistics to the parents of the children who have lost their lives or their health, and who may or may not figure in the statistics'! Statistics are curious things, and can be made to prove anything according to the temper of the people who coinpile them. One " authoiity," for instance, in his desire to show that the mortality from small-pox was greater among unvaccmated patients than aimmg the vaccinated arrived at tho astounding conclusion that smallpox is three or four times more fatal in this aga than it was before vaccination was heard of. He arrived at this result by the short and easy method of counting as unvaccinated all those deceased persons about who:e vaccination any shadow of doubt could be raised. The figures still stand a confession of self-stultified falsification. Another zealous statistician of the same persuasion admitted that m his desin> to save vaccination from reproach lie had been in tho habit of returning deaths from erysipelas after vaccination as deaths from erysipelas only, Stili in spite of these disturbing forces the statist cs reveal enough to justify tho growing distrust of the practice, and there can be little doubt that days of compulsion in other colonies aro rapidly drawing to a close. In New South Wales I don't believe they will ever begin. The true preventative of smallpox, as of all other zymotic diseuses, is to be found in sanitation.