Whether or not, in face of the accumulated evidence of the import - ance of vaccination to children, who cannot judge for themselves of its value, it may be expedient to relax those provisions of the Compulsory Vaccination Acts which allow of repeated penalties on such parents as refuse vaccination, is a question which lies within the province of the statesman rather than the physician to settle. To the physician, who realises the powers of vaccination, and who knows the malignity of the disease against which it protects, the notion of enforcing the acceptance of such a boon is distressful. But the distress is akin to that with which he himself has at times to force nourishment down the throat of a lunatic who is starving himself; and in the case of vaccination he sees that it is for the security of children otherwise helpless, not the recalcitrant himself, that compulsion is wanted.

In England, however, ‘compulsory vaccination’ has never meant, and probably never will mean, taking a child out of the custody of its parent and returning it to him vaccinated; and if it does not mean this it may by some persons be judged advantageous, in order to avoid gratifying the sheer love of martyrdom that influences the conduct of misguided people, to alter the Compulsory Vaccination Acts in such a way as to limit the number of penalties that can be imposed for disobedience to them. I express no opinion on this proposal, but if it should be adopted it would appear as a corollary that the Acts be so further altered as to mark by law the sense of the community that a parent will have committed an offence whose child dies of small-pox without having been vaccinated […] Such parents will have failed to give the security that the law provides for their helpless children, and will be in the same position as if they had failed to provide their children with any other security important to their lives.