Whether or not, in face of the accumulated evidence of the importance 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.