CHAPTER XXII.
WILLIAM COBBETT.
Everybody appeals to common-sense, but what is common-sense? It is a question difficult to answer; and yet, as I propose to show that Cobbett’s opposition to vaccination was justified by common-sense, I am bound to give some definition of the term.
Common-sense is reason as evolved from common experience. What the multitude of men have found to be true in the course of life, that is common-sense, which to question or resist is folly or fanaticism. This vulgar and vigorous rationality is often summoned to service where it has no vocation. For example, when it was first taught that the earth was a sphere and that its inhabitants had antipodes, the revelation was denounced as contrary to common-sense; but it is obvious that in such a case (which represents myriads) it was wrongly invoked; the form of the earth being at the time outside common cognisance. As soon, however, as it was realised by experience that the earth was spherical and inhabited in all its quarters, then its rotundity became incorporated in the constitution of common-sense.
The realm of common-sense I therefore hold to be limited by its origin in common experience, and in matters above or beyond that experience, its dicta are illegitimate, and synonyms for presumption and prejudice.
William Cobbett was essentially a man of common-sense. His power lay in his community with the experience and reason of his countrymen; and, like all of us, he had the defects of his virtue. He continually applied his vulgar judgment to the criticism of men and matters beyond the range of his competence, and the result was a luxuriance of arrogance and contempt for which at this day we must resort to Mr. Ruskin for a parallel.
Such being the case, we have to inquire, What was the worth of Cobbett’s opinion in the matter of vaccination? The attempt is sometimes made by vaccinators to withdraw their practice from popular discussion. They say it is a medical question for medical men; but the assertion provokes suspicion rather than confidence, for mystery is an invariable note of imposture. It is fair, I allow, to say of any abstruse knowledge that it can only be apprehended by those whose faculties are trained for its apprehension; but what is there abstruse about vaccination? With little trouble, everybody may know as much about it as anybody. It is the simplest of surgical operations. It is almost as easy as taking pills—instead of putting poison down the throat it is inserted into the skin. The operation may result in any number of pathological complications, but whether such complications be admitted or denied, what vaccination is prescribed for, namely, the prevention of smallpox, comes within the range of common observation. What, therefore, I have to answer is, that Cobbett’s common-sense was competent to deliver judgment upon vaccination.
Moreover, the circumstances of the time compelled an opinion: silence or neutrality was impossible. England was swarming with vaccinators. All the fussy folk who had a taste for doing much good at little cost were plying the cowpox lancet. Encouraged by Jenner, they got vaccine, inoculated a victim, and propagated the virus from arm to arm. Here I may let Cobbett speak for himself—
This nation is fond of quackery of all sorts; and this particular quackery having been sanctioned by King, Lords, and Commons, it spread over the country like a pestilence borne by the winds. Speedily sprang up the Royal Jennerian Institution, and branch institutions issuing from the parent trunk, set instantly to work, impregnating the veins of the rising generation with the beastly matter. Gentlemen and ladies made the commodity a pocket companion; and if a cottager’s child was seen by them on a common (in Hampshire at least) and did not quickly take to its heels, it was certain to carry off more or less of the disease of the cow. One would have thought that half the cows in the country had been tapped to get such a quantity of stuff.[180]
Nor was vaccination merely forced on Cobbett’s attention as a popular craze. He had to deal with it as a possible compulsory infliction. At a public meeting in 1803, Wilberforce and Dr. Clarke advocated the prohibition of smallpox inoculation and the enforcement of vaccination; and Cobbett, in a letter addressed to Wilberforce, rebuked the arbitrary project in a strain impressive and dignified as that of Burke himself. He wrote—
It seems there are prejudices against cowpox which it is necessary to destroy by force. That there are prejudices, and very strong ones too, I am ready to allow, but I cannot agree that these prejudices should be eradicated by force; nor is it perhaps fair to use the degrading term as expressive of the dislike which so large a portion of the community entertain to the practice you are so anxious to compel them to adopt. The charge of prejudice has been preferred but too often, and with but too fatal success against every one opposed to change. The truth is that whoever has been found to object to innovation, however wild in itself, however destructive in its consequences, has constantly been accused of prejudice; and as prejudice thus used implies a mixture of ignorance and perverseness, and as few persons are willing to be thought ignorant and perverse, the imputation is employed to coerce assent where reason hesitates.
He then aptly applied the repudiated recommendation of inoculation with smallpox as cause for hesitation in assenting to inoculation with cowpox—
There was, you must well remember, a strong and general objection, which for a long time prevailed, against Inoculation with Smallpox; and you cannot have forgotten that this objection was termed prejudice, and the persons entertaining it were regarded as illiterate, ignorant, or perverse; yet it now appears from the Address of your Royal Jennerian Society that it would have been well for the human race if the prejudices of those illiterate, ignorant, or perverse persons had universally obtained; for you now tell us that “Inoculation by spreading the contagion has considerably increased the mortality of Smallpox.” With an example like this before our eyes, Ought we not to be very cautious how we adopt your new system of Inoculation with Cowpox?
Then turning upon Wilberforce in his favourite character of constitutional Englishman, he proceeded—
Give me leave to ask you, Sir, how you reconcile a proposition to enforce this novel practice with the spirit of that Constitution of which you profess to be so great an admirer, and with that freedom of which you wish to be regarded as one of the principal supporters? What I am opposed to, and what I am alarmed at, is the proposition to obtain an Act of Parliament which would in its operation be nothing short of compulsion on every man to suffer the veins of his child to be impregnated with the disease of a beast—a measure to be adopted in no country where the people are not vassals or slaves.
Lastly came these remarks which at this day have force and application greater even than when written—
I like not this never-ending recurrence to Acts of Parliament. Something must be left, and something ought to be left, to the sense and reason and morality and religion of the people. There are a set of well-meaning men in this country, who would pass laws for the regulating and restraining of every feeling of the human breast, and every motion of the human frame: they would bind us down, hair by hair, as the Liliputians did Gulliver, till anon, when we awoke from our sleep, we should wonder by whom we had been enslaved. But I trust, Sir, that Parliament is not, and never will be, so far under the influence of these minute and meddling politicians as to be induced to pass laws for taking out of a man’s hands the management of his household, the choice of his physician, and the care of the health of his children; for, under this sort of domiciliary thraldom, to talk of the liberty of the country would be the most cruel mockery wherewith an humble and subjected people were ever insulted.[181]
Cobbett, be it observed, thus addressed Wilberforce in 1803, when vaccination was as yet imperfectly tested, and its advocates were in the full blast of enthusiastic persuasion that to be Jennerised was to be made proof against smallpox for ever. When Cobbett had again occasion to write about cowpox, six years had passed away, bearing with them the phantastic certainty with which vaccination had been imposed upon public credulity. Nevertheless the practice was not abandoned: quackery once alive and lucrative, dies hard: but it was discredited, and its apologists exercised their ingenuity in devising explanations and excuses for its manifest failures. The Royal Jennerian Society had split between Jenner and Walker, and application to Parliament was resolved upon for two purposes—first, to save Jenner from poverty; and second, to provide funds for the maintenance of vaccination, voluntary subscriptions having fallen off irretrievably. In short, vaccination had broken down, and the House of Commons was called upon to save it from extinction. There were wire-pullers in the House and out of the House who were compromised by their patronage of Jenner and his imposture, and they had the craft and the power to transfer the responsibility of which they were sick to the national exchequer. With this explanation, we shall understand the following article from the Register of 18th June, 1808. Cobbett wrote—
This experiment with Cowpox, which has cost the nation £30,000 to Dr. Jenner, is now, it seems, to have an Act of Parliament to give it currency. Mr. Rose has brought in a bill for the purpose of establishing a central institution in London for the distribution of Cowpox matter, which bill in all appearance will pass; and this disgusting and degrading remedy will cost the nation another £4,000 or £5,000 annually, though it has been clearly proved not to have answered the purpose intended. This, however, I regard as cheap when compared with the menace of Mr. Fuller, who, in the debate, proposed a compulsory law on the subject. He took up the old idea of Mr. Wilberforce, who was for a law to prevent parents from having their children inoculated with Smallpox unless they chose to send them to pest-houses, or to some place at a considerable distance from any other habitations. This cruel and tyrannical proposition I opposed at the time; and I am happy to perceive that it is now almost universally exploded.
Whilst Cobbett could not arrest the action of Parliament, he was short-sighted in considering that the proposed endowment of vaccination was merely a question of the loss of a few thousands a year. We are saddled with vaccination at this day, its costs and mischiefs, by reason of the vote for the National Vaccine Establishment in 1808. As soon as an annual subsidy is placed on the estimates, interests are created, which not only perpetuate themselves, but constantly tend to enlargement; and such interests, once created, can only be got rid of when proved useless by agitation out of doors and persistent pressure on the House of Commons.
Referring to a notorious outbreak of smallpox among a vaccinated population at Ringwood in Hampshire, Cobbett continued—
I should like to have heard Mr. Rose’s statement of the circumstances at Ringwood, whence, he says, it is evident that the failure arose “from the use of improper matter.” That many persons, who had been inoculated with Cowpox, caught Smallpox and died at Ringwood, is a fact that even the Royal Jennerian Society cannot deny; and this being the case, what man in his senses will put any faith in the efficacy of Cowpox as a preventive of Smallpox? The thing is done. It has failed, and it is vain to endeavour to prop up its reputation; for, in a few years, it will become proverbial as humbug.
A prophecy, it will be said, that has not been fulfilled. True: but in Cobbett’s time it advanced far to fulfilment. All the unqualified promises under which vaccination was brought into practice, were one by one surrendered under the compulsion of experience. The mass of the people remained unvaccinated; the zeal for vaccinating the poor abated; and the practice continued among the middle and upper classes on the humblest pretexts—as something that might hinder or mitigate smallpox, and in any case do little harm. We have to recollect that the mania for vaccination which now prevails is a revival of a prescription which our forefathers had tested and found wanting. Vaccination fell into neglect, not because there was indifference to smallpox, but because it did not prevent that disease.
The excuse for the first failures of vaccination was, that spurious cowpox must have been employed—spurious cowpox being the artful invention of Jenner to cover disasters; artful, and yet absurd, for how could cowpox exist spuriously any more than smallpox? The precise fact, that spurious cowpox was the dodge of an unscrupulous quack was unknown to Cobbett, but he was sharp enough to recognise imposture, and thus wrote—
The pretext of spurious matter is the weakest defence that ever was set up, because it is evident that such will always be an excuse. The Methodist pike who told his shoal of gudgeons that if they had faith, they might jump into a chalk pit without so much as spraining their ankles, answered all their reproaches with saying, that their broken bones were owing to their own sin in not having faith, and referred, for proof, to one among them who had accidentally escaped unhurt. All who catch Smallpox and die have been Cowpoxed with spurious matter, and all who have not yet caught Smallpox, after the Cowpox operation, have had the pure matter; and so it will be, to be sure, to the end of the chapter.
Who is to collect this genuine matter, and whence is it to come? Who shall tell whether he inoculate with Cowpox or King’s Evil? Or with many other disorders, one of which I will not name, but which I do hope, that fathers and mothers who have given their children that greatest of blessing, a pure stream of blood, will not forget when they are about to cause that blood to be impregnated with matter taken from the ulcerous bodies of others.
In this latter warning, we have to remark Cobbett’s prescience. He knew that it was impossible to transfer organic virus from arm-to-arm without transferring more than was intended, inclusive of the dreadful disease he indicated. Vaccinators naturally denied the possibility of such extra transmission; for if they had admitted the possibility, they must have ceased to vaccinate. M. Ricord has put the alternative plainly—
The obvious fact is, that if ever the transmission of this disease with vaccine lymph is clearly demonstrated, Vaccination must be altogether discontinued.
The clear demonstration demanded by M. Ricord has been abundantly supplied; and what at one time was conveniently considered questionable, is now openly confessed. Mr. Brudenell Carter, writing in the Medical Examiner, 24th May, 1877, testifies—
I think that syphilitic contamination by vaccine lymph is by no means an unusual occurrence, and that it is very generally overlooked because people do not know either when or where to look for it. I think that a large proportion of the cases of apparently inherited syphilis are in reality vaccinal; and that the syphilis in these cases does not show itself until the age of from eight to ten years, by which time the relation between cause and effect is apt to be lost sight of.
And we have Sir Thomas Watson’s memorable declaration in the Nineteenth Century, June, 1878—
I can readily sympathise with, and even applaud, a father who, with the presumed dread or misgiving in his mind, is willing to submit to multiplied judicial penalties rather than expose his child to the risk of an infection so ghastly.
Thus belated, thus after infinite mischief to the public health, the Nestor of Medicine appears and solemnly allows that the warning of William Cobbett, given seventy years before, was a true warning, and that worthy of praise are the wise parents who give it heed.
Cobbett, grateful for escape from compulsory vaccination, overlooked, I said, the danger perpetuated through the endowment of the practice. He was overjoyed at Canning’s emphatic declaration, that “he could not imagine any circumstances whatever that would induce him to follow up the most favourable report of the infallibility of vaccination with any measure for its compulsory infliction.” Hence he continued—
I am glad to perceive that the Ministry took care to intimate their decided hostility to any law for propagating Cowpox by force, by the aid of pains and penalties. This being the case, I care little about Mr. Rose and his Cowpox Institution. Those who choose to have their children impregnated from that shop, will be at liberty to do so; and those who wish to avoid it, may. This is all right; though it may be very foolish for Government to interfere in such a matter. I think we may thank the events at Ringwood for the ministerial protest against compulsory measures. It would have been curious enough to see people paying penalties for being so obstinate as not to consult their own health, or that of their children.
What Cobbett thought would be “curious enough” we witness daily. English liberty, if it has advanced in some directions, has gone back in others since Cobbett wrote. Parents are now haled before magistrates, fined and imprisoned, because (knowing that vaccination cannot avert smallpox, whilst it may seriously injure the health of their children, and even cost them their lives) they refuse to submit to the infliction. Never, perhaps, was there a more impious invasion of liberty than compulsory vaccination, and yet we have free and enlightened Englishmen who excuse and defend it! These are the Pharisees of Liberalism, blatant over tyranny, extinct or foreign, but dull to similar tyranny within their own domain. They garnish the sepulchres of the prophets of freedom, but (in their petty measure) repeat the deeds of those who persecuted and slew them.
Lastly, in the article from which I have been quoting, Cobbett assumed that the resort to the House of Commons for money was evidence that the enthusiasm for vaccination was abating. He wrote—
The present application to Parliament is a pretty good proof that Cowpox is beginning to be blowed upon. The Royal Jennerian Society wants funds. The subscribers have fallen off; and so application to the public purse has become necessary. Why have the subscribers fallen off? Their humanity has not waxed cold. It were slander, indeed, to suppose that. But I suspect that their faith has waxed cold; and when that is the case, zeal soon slackens its operations, more especially when these operations consist chiefly in the expenditure of money.
The fact was, that as vaccination failures multiplied, Jenner tried, more suo, to make a scape-goat of Walker, the Resident Inoculator of the Royal Jennerian Society. There was a dreadful row, and a secession of the better part of the members with Walker, who set up the London Vaccine Institution. Those who adhered to Jenner were not of the philanthropic and subscribing order, but they had political influence, and used it to get rid of their liabilities, first in obtaining a vote of £20,000 for Jenner, and second in the establishment of a National Vaccine Establishment with a subsidy of £3,000 a year.
So far Cobbett in his Register, where he had no occasion to discuss vaccination again; but toward the end of his life, 1829-30, he produced a series of papers entitled Advice to Young Men, in which he reiterated and enforced his protest against the Jennerian imposture—
I contend [he wrote] that the beastly application could not, in nature, be efficacious in preventing Smallpox, the truth of which assertion has now been proved in thousands upon thousands of instances. For a long time, for ten years, the contrary was boldly and brazenly asserted.... But Smallpox, in its worst form, broke out at Ringwood, and carried off, I believe (I have not the account at hand), more than a hundred persons, young and old, every one of whom had had the Cowpox “so nicely.” And what was then said? Was the quackery exploded? Not at all: the failure was imputed to unskilful operators: to the staleness of the matter: to its not being of the genuine quality. Admitting all this, the scheme stood condemned; for the great advantages held forth were, that anybody might perform the operation, and that the matter was everywhere abundant and cost free.
But these were paltry excuses: the mere shuffles of quackery; for what do we know now? Why, that in hundreds of instances, persons Cowpoxed by Jenner himself, have taken the real Smallpox afterwards, and have either died from the disorder or narrowly escaped with their lives! I will mention two instances. The first is Sir Richard Phillips, whose son, several years after Jenner had given him the insuring matter, had a very hard struggle for life, under the hands of the old-fashioned, seam-giving, and dimple-dipping Smallpox. The second is Philip Codd, Esq., of Rumstead Court, near Maidstone, whose son had a very narrow escape under the real Smallpox, and who also had been Cowpoxed by Jenner himself. Mr. Codd I have known, and have most sincerely respected, from the time of our both being eighteen years of age. When the young gentleman, his son, was very young, I, having him on my knee one day, asked his kind and excellent mother whether he had been inoculated. “Oh, no!” said she, “we are going to have him vaccinated.” Whereupon I, going into the garden to the father, said, “I do hope, Codd, that you are not going to have that beastly cow-stuff put into that fine boy.” “Why,” said he, “you see, Cobbett, it is to be done by Jenner himself.” What answer I gave, what names and epithets I bestowed upon Jenner and his quackery, I will leave the reader to imagine.
Now, here are instances enough; but every reader has heard of, if not seen, scores of others. Young Mr. Codd caught Smallpox at a school; and if I recollect rightly, there were several other vaccinated youths who did the same at the same time. Quackery, however, has always a shuffle left. Now that Cowpox has been proved to be no guarantee against Smallpox, it makes it milder when it comes! A pretty shuffle, indeed, this! You are to be all your life in fear of it, having as your sole consolation, that when it comes (and it may overtake you in a camp or on the seas) it will be milder! It was not too mild to kill at Ringwood, and its mildness, in the case of young Mr. Codd, did not restrain it from blinding him for a suitable number of days.
I shall not easily forget the alarm and anxiety of Mr. and Mrs. Codd on this occasion—both of them the best of parents, and both of them punished for having yielded to fashionable quackery. I will not say justly punished; for affection for their children, in which respect they were never surpassed by any parents on earth, was the cause of their listening to the danger-obviating quackery. This, too, is the case with other parents; but parents should be under the influence of reason and experience, as well as under that of affection; and now, at any rate, they ought to set this really dangerous quackery at naught.
Such was Cobbett’s case against vaccination, and I ask, Was he not justified in his opposition? He saw vaccination introduced to the world as an infallible preventive of smallpox, and he lived to see the claim gradually minimised until reduced to that of making smallpox milder! Even thus abated, he had to stigmatise the claim as a last shuffle of quackery. It is asserted to this day, that vaccination makes smallpox milder, but the pretence is exploded whenever we demand, How do you know? In any case, or in any number of cases of smallpox, Who can define the severity that has been reduced by vaccination? any more than if I were to assert that vaccination intensifies smallpox, it would be impossible to confute me. We can only meet unverifiable assertion with indifference or contempt. If it pleases people to believe in metempsychosis or the constitution of the moon in green cheese, the wise leave them to the enjoyment of their humour. On the other hand, I have to remark, that smallpox is a disease of wide range of intensity, from an ailment almost trivial to one invariably fatal; and this wide range of intensity was as characteristic of the disease before as since the introduction of vaccination. On what pretext then are mild cases of smallpox attributed to the influence of vaccination? There are mild and malignant cases of smallpox alike among the vaccinated and unvaccinated, and not unfrequently when the vaccinated and unvaccinated are found in approximate conditions, as in the same household, it is the unvaccinated who are most lightly afflicted, or who make the better recovery.
It often helps to a clearer apprehension of a position if we endeavour to conceive its opposite. We have seen Cobbett as an opponent of vaccination: let us try to think of him as its advocate. Suppose he had joined with the polite and educated mob in hailing Jenner as the saviour of mankind from smallpox, and assured the readers of the Register that they would be secure from the disease for ever if inoculated with cowpox—an easy and harmless operation. Then after a while imagine him reporting that he had been misled—that the operation was not so easy as represented, nor always so harmless. By and bye he would be the bearer of a more serious revelation. Some of the vaccinated, warranted secure, had taken smallpox, but such misadventures, he would explain, were due to the use of a wrong sort of cowpox, of which there was a spurious variety. But the suggestion of spurious cowpox creating alarm and discouragement of vaccination, it would be necessary for him to counteract the declaration with the avowal that by spurious cowpox was not meant spurious cowpox, but simply irregularities in the action of the genuine virus on the arms of the vaccinated. But even these excuses would be insufficient. It was not difficult to ascribe smallpox after vaccination to careless practice, or to virus that was not the right sort of cowpox; but when smallpox was found to occur in numerous instances after Jenner’s own vaccinations and those of the most accomplished practitioners, What was to be said? Why, what was said, that when vaccination did not prevent smallpox, it made it milder!
Imagine, if we can, Cobbett’s honest and vigorous intelligence retreating through this slush of apology and prevarication! Yet through such slush every follower of Jenner had to trudge.
I am not intent on setting Cobbett forth as a model of wisdom. I simply maintain that his common-sense was adequate to the judgment of vaccination, and that it was correctly exercised. Of physiology and hygiene he was as ignorant as his contemporaries; but if a lotion were sold to prevent toothache, and it did not prevent toothache, it would be safe to denounce its vendors as quacks, even though the vendors happened to be the Royal College of Physicians and the Royal College of Surgeons. The causes of disease were unconsidered in Cobbett’s days. It was not asked why people suffered from smallpox and other fevers, nor whether fevers were avoidable. Such maladies were accepted like bad weather, and encountered by medical dodges, or by charms like vaccination, the more irrational and nasty being taken for the more effective. Cobbett himself, if he did not believe in vaccination, believed in inoculation with smallpox. He had his children poxed in infancy, and when he argued against vaccination, it was in the confident possession of a surer prophylactic. Taking smallpox for a probable calamity that could only occur once in a lifetime, it seemed to him expedient to incur the disease when convenient, and to have done with the dread of it. How far he was mistaken in this course I need not stay to debate. Suffice it to say, that he thought he could make sure that smallpox was smallpox, whilst what cowpox might be none could tell, especially after transmission through arms and constitution unnumbered and unknown.
The causes of smallpox, I said, were unconsidered in Cobbett’s days. It never even entered into Jenner’s head that the disease might be a consequence of bad conditions of life; nor did he try to explain why the malady was on the decrease ere he appeared with his magical prescription. The decrease was claimed for vaccination, but it had set in before vaccination was heard of, and was continued among those who never received it. No sanitary improvements had been effected to account for the abatement of the disease. To what, then, was it due? I answer, in part at least, to a progressive change in the diet of the people—to the substitution of tea for malt liquors, and to the displacement of arid fare by potatoes. The food of city folk up to the close of last century was closely akin to that of men at sea, and their scorbutic habit of body was notorious—a habit that rendered acute or chronic whatever disorders they were subject to. The remedy came of inclination and necessity rather than of intention. Tea was instinctively preferred by women, and the dearness of provisions compelled resort to the potato, easily grown and grateful to the palate as a mitigant of the saltness of beef, bacon, and fish. If any are disposed to dispute the fact of this revolution in the popular dietary, they may be referred to Cobbett. He witnessed the change, and persistently denounced it. Tea-drinking was to him an abomination. It was a slatternly indulgence, costly to the poor, and innutritious. Potatoes were as detestable. They were trash as compared with bread; wasteful, dirty, and unfit to satisfy a man’s appetite. It is true that tea and potatoes are poor forms of food, but the one as a substitute for beer, and the other as an antiscorbutic, were eminently useful. It is not said that smallpox is caused or prevented by food, proper or improper, but that the character of food may predispose to disease, and intensify it; as is manifest on ship-board. Hence it is (in the absence of other adequate influences) that I am disposed to ascribe the abatement of smallpox which set in toward the close of last century to the better blood of the people ameliorated by that increased consumption of tea and potatoes, against which Cobbett so blindly and vainly testified.
A last word about Cobbett. His prejudices had nearly always a creditable root. He hated potatoes because they were strenuously recommended by Wilberforce and other good and goody people as cheap food for the poor. Cobbett’s contention was, that not cheap food, but political justice was the true remedy for popular misery. It was very nice of Wilberforce and his friends to be kind to the poor, but, said Cobbett, if they were first just, the poor might dispense with their kindness. If the poor had their own, they might have beer instead of tea, and bread and beef and bacon instead of potatoes, with much else besides. Cobbett was often enough in error, but behind all his perversities lay ardent good-will for the welfare of the greatest number of his countrymen; and the consideration now enjoyed by the working classes is largely due to his dauntless spirit and unwearied exertions in presence of what appeared at the time to be omnipotent opposition.