OUR SYDNEY LETTER.

Gisborne Standard and Cook County Gazette, Volume II, Issue 284, 9 April 1889, Page 3

OUR SYDNEY LETTER.

(from oub own cobbespondekt.’) Sydney, March 27.

The pressure of equally balanced parties is forcing the hands 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 party to represent agriculture as being In a prosperous condition through the beneficent operation of a so-called Freetrade policy. Circumstances, however, alter cases, as well with Freetraders as with Protectionists.

But if it was the fashion to represent agriculture as flourishing, much more was it the habit to condemn the taxing of the community for 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 crvrhsed state in the world, there would be no 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 glorias in the consciousness of paying twenty shilling! in the pound, they are not at all certain whether they will accept it, They want to find oub how to receive a dole, and yet maintain the erect and independent position of people who don t require it, Th s is a problem which, I imagine, they will find it 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 fiqdmg out sufficient of the position of Crown leaseholders to justify him in bringing in a measure which shall catch their votes. Th s ought not to be so very difficult. But whether the measure aforesaid will also oatoh the votes of those member! who have some regard for the public Interests m the matter is more than doubtful. For the best part of two years the Premier and his majority were grappling with this question, and at last they threw it aside,, Dun* dreary fashion, as one of the things that no fellah can understand," Mr Garrett, the then Minister for Lande, was admittediy one of the best, perhaps the very best authority on the subject in the Colony, Mr Brunker, the present Minister, as every one knows, is a thorough novice, and in his speeches on the subleot has made the public well aware of this disquieting fact. He trusts no doubt in some eudaen illumination of genius to enable him to extricate himself from the difficult task, He is in the position of that famous Irishman who, when he was asked whether ha could play the violin, said l‘Faith, I don't know, but I’ll try." Mr Brunker don't know, but he likewise will try. What the result will be, time alone can tell, but we can at least form some idea of its general character. Besides the farmers and the squatters, the unemployed also are putting in tbeir claim for the assistance of the Government, and the Minister for Works is lending the mighty force of his gigantic intellect to grapple with the problem. This means that public money is to be spent in works that are proceeded with, not so much because they are needed, ae because they will employ labor. It is an indelible brand of disgrace on previous administrations that in a magnificent country like this, there should be any large body of deserving unemployed at any time. It point! to the necessity tor an entire change of policy. The course which is at present being adopted is at best a miserable palliative, calculated in the long run to intensify the evil with which it deals. My remarks on vaccination in last week’s letter have elicited a medical defence of the practice. Dr Thane, jn the Yacs Tribune, cavfls at my authority, which, as I said before, is the last edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica. No expense has been spared to render that publication a worthy exponent of the latest science of the day, and with all due deference to the worthy doctor I prefer to believe it rather than accept the objections which he urges from evidently interested sources. 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 1 What is euphemistically termed vaccination is in reality cow pox. Had it always been known under its true name I question whether it would have ever imposed on the credulity of the civilised world. Cowpox itself is a bestial disease, and as such it does commend itself very strongly to men and women of unperverted tastes. But worse than this, people can't even get their cowpox pure and unadulterated. In its passage through the bovine or human constitutions from which the virus is collected it gatheis all the inooulable taints with which it comes in contact. When your children are being “ vaccinated,” Angliee “ oowpoxed,” as a preventative against smallpox, they may at the same time be getting erysipelas or syphilis. They may get a disease that shall shorten tbeir lives or make them a misery ; they may get one that will make short work of 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 ehall make them dwindle and pine away. Only one thing they can’t possibly get, and that is health, Al! these other contingencies, be it noted, as well as ths 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 advocate! of vaccination are io utterly lost to human feeling as to keep this fact consciously before their eyes. But it is a fact, nevertheless, and it is one which honest legislators and wise parents cannot afford to ignore, Hohbes, that quaint old philosopher, says that if it were more advantageous to the human race for 2 and 2 to make 5 than they should make 4,2 and 2 would make 5, and no person who was interested would have the slightest doubt about it. And we may be certain that the interested persons aforesaid 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 icon ascertained if they were asked to make themselves responsib’e 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 secure the protection which is hoped for. Finally, Dr Thane tells his reads; g that it is purely a question of statistics, la it a question of statistics to the parents of ths 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 compile them. One “ authority,"'for instance, in his desire to show that the mortality from smallpox was greater among unvacoinated patients than among the vaccinated, arrived at the astounding conclusion that smallpox is three or lour times more fatal in this age than it was be-

tore vaccination was beard of. He arrived at this result by the short and easy method of counting as unvacoinated all those deceased persons about whose vaccination any shadow of doubt could be raised. The figures still stand, a confession of sell stultified falsification. Another zealous statistician of ths same persuasion admitted that in his desire to save vaccination from reproach, he had been in the habit of returning deaths from erysipelas after VaCtjlnallon gs tleqihs from erysipelas

Still in spite of these disturbing forces, the statistics reveal enough to justify thegrowing distrust of the practice, and there can be little doubt that days of compulsion in other colonies are 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 diseases, is to be found in sanitation.