unconnected with cows or Jenner) which, as they are continually reminded
by energetic anti-inoculation propagandists in largely circulated
journals and pamphlets, not to mention ghastly photographs of disfigured
children, sometimes produce worse effects than the diseases they are
supposed to prevent. Indifferent or careless recruits are easily induced
to submit to inoculation by little privileges during the ensuing
indisposition or by small money bribes; and careful ones are
proselytized by Sir Almroth's statistics; but on the whole both
inoculation and amateur medical statistics are regarded with suspicion
by the poor; and the fact that revaccination is compulsory in the
regular army, and that the moral pressure applied to secure both typhoid
inoculation and vaccination both in the regular army and the
Territorials is such as only a few stalwarts are able to resist, is
deeply resented. At present the inoculation mania has reached the pitch
of proposing no less than four separate inoculations: revaccination,
typhoid, cholera, and--Sir Almroth's last staggerer--inoculation against
wounds! When the War Office and its medical advisers have been
successfully inoculated against political lunacy, it will be time enough
to discuss such extravagances. Meanwhile, the sooner the War Office
issues a proclamation that no recruit will be either compelled or
importuned to submit to any sort of inoculation whatever against his
will, the better for the recruiting, and the worse for the enemy.


*The War Office Bait of Starvation.*

But this blunder was a joke compared to the next exploit of the War
Office. It suddenly began to placard the country with frantic assurances
to its five-thousand-a-year friends that they would be "discharged with
all possible speed THE MINUTE THE WAR IS OVER." Only considerations of