WCP1416

Letter (WCP1416.1195)

[1]

Copy1

Parkstone, Dorset.

Septr. 27th. 1900

To <Arthur Acland Allen>2

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Dear Sir

I have duly received your Election Address for the district in which I am a voter.

I hold, strongly, that personal liberty and the sanctity of a man's home and family, are the most important of all political questions.

I cannot therefore give my vote to any candidate who will not do all in his power to abolish the Compulsory Vaccination Laws.

I have myself studied this subject for more than 20 years, and Chapter XVIII. of my book — "The Wonderful Century"3 I have [2] demonstrated, from official facts and figures the absolute uselessness of vaccination as a preventive of Small-pox. But it is admittedly a cause of much suffering and many deaths annually, and is also the means of spreading many terrible diseases.

I submit, therefore, that, without a careful study of the evidence which I myself and others have published, no legislator is justified in enforcing, at the public expense, on unwilling, or even on willing, parents, a medical dogma — especially as the [3] whole history of medicine is a continuous record of blunders and disasters.

Believe me | yours very truly | Alfred R. Wallace [signature]

In ARW’s hand.
Allen, Arthur Acland (1868-1939). British Liberal Party politician.
Wallace, A. R. 1898. The wonderful century; its successes and its failures. London: Swan Sonnenschein & Co. and New York: Dodd, Mead & Co. and Toronto: George N. Morang.

Please cite as “WCP1416,” in Beccaloni, G. W. (ed.), Ɛpsilon: The Alfred Russel Wallace Collection accessed on 5 June 2025, https://epsilon.ac.uk/view/wallace/letters/WCP1416