His appearance in the field put a new complexion on matters; it meant, indeed, that instead of the easy and comfortable walk over which I had anticipated, I must fight hard for my political existence.
In the course of my speech, which was very well received, for I was still popular in the town even among the more moderate of my opponents, I dwelt upon Sir Thomas Colford's address to the electorate which had just come into my hands.

In this address I was astonished to see a paragraph advocating, though in a somewhat guarded fashion, the re-enactment of the old laws of compulsory vaccination.

In a draft which had reached me two days before through some underground channel, this paragraph had not appeared, thus showing that it had been added by an afterthought and quite suddenly.

However, there it was, and I made great play with it.
What, I asked the electors of Dunchester, could they think of a man who in these modern and enlightened days sought to reimpose upon a free people the barbarous infamies of the Vaccination Acts?
Long ago we had fought that fight, and long ago we had relegated them to _limbo_, where, with such things as instruments of torment, papal bulls and writs of attainder, they remained to excite the wonder and the horror of our own and future generations.
Well would it have been for me if I had stopped here, but, led away by the subject and by the loud cheers that my treatment of it, purposely flamboyant, never failed to evoke, forgetful too for the moment of the Red-headed Man, I passed on to deductions.

Our opponents had prophesied, I said, that within ten years of the passing of the famous Conscience Clause smallpox would be rampant.