Indeed, such a thing was hardly known as that an unvaccinated person coming into immediate contact with a smallpox patient after the eruption had appeared, should escape infection.
What did this mean?
It meant that within a few days Jane, my only and darling child, the very hope and centre of my life, would be in the fangs of one of the most dreadful and dangerous diseases known to humanity.

More, having never been vaccinated, that disease was sure to strike her with its full force, and the type of it which had appeared in the city was such that certainly not more than one-half of the unprotected persons attacked came alive out of the struggle.
This was bad enough, but there were other things behind.

I had never been vaccinated since infancy, over fifty years ago, and was therefore practically unprotected with the enemy that all my lifetime I had dreaded, as I dreaded no other thing or imagination, actually standing at my door.

I could not go away because of the election; I dared not show fear, because they would cry: "Look at the hangman when he sees the rope." Here, since compulsory vaccination had been abandoned, we fought smallpox by a system of isolation so rigorous that under its cruel provisions every one of whatever age, rank or sex in whom the disease declared itself was instantly removed to a hospital, while the inhabitants of the house whence the patient came were kept practically in prison, not being allowed to mix with their fellows.

We had returned to the preventive measures of centuries ago, much as they were practised in the time of the Great Plague.
But how could I send my daughter to one of those dreadful pest-pits, there at the moment of struggle to be a standing advertisement of the utter failure and falsity of the system I had preached, backing my statements with the wager of her life?
Moreover, to do so would be to doom myself to defeat at the poll, since under our byelaws, which were almost ferocious in their severity, I could no longer appear in public to prosecute my canvass, and, if my personal influence was withdrawn, then most certainly my adversary would win.
Oh, truly I who had sown bounteously was reaping bounteously.