["Professor Newman on Bingley Justice." The Vaccination Inquirer, December 1879.]

        Mr. W. Ferrand appears to be a magistrate of most arbitrary temper. Sitting on the Bingley bench on 29th October, he sentenced Levi Phillips, Jonathan Wood, Edward Johnson, Brown Lee, and Benjamin Johnson to fines of 20s. and costs, or fourteen days imprisonment, and would hear not a word in their defence. In one case he added "with hard labour," but the clerk pointed out that such extra malice was beyond his discretion. Edward and Benjamin Johnson and Brown Lee elected to go to prison rather than pay their fines; and on Brown Lee's release on 11th Nov. he was met at Bingley station by a torchlight procession, and conducted in triumph in a carriage to the Oddfellows' Hall where an enthusiastic anti-vaccination meeting was held. The following letter from Professor Newman was read—

Weston-super-Mare,
November 7/79

        To Mr. George Kidson.

    Sir,

        You send me a copy of the Keighley Herald of October 31, 1879, with a column marked, and you desire from me some comments on the conduct of the magistrates towards persons who refuse to allow their infants to be vaccinated. Of course I am forced to assume the newspaper report to be correct. Any remarks of mine may be superfluous or injurious if I proceed on an erroneous representation of the magistrates' conduct. But if the representations are correct as matter of fact, I lift up my voice as an Englishman in vehement indignation. Not in surprise, for other magistrates elsewhere, alas! are equally unjust, equally stupid, equally bent on holding up the Bench to reprobation and contempt. One clause of the Act most distinctly gives to the magistrates discretionary power threefold. The magistrates are told what they may do, and what they must do. They are allowed, even after they have summoned a father and he has appeared before them, to dismiss the case if there be reasonable excuse. It is for them to judge what is reasonable, and they cannot do so without having the parent's reasons. The chairman at the Bingley petty sessions hectors against and browbeats honest men, and says he is in fact refusing to do what the law implies, viz., to hear the men whom he has evidently made up his mind to punish. He even threatens hard labour, and has to be reminded by the clerk that he is uttering an illegal threat. Men in a little brief power are free to scold and threaten; and we of the commonalty must be silent in court. But we will not be silent out of court. Lord Clarendon, in his history of the uprising of the nation against Charles I. (which cost that king his head), lays stress on the great mischief done by the judges declaring in the matter of ship money that to be lawful which all men of common sense knew to be unlawful. I and you can understand a paragraph of an Act of Parliament (when it happens to be good English) as well as a magistrate or his clerk; and we know that the Act does not compel a magistrate to be haughty, overbearing, unreasonable, unrighteous, and tyrannical, as the report of the Keighley Herald represents Mr. W. Ferrand to be, but only permits him to act, and approves of his listening to reason. The magistrates, by their violent and fanatical use of power, will damage their whole class irretrievably. I account it execrable tyranny if a magistrate do not regard it as a reasonable excuse to give (against the filthy practice falsely called vaccination) that the parent has already had one child killed by, or made permanently ill by it, or has seen other children so damaged, ruined, or killed. The doctors infamously, for some twenty years, denied what they now confess, that their vile process of arm-to-arm mixing of blood may and does communicate disease. Their error and false confidence misled Parliament. The magistrates are bound to know this, and in all common sense and humanity (if they have any spark of either) ought to sympathize with parents who are bound before God in the court of conscience to shield their infants, and they ought rather to resign their office as magistrates if cruelty and injustice were commanded. The least we can demand of them is to use to the utmost their legal power of leaving faithful parents unmolested. I beg to congratulate the faithful parents on their sturdy refusal to damage their children's health in deference to a stupid and usurping law.

F. W. NEWMAN