CORRESPONDENCE. CONSCIENTIOUS BELIEF. To the EDITOR of the PALL MALL GAZETTE. SIR, - What is conscientious belief, not only as regards vaccination, but as regards all ills to which the flesh is heir ? By some curiously illogical method of reasoning, the Government have allowed something that is hereafter to be defined as "conscientious objection" to prevail in the case of those faddists who object to vaccination, while they still prosecute the "Peculiar People" who object to any form of medical aid in case of sickness. In the case of the Peculiar People, they have proved by their acts and reasons that their objection to medical aid, however mistaken it may be, is conscientious ; and yet they are liable to prosecution for manslaughter if, through a conscientious objection to calling in medical aid, persons for whom they are responsible die. The conscientious anti-vaccinator not only deprives his offspring, for whom he is responsible, of an efficacious means of avoiding the most frightful, loathsome, and possibly fatal scourge to which the human frame is liable, but he involves the community in the liability to an epidemic of the scourge. Surely the Peculiar Person has as much right to his opinions as the anti-vaccination faddist, and why is the former to be persecuted and prosecuted, while the latter may go scot-free ? I am not a Peculiar Person myself, at least not in the sense in which the phrase is applied to the sect in question; but I do regard the Peculiar Person as a far less dangerous person to society at large than the anti-vaccinationist, and also as a far more conscientious person. If justice is to be fairly meted out to all alike, the Government cannot do less than bring in a bill next Session to relieve the Peculiar People from the pains and penalties to which they are liable for acting according to their consciences. - Yours truly, 20, Victoria-street, Westminster, Dec. 26. R. J. TAHOURDIN. _________________________________________________