Title: The Queen's Daughters in India
Author: Andrew, Elizabeth W., Bushnell, Katharine C.
Language: English
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Transcriber's Note:

In the text, italic is denoted by _underscores_ around the letter, word
or phrase. Small capitals in the printed works have been transcribed as
ALL CAPITALS.

More Transcriber's Notes may be found at the end of this text.



  THE QUEEN'S DAUGHTERS
  IN INDIA.

  BY
  ELIZABETH W. ANDREW and KATHARINE C. BUSHNELL.


  WITH PREFATORY LETTERS BY
  Mrs. JOSEPHINE E. BUTLER and Mr. HENRY J. WILSON, M.P.


  "_Remember them that are in bonds as bound with them._"


  LONDON. MORGAN AND SCOTT,
  12, PATERNOSTER BUILDINGS, E.C.


  _To be obtained from the_

  _British Committee of the Federation for the Abolition of State
  Regulation of Vice, 17, Tothill Street, Westminster, S.W.;_

  _And from the American Purity Alliance, United Charities' Building,
  New York, U.S.A._


  1899.



  Entered, in the year 1898, by
  ELIZABETH W. ANDREW and KATHARINE C. BUSHNELL,
  At Stationers' Hall, London.



  DEDICATED
  TO
  JOSEPHINE E. BUTLER,

  PROPHETESS OF THE TRUTH IN CHRIST JESUS; LOVER OF HOLY JUSTICE;
  FRIEND OF OUTCAST WOMEN; LEADER OF "THE NEW ABOLITIONISTS";
  WHOM GOD HATH ANOINTED WITH HIS OWN PECULIAR JOY.
  BECAUSE, IN THE SPIRIT OF HER MASTER, SHE HATH
  "LOVED RIGHTEOUSNESS AND HATED INIQUITY."



PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION.


THIS little book is written under a deep sense of obligation to the
womanhood of the world, but more especially under a sense of duty to
God. A group of women of the British aristocracy have lifted their
voices in advocacy of licensed vice; and their sycophants and admirers
in England and America are either re-echoing their plea or excusing
their conduct. The plea is made primarily for India, but incidentally
for all Christendom, and every effort is being put forth, openly or
covertly, to contaminate public sentiment on this point.

In five States of America, in a little over a year, the attempt
has been made to secure legislation for the compulsory periodical
examination of women; and a strong organization exists on both sides
of the water to promote this infamous object. Under these conditions
it is a matter of grave moment that certain secular, temperance, and
religious periodicals which would have sounded a clear note of warning
six months ago, are today being deceived. They print the outrageous
falsehoods that represent India as having become a menace to the health
of England because of the abolition of brothel slavery in that country.
Excuses are made for the shallow-brained sophistry of those who pretend
that the compulsory periodical examination of women can be divorced
from the moral debasement of women, and as though such compulsory
examination were something quite unlike the notorious Contagious
Diseases Acts. High titles and famous names are quoted as a warrant for
advocating the iniquity; and certain men are being exalted as though
famous temperance advocates, who are not themselves total abstainers,
and who are well-known public advocates of licensed fornication. Thus
is introduced into philanthropic movements of the present day an
element of fatal moral confusion, as though a person who boldly defies
the principles of ordinary decency in one direction could be received
as a trusted and efficient promoter of decency along another line;
as though a man could be relied upon as an advocate and apostle of
that of which he is not an example. We do not doubt that some of the
persons who do these things are well-intentioned; but they expend their
benevolence on the wolf and forget the lamb. They would win others to
play with them on the asp's nest.

We have determined on our knees before God that those who advocate the
compulsory periodical examination of women shall do so knowing what it
means, and knowing also that their friends and neighbours understand
what is being advocated.

We offer no apology for our plainness of speech; to employ smooth
language and obscure phrases in the present crisis would be to trifle
with a deadly enemy--to toy with the Indian cobra.

_September, 1897._



FROM MRS. JOSEPHINE E. BUTLER.


I wish that every woman in the United Kingdom could read this little
book. It tells the truth, the terrible truth, concerning the treatment
of certain Indian women, our fellow-citizens and sisters, by the
British Government. I believe if that truth were known throughout the
length and breadth of our land, it would become impossible for our
rulers to continue to maintain the cruel and wicked Regulations by
which these Indian women are enslaved and destroyed.

I am a loyal Englishwoman; I love my country. It is because of my great
love for her that I mourn so deeply over her dishonour in the promotion
of such legislation and practices as this book exposes, and that I will
not cease to denounce the crimes committed in her name so long as I
have life and breath.

I thank God that the writers of this book have been raised up to plead
the sacred cause of Justice and of Womanhood; and I rejoice to know
that God has bestowed on them a measure of the fearless spirit of the
faithful prophets and prophetesses of old, to rebuke national sin and
to preach repentance to the people.

  JOSEPHINE E. BUTLER.

_Feb., 1898._



FROM MR. HENRY J. WILSON, M.P.


DEAR FRIENDS,

I am glad you intend to reprint "The Queen's Daughters in India."

It brings home to many who will never read Blue Books the terrible
facts about officially-authorized vice; and it shows the moral aspects
of the "Regulation" system, which Blue Books never show.

I remember very clearly how your first Report, in 1892, of what you
had seen, impressed us all as a very careful record of a very careful
investigation.

Then, in 1893, I was a member of the Departmental Committee
appointed to hear your evidence, when your clear testimony, which no
cross-examination could shake, gave abundant evidence of your close
observation and the accuracy of your records.

The impression this made on me was only deepened when, in India,
in 1894 (on the Opium Commission), I saw one of the places you had
described with such remarkable closeness of detail.

It is deplorable that we should have to fight this battle again. But
so it is. Princesses and Titled Ladies have added their influence
to that of the panic-mongering materialists, in the endeavour to
"make the practice of prostitution, if not absolutely innocuous, at
least, much less dangerous"--for that is, in the language of the Royal
Commissioners of 1871, the object in view.

I thank God, therefore, that you are able to visit this country again,
to help us both by voice and pen in the renewed agitation which is
forced upon us.

Yours faithfully,

  HENRY J. WILSON.

_Feb., 1898._



CONTENTS.


                                                   PAGE

  DEDICATION                                        iii

  PREFACE TO FIRST EDITION                            v

  FROM MRS. JOSEPHINE E. BUTLER                     vii

  FROM MR. HENRY J. WILSON, M.P.                     ix

    I. CANTONMENT LIFE IN INDIA                      13

   II. SEEKING THE OUTCAST                           32

  III. THE HABITATIONS OF CRUELTY                    45

   IV. THE CONTAGIOUS DISEASES ACTS                  64

    V. PLEADING FOR THE OPPRESSED                    86

   VI. SOME ANGLO-INDIAN MORAL SENTIMENTS            99

  APPENDICES                                        113



THE QUEEN'S DAUGHTERS IN INDIA.



I.

Cantonment Life in India.


A GENTLEMAN in India, who had spent many years in military service,
told us the following tradition:--

"In the year 1856, before the Mutiny, Lady ---- was one evening riding
out on horseback at Umballa, unattended, when the bridle of her horse
was suddenly seized by a British soldier who was possessed of evil
designs against her. Most earnestly she protested against his violence,
and remonstrated with him that, besides the wrong to her, to injure one
of her social rank would utterly ruin his entire future, as he would
be flogged and dismissed from the army in disgrace. Thereupon ensued
a conversation in which he pleaded extenuation for such a crime so
successfully that she readily accepted his false statement that there
was excuse for vice when soldiers were not allowed to marry. After
that experience she sought opportunity to talk with high military
officials concerning the necessity of protecting high-born ladies from
such risks, by furnishing opportunities for sensual indulgence to the
British soldiers, and the result was the elaboration and extension
of a system for the apportionment of native women to regiments." We
have never been able to verify the exact truth of this incident, but
it probably has a basis in fact. Yet it has had its counterpart in a
recent movement among the aristocratic women of England to re-introduce
the same wicked legislation. It is on this account that the authors
have considered it necessary to print a more extended account of the
work in behalf of the women of India, in which they have had a large
share. If the exceedingly simple style in which they give their story
seems to some readers almost an insult to their intelligence, and
lacking in the delicacy of touch that could be desired, it must not
be forgotten for one moment that they are writing with special regard
for those in the humblest ranks of life, who have often had scant
opportunities for education; for it is upon the daughters of such that
the oppressive laws for the licensing of prostitution fall; and in
large part the supposed advantages of licensed prostitution accrue to
the upper social classes, which are, in fact, the lower moral classes.
The crusade against licensed fornication is a war between respectable
daughters of the poor and rich and powerful men and women.

Whether the narrative given above be wholly true or not, the fact
remains that when so-called "Christian England" took control of
"heathen India," and plots of ground called Cantonments were staked
off for the residence of the British soldiers and their officers,
full provision was made for the flesh, to fulfil the lusts thereof.
A Cantonment is a considerable section of land, sometimes comprising
several square miles; and within these Cantonments much more arbitrary
law prevails than the civil law by which the rest of the country is
governed. There are about one hundred military Cantonments in India.
Sometimes these Cantonments have few inhabitants besides the soldiers
and a few traders in groceries, etc., for the soldiers; and again in
some places a whole city has grown up within the Cantonment, and many
Europeans reside therein, feeling more safe in case of threatened
trouble from an uprising of the people against the Government, than
outside under civil law only. All the land of a Cantonment belongs to
the Government, and in case of war the military officials may seize,
for residence, all the houses within the Cantonment without regard to
the actual owners of the buildings, and the commanding officer has the
power of expelling any one he pleases from the Cantonment, without
assigning any reason for so doing.

The system devised for furnishing sensual indulgence to the British
soldier, and for protecting him from diseases consequent on such
indulgence, was commonly called the Contagious Diseases Acts, but was
carried out under Cantonment Regulations, and was as follows in its
main features:--

There were placed with each regiment (of about a thousand soldiers)
from twelve to fifteen native women, who dwelt in appointed houses or
tents, as the case might be, called "chaklas." These women were allowed
to consort with British soldiers only, and were registered by the
Cantonment magistrate, and tickets of license were given them.

Besides the "chakla," _i.e._, the Government brothel, there was in
each Cantonment a prison hospital, in which the patients were confined
against their will. To these Lock Hospitals the women were obliged to
go periodically (generally once a week) for an indecent examination, to
see whether every part of the body was free from any trace of diseases
likely to spread from them to the soldiers, as the result of immoral
relations. The compulsory examination is in itself a surgical rape.
When a woman was found diseased, she was detained in the hospital until
cured; when found healthy she was given a ticket of license to practise
fornication and was returned to the chakla for that purpose.

In case a woman tried to escape from the chakla, or from the Lock
Hospital, and was apprehended, she would be taken to the Cantonment
magistrate, who would punish her with fine or imprisonment.

Even the price of the visits of soldiers to the chakla was fixed by
military usage, and was so low that the soldier would scarcely miss
what he expended in vicious indulgence. We have frequently heard in
England that the officers sent out in the English towns to secure
recruits for the army hold out, as an inducement to young men to
enlist, the fact that a licentious life in India is so cheap, and that
the Government will see to it that no disease will follow the soldiers'
profligacy. But this last promise is altogether false, for statistics
show that with all their efforts diseases increase with the increase of
licentiousness, with small regard to the military surgeons' efforts to
make it physically safe.

When a regiment came into a large Cantonment where there were barracks,
there was generally a large Government brothel to which all the women
were sent for residence, and a guard in uniform looked after them.
When the soldiers were camped out in the open field, tents were set up
for the women at the back part of the encampment. When the soldiers
marched, the women were carried in carts, with British soldiers to
guard them, or sent by train to the destination of the regiment. In
charge of the women was placed a superintendent or brothel-keeper,
called the "mahaldarni." She also was expected to procure women as
desired; and we have ourselves read the official permits granted these
women to go out to procure more women when needed.

On June 17, 1886, a military order, known among the opponents of State
regulation as the "Infamous Circular Memorandum," was sent to all the
Cantonments of India by Quartermaster-General Chapman, in the name
of the Commander-in-Chief of the army in India (Lord Roberts). But
during the course of the enquiry of the Departmental Committee of 1893,
its real author was discovered to be Lord Roberts himself, not his
Quartermaster-General.

This Memorandum (Parliamentary Paper No. 197, of 1888) is a lengthy
document, every part of which has painful interest; but we can only
give a faint outline. It specified certain measures to be instituted as
means for looking more carefully after the health of British soldiers,
and the observations therein were to be heeded by the "military and
medical authorities in every command" throughout India. (See Appendix
A.)

This order said (and military orders are well-nigh inexorable): "In the
regimental bazaars[1] it is necessary to have a sufficient number of
women, to take care that they are sufficiently attractive, to provide
them with proper houses, and, above all, to insist upon means of
ablution being always available." It proceeds: "If young soldiers are
carefully advised in regard to the advantage of ablution, and recognise
that convenient arrangements exist in the regimental bazaar [that is,
in the chakla], they may be expected to avoid the risks involved in
association with women who are not recognised [that is, licensed] by
the regimental authorities." In other words, young soldiers are not
expected to be moral, but only to be instructed as to the safest way of
practising immorality. This remarkable document goes on to suggest that
young soldiers should be taught to consider it a "point of honour" to
save each other from contagion by pointing out to their officers women
with whom there was risk of disease. The document calls attention to
the need of more women, and the necessity of making the free quarters
"houses that will meet the wishes of the women"--in order, it is
implied, that they may be the more easily lured to live in them.

The official record of what followed, as a result of effort on
the part of under-officials to carry out the instructions of the
Commander-in-Chief (Lord Roberts) is truly shocking, as might be
expected. The officer in command of the 2nd Battalion Cheshire Regiment
sent the following application to the magistrate of Umballa Cantonment:
"Requisition for extra attractive women for regimental bazaar, in
accordance with Circular Memorandum 21a." "These women's fares," it
continues, "by one-horse conveyances, from Umballa to Solon, will
be paid by the Cheshire Regiment on arrival. Please send young and
attractive women, as laid down in Quartermaster-General's Circular, No.
21a." Then he added a note to the effect that some of the women already
at hand were not very attractive, adding: "Application has been made
to the Cantonment magistrate of Umballa for others, but up to date
none have arrived; therefore, it is presumed a great difficulty exists
in procuring the class of young women asked for." Evidently it was an
amazing thing to these self-styled Christian military officials that
heathen women would not flock to their slave pens!

Another commanding officer writes: "There are not enough women; they
are not attractive enough. More and younger women are required, and
their houses should be improved." Yet another commanding officer
writes: "I have ordered the number of prostitutes to be increased to
twelve, and have given special instructions as to the four additional
women being young and of attractive appearance."

Such was the zeal for increasing the facilities for safe vice, provoked
by such military methods as described by this Memorandum, that the
unwillingness of the native women to plunge into a life of shame at the
behest of their conquerors, received scant consideration. A retired
soldier, living at Lucknow, told us of his own observations a few
years before: that, if a native policeman saw a young girl talking
indiscreetly, though innocently, with a man, he would denounce her as
a suspected prostitute; she would be brought before the Cantonment
magistrate, and be registered to live among the soldiers. He said
the police made large sums of money by threatening to thus hand over
girls to the magistrate, and demanding bribes as the alternative of
such a horrible fate. A Christian Englishman, holding a responsible
position under the Government, vouched for by the Editor of the
_Bombay Guardian_, relates what he saw in four Cantonments, where the
instructions of the "Infamous Memorandum" were carried out, in the
following language:--

  "The orders specified were faithfully carried out, under the
  supervision of commanding officers, and were to this effect. The
  commanding officer gave orders to his quartermaster to arrange with
  the regimental _Kutwal_ [an under-official, native] to take two
  policemen (without uniform), and go into the villages and take from
  the homes of these poor people their daughters from fourteen years and
  upwards, about twelve or fifteen girls at a time. They were to select
  the best-looking. Next morning, these were all put in front of the
  Colonel and Quartermaster. The former made his selection of the number
  required. They were then presented with a pass or license, and then
  made over to the old woman in charge of this house of vice under the
  Government. The women already there, who were examined by the doctor,
  and found diseased, had their passes taken away from them, and were
  then removed by the police out of the Cantonment, and these fresh,
  innocent girls put in their places."

There is a whole volume of misery expressed in that last sentence, both
for the fresh, innocent girls, and for the diseased ones turned out of
the Cantonment. It has been repeatedly asserted that this system of
regulating vice was so merciful, even to the girls; for their diseases,
it has been claimed, were never allowed to go beyond the initial stage.
But what this witness states is strictly in accordance with what we
found to be the case. When we visited some of these Lock Hospitals and
examined the records kept there, we noted that in the annual reports
no cases of secondary stages of disease were mentioned; but when we
questioned the native physicians in charge as to whether these ever
arose, they answered that frequently such cases occurred, but when a
woman became unfit to practise prostitution, because of that fact, she
was turned out of the Cantonment.

The British officials of India have not shown the slightest concern
as to the spread of disease, even when introduced by their own race
among the natives, but have actually sent these women abroad to scatter
disease wherever they go. And what can a poor Army slave-woman do
when thus turned out? Her caste is broken, because she has lived with
foreigners, and her friends will seldom receive her back; she has been
compelled to follow the soldiers on the march; and when dismissed may
be hundreds of miles away from any human being who ever saw her face
before. Practically almost every industrial door in India is closed
to women, the nurse-girl to foreign children being so exceptional as
not worthy of mention among the hundreds of millions of people. The
Cantonment sometimes includes all there is of city life in the whole
region, and the woman has no choice but the open fields or the jungle.
God alone knows the fate of these helpless creatures, and few beside
care to know.

This was the exact state of things, with details too infamous to
commit to paper, until 1886, when the Contagious Diseases Acts which
had prevailed in the military stations of England were repealed as the
result of a remarkable crusade led by Mrs. Josephine Butler. As the
dependencies of Great Britain are all supposed to be governed by the
same policy as that of England the repeal of the Contagious Diseases
Acts there virtually repealed them in India. But it was not until 1888
that a despatch was sent to India by the Secretary of State for India,
whose duty it is to attend to such matters, declaring that the system
was "indefensible, and must be condemned."

A copy of Lord Roberts' "Infamous Memorandum" fell into the hands of a
Christian gentleman who sent it to England. It was there reprinted and
distributed to every member of the House of Commons, and created a
great sensation, meeting with almost universal condemnation. Following
upon the popular indignation created thereby, the House of Commons on
June 5, 1888, passed a unanimous resolution that "Any mere suspension
of measures for the compulsory examination of women, and for licensing
and regulating prostitution in India, is insufficient; and the
legislation which enjoins, authorizes, or permits such measures ought
to be repealed."

The publication of the "Infamous Memorandum" in England had shown that
the existing Indian Cantonment Acts must be condemned, and they were
superseded by rules made under a new law, the "Cantonments Act of
1889." This was a very specious document, which avoided the issue by
merely placing unlimited powers in the hands of the Governor-General
in Council to "make rules consistent with this Act, for the prevention
of the spread of infectious and contagious disorders within the
Cantonment."

It was so recognised and pronounced upon by the newspapers of India,
which favoured licensed vice. Commenting on the new Cantonments Act
one newspaper said: "The religious fanatics who howled until a weak
Government gave way to their clamour ... will probably howl again now
at the way the old order of things will be enforced under another
name, but with very little difference in manner." Another said: "Their
phraseology is the work of a master in the art of making a thing
look as unlike itself as it well can be." Many others spoke in the
same strain. Immediately the advocates of the abolition of licensed
prostitution took alarm, and began a vigorous remonstrance; for they
saw great danger in any law which put large discretionary power into
the hands of officials. The late Rt. Hon. Sir James Stansfeld, M.P.,
and Professor Stuart, M.P., addressed a letter to the Secretary of
State for India concerning this new Act, in which they said, among
other things: "If our interpretation of the new proposed regulations
is correct, they may be used to set up again a system of compulsory
examination of prostitutes, and to regulate and license, within the
Cantonment, the calling of those prostitutes who submit to periodical
examination, and to certify and license those who are pronounced
physically fit."

The official reply from the Secretary of State for India was to the
effect that the Home Government was unwilling to believe, without
positive proof, that this new Cantonments Act would be used to foster
licensed prostitution.

It should be explained here that Abolitionists have always recognised
that to establish the periodical examination is, in and of itself,
to license prostitution; for there can be no possible excuse for
the reiterated examination of healthy women, in anticipation of
possible contagion, without recognising a certain right to practise
prostitution, if the women be pronounced medically "fit" for such a
calling. The periodical examination of women, then, constitutes the
living heart of all those forms of legislation generally comprised
under the term, "The Contagious Diseases Acts," by whatever local name
such regulations may be known.

We came to England in the winter of 1890-91, it being the first country
visited by us on a round-the-world journey for the World's W.C.T.U.,
with which we were, at that time, officially connected.[2] During this
visit we frequently met and talked with Mrs. Josephine Butler, known
and revered by lovers of purity throughout the world for her heroic
service in the cause of the Abolition of State Regulation of Vice. She
expressed a strong desire that while in India in the course of our
journey we should make a careful investigation into the conditions
prevailing there, and learn, if possible, whether the resolution of the
House of Commons of June 5, 1888, was being obeyed. As already noted,
this resolution demanded the repeal of all measures that enjoined,
authorized, or permitted the compulsory examination of women and the
licensing and regulation of prostitution. It was desired also that
we should secure for the use of Parliamentary members of the British
Committee of the Federation for the Abolition of State Regulation
of Vice actual proof that the resolution was being disobeyed, such
as would meet the official demand for proof from the Secretary of
State, before he would be willing to believe that the new Cantonments
Act was being used to foster licensed prostitution. The mission was
pronounced by Mrs. Butler "one of the most difficult and even perilous
missions ever undertaken in the course of our great crusade." After due
consideration and prayer for guidance, we consented to undertake the
task.

The British Committee of the Federation furnished us with all necessary
official documents with which to make ourselves thoroughly conversant
with the history of the C. D. Acts throughout the British dependencies
in the Orient, and supplied us with a letter of introduction to a
staunch friend of the cause in India, with whom we were expected to
hold frequent consultations.

We took our departure from England in the month of July, 1891, going
first of all to South Africa and labouring in the interests of our
work there until the cold season set in and we could proceed to India.
Reaching India at the end of December, 1891, we conveyed our letter of
introduction to this confidential friend, who advised us to proceed
northward and consult with a friend of the cause who understood
thoroughly the interior life of the people, and, it was believed, would
give great aid to our mission. Travelling northward we arrived at the
station designated, and sought an interview with this gentleman.

We intimated to him what we hoped to accomplish in India, with a
view to obtaining an expression from him of his willingness to aid
us. With consternation and embarrassment he protested against our
undertaking anything so foolish and impracticable, declaring from
his long experience that it was utterly impossible for women to get
at the truth, and entreating us to abandon so wild a project. When
he saw that we did not yield the matter, he questioned us as to what
we were planning to do, how we should proceed to get information in
a country whose customs and language were so utterly unknown to us,
and concerning a military system with which, as Americans, we were
quite unacquainted. We withheld further confidence, simply saying with
earnestness, "Whether this is practicable or impracticable, women
have a right to this knowledge; and we do not think it foolish or
impracticable to trust God to give us all the information we need,
without human aid."

He felt the most kindly interest in us personally, and manifested this
by several practical expressions; but doubtless he reasoned that
he could not encourage us in what he believed to be an impossible
undertaking.

This experience drove us to God, our only helper. We were strangers in
a strange land, carrying the burden of a sacred secret which weighed us
to the earth. After much prayer and deliberation we called on the chief
military surgeon in charge of the station hospital of ---- Cantonment.
This official began almost immediately when we called upon him, and
entirely without suggestion from us, to deplore "the repeal of the
C. D. Acts," and, as he claimed, the consequent increase of specific
diseases. He showed us his daily report, which illustrated what he
said on this subject. These diseases, he said, were for the most part
contracted on the march or in the hills, especially at Ranikhet. This
interview took place on January 4, 1892.

The surgeon said he wondered that people did not, from the moral
and religious point of view, see the injury that the repeal of the
Contagious Diseases Acts was doing, not only to the soldiers but to
the whole country; "and," he added, "we can do nothing." We asked, "Is
there, then, no form of regulation now?" He answered emphatically,
"_None whatever._" He said, "We can do nothing about the women outside
the Cantonment, and there is the trouble." He added, "Those inside go
on as they used to, and go to the hospital for treatment when diseased.
But," he continued in an aggrieved tone, "this is absolutely voluntary;
we have no control."

He said there was a European physician in charge of the hospital, to
whom he had just been talking regarding the matter when we came in. We
said, "There is a European physician in charge, then, is there?" He
answered, "Yes; but the hospital is not for these diseases only, but
also for fevers, dysentery, cholera, and all diseases"; and that there
were men there as well as women. We asked, "Is the Lock Hospital, then,
entirely disused?" He replied, "Why, there is _no_ Lock Hospital."
He added that many good people were getting their eyes opened now
as to the condition of things, and that even some clergymen had the
courage of their moral convictions, and had come out in favour of the
Contagious Diseases Acts.

Previous to leaving England we had received information concerning
this Cantonment and its Lock Hospital. Our information, compared with
this official's inconsistent statements, convinced us that he was
endeavouring to mislead us. After other and many futile efforts to
reach the truth, we gave ourselves up wholly to prayer, remembering the
promise, "They shall come with weeping, and with supplications will
I lead them. I will cause them to walk by the rivers of waters in a
straight way, wherein they shall not stumble." We felt sure that any
mistake at the outset of our work, such as giving confidence to the
wrong person, or any indiscreet action that might betray our object in
visiting India, would be fatal to our purpose; therefore we cried to
God to preserve us from impatience and to keep our feet from stumbling.

We went next to Agra and remained there several days, wandering about
the old fort and other places of interest. But surely never was
sadder sight-seeing! The way seemed utterly closed against us. The
work stretched, vast and difficult, before us, and those towering
thick walls that surround the fort, with a deep moat at their foot,
represented to our thoughts the pride, strength, and secrecy of the
system which we sought to penetrate, and at other times the barriers
that separated us from the enslaved women whom we had come to India in
the hope of helping.

Nearly five weeks had gone by; the winter season was rapidly passing,
and we were yet without a single clue to guide us in our investigations.

One Sunday we set apart for fasting and prayer--in the morning
instructing the native servants at the Rest House where we were staying
to leave us uninterrupted until the evening, as it was a sacred day
with us, and we wished to be alone. We locked our doors and waited on
the Father of spirits for guidance. Never shall we forget the hours
of that day. At the beginning our hearts seemed completely crushed
under a sense of our absolute helplessness and ignorance; but we know
now that we were in the very place of power--that it was only there
that God could reveal Himself to our waiting spirits. It was at the
first, however, inexpressibly dark. Still we held on, in faith that
light would come; and before night, light was fully given to us both,
as to our next step, which was that we were to go to a friend in a
neighbouring city and lay the whole case before her. We obeyed the
guidance; and although our friend was exceedingly hopeless as to our
undertaking, yet she was willing to give us the assistance of her
quick intelligence and long acquaintance with India. She proved of
invaluable service to us in teaching us many simple colloquial phrases,
and inducting us into a knowledge of the customs of the country, thus
making us much more independent in our work and travels.

At this time it became clear to us that we must approach the whole
question from the native side. We had gained nothing in seeking
information from European officials. Our hope now lay in interviewing
the native physicians and the women themselves. We did not at first
venture to ask the way to the Lock Hospital, taking it for granted that
this term had long before fallen into disuse, as the existence of this
hospital was officially denied. But after visiting various hospitals
within a Cantonment, and failing to find the "Cantonment Hospital" so
called, which term we were told was now applied to the place for which
we were searching, we asked for the Lock Hospital, and to our surprise
found that in common parlance it was still so named. Our cab-drivers
always understood instantly what we meant when we used either this term
or the native term, which means a hospital for degraded women. Our
first actual interview was held with the dhai, or nurse, and inmates of
a Lock Hospital. Besides much valuable information gained from them,
we learned the native name used to designate the quarters within the
military Cantonments for degraded women, viz., "The Chakla."

From this time forward, our way became much more plain, as in the ten
Cantonments visited[3] we found that we needed only to give directions
to our cabmen and they would take us without hesitation both to the
Lock Hospital and to the chakla, these places being perfectly well
known to the natives residing within the Cantonment.

These Cantonments are all under military rule. As our work lay only
within the Cantonments the military regulations, of course, applied
to us. One of these rules made it possible at any time for us to be
excluded, for it refers to "persons whom the Commanding Officer deems
it expedient to exclude from the Cantonment, with or without assigning
any reason for excluding them therefrom" (Cantonments Act, chap. 5,
sec. 26, clause 23). It was necessary, therefore, that we should not
attract attention to the fact that we were making investigations as
to whether the resolution of the House of Commons was being obeyed or
not by the military authorities. Had our errand been suspected, we
could have been sent out of the Cantonment at once, with no explanation
and no opportunity for redress. We therefore proceeded as quietly as
possible.

Towards the last our enquiries proceeded very rapidly, for we had
learned to accomplish as much in one day as would formerly have
occupied a week. The winter season was over, and we were now in
the month of March, with the heat of the advancing Indian summer
daily increasing in terrible force, and becoming oppressive to our
unaccustomed Anglo-Saxon constitutions. We travelled by night and
worked by day, hastening on to the completion of our task. At times,
arriving at our destination in the middle of the night, we rested,
exhausted, in the ladies' waiting-room at the railway station, where
there were cane-seated settees, on which we spread our travelling rugs
and remained until the morning. A native woman was always in charge,
and good refreshment-rooms were at hand, so that we saved much time and
avoided publicity in this way. We often travelled in what were known
as "intermediate compartments," knowing that we should attract less
attention than as first or second-class passengers. We simply asked
for guidance at every step of the way through these months of anxiety
and toil; and we knew that our prayers were answered.

We had various interpreters. One of these was a specially gifted
woman. She had a sweet, plaintive voice, and sang the native songs
with touching effect on the poor women whom we visited; one we always
recall as having been a wonderful instrument through God of moving
their hearts. It was a pilgrim hymn with a recurring strain of warning
against the love of the world, dress, jewellery, and sinful pleasures;
and reminding us all that this life is swiftly passing, and that death
may soon overtake us. Often before the refrain was finished the poor
women would be seen sobbing as they listened, joining in the sorrowful
strain that recurred again and again; and as soon as the song was ended
pouring out their pitiful histories and their protests against the
degradation into which they had been thrust by the infamous system of
legalised vice under which they were slaves.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Trading-posts for the supply of necessaries to the soldiers; but
the author means, in explicit terms, the chakla or brothel.

[2] We resigned June 15, 1896.

[3] The Cantonments we visited were Bareilly, Lucknow, Meerut, Lahore
(Cantonment Station, Meean Meer), Rawal Pindi, Peshawar, Amritzar,
Umballa, Sitapur, and Benares. Five of these we visited a second time.



II.

Seeking the Outcast.


A VIVID scene comes before us: We are sitting on a mortar bench, built
in a circular form around the trunk of an old tree, in the open court
of a Government chakla in one of the Cantonments of India. Some thirty
or forty girls come trooping around us, either sitting down on the
ground, native style, or bringing their cot-beds with them for seats.

Our sweet-voiced interpreter sings a plaintive song--native words
and native tune--and when she has finished there is scarcely a dry
eye to be seen. Then follows a simple Gospel message to which all
give respectful heed, and at its close we ask, "Why are you in such
a place as this?" Several answer in brief monosyllables, accompanied
by a gesture as though drawing a line transversely across the brow.
"It is our fate! It is our fate!" are the words used in reply; and
our interpreter explains to us that these believe, in accordance with
their religious instructions, that while they were yet babes, in an
unfortunate moment, when left alone by the mother, the messenger of
fate entered the room and wrote the word "prostitute" in invisible
characters across the brow, and that from that moment to struggle
against the lot that awaited them would have been useless.

No wonder that such poor slaves, when once taken and placed with the
British soldiers by some wicked mahaldarni, never dream of trying
to get away; and small wonder if others who had hoped that a better
fate might await them, and who make one ignorant, feeble attempt
to escape (and the women of a people whose customs keep them in
perpetual seclusion are extremely ignorant of the outside world) and
are recaptured by the police, will never be induced to try again, but
quickly become convinced that their fate has been also inexorably fixed
from the cradle.

"But," we say, "God is too good; He would not have it so." And they
reply hopelessly, "But what can we do? We cannot starve; we cannot cut
our own throats. Oh, that we might die!"

Then they begin to clamour for a chance to tell their individual
stories. One is a girl who was left an orphan at the age of six years.
At the tender age of eleven she says she was taken by an Englishman and
kept three years as his mistress. When he deserted her, there was no
door open to receive her but the chakla. One pretty girl said she had
been deceived by a bad woman, under promise of employment.

Another, with face partly covered by her hands for very shame, said her
husband had sold her to the mahaldarni for money. By graphic gesture
and with the help of the few English words she knew, another told of
the agonies of slow starvation until at last her courage gave way, and
she came to the British soldiers, who were willing to feed her starving
body for the sake of its worth as an instrument of self-indulgence.
This is the only right to existence accorded to many women, even in
so-called Christian countries, where labour is hard to obtain.

A little girl of ten, gaudily arrayed in the style of the others, thus
publishing her candidature for a life of vice before she knew its
meaning in the least, played about among the older ones. A little boy
of two, with beautiful forehead, and other features that betrayed his
English blood, had been forsaken by his father, who had, the girls
said, "gone home to England." We recall having seen other children of
Saxon type at Lucknow, Meerut, and at Peshawar, left in the same way
by fathers who were officers of the British army in India. While the
attempt is being made to create sentiment in favour of protecting the
"innocent wives and children" of British soldiers, it might be well to
inquire which wives and which children--those that already exist in
India, or those that have not yet materialised in England. God knows
which are the real wives and the real children of soldiers who have, in
many cases in the past, entered into a contract with unsophisticated
native women who never dreamed that it was anything less than lawful
marriage!

"These bad women promise us everything and then betray us into this
life," said several of the girls, referring to the treachery of the
mahaldarnis. They told us of a girl who had recently been set on fire
by an angry soldier, and had been burned to death, and related the
story of cruelties practised upon them by drunken soldiers. A native
guard in uniform drew near to listen. These military guards were there
all the time, and were changed every few hours, the girls told us. As
the mahaldarnis who own the girls are always at hand to watch against
the escape of the discontented, the work of the guard seems to be
chiefly to keep order and to prevent the entrance of native men, as the
latter are strictly forbidden to associate with women kept for the
English soldiers.

Two women of mature years now approached, and we were informed that
they were the mahaldarnis. One lived there all the time, and the other
was there with her girls for the time being. They said they had each
a salary of ten rupees a month from the Government. They also took a
share of the girls' earnings. Another time we went to the hut, close to
the chakla, where one of them lived, and she proudly displayed to us
some of the recommendations she held from British officers. They were
grim and horrid reading; we will give but a single illustration:--

  "Ameer has supplied the 2nd Derby Regiment with prostitutes for the
  past three years, and I recommend her to any other regiment requiring
  her for a similar capacity.

   "S. G. M----,

   _"Quartermaster 2nd Derby Regiment."_

As to the methods to which these mahaldarnis resort to procure girls,
it has been touched upon in the personal stories of girls already
given, and will be emphasized necessarily more and more as our story
continues. Mahaldarni Rahiman, met in another Cantonment, told us a
story closely resembling the methods described in a former chapter
(page 20), by a Government official. She said in substance: "If a girl
is not sufficiently attractive to earn a living, I send her away and
get another in her place. I get the women from the bazaar when more are
needed. I go to the Cantonment magistrate, and he gives me five, ten,
twenty, or fifty rupees, as the case may demand. To buy a very young,
attractive girl I will be furnished with fifty rupees. There is always
plenty of money to get them with."

When opportunity afforded, we called upon the other mahaldarni, and
she likewise showed us her recommendations in the handwriting of
British military officials, and other interesting papers which she had
carefully preserved. There was an original copy of her appointment as
mahaldarni to a certain regiment, closing with permission for her to
go to Ferozepore to attend to "certain business of her bazaar." This
was signed by the Colonel of the regiment. There was a letter written
to her by the Staff-Surgeon of the same regiment, a few days later,
saying:--

  "Mahaldarni, Seventh Lancers,--You have not brought your women from
  Meerut and Ferozepore. You will have to do it or the Colonel will
  think you have broken faith, as it is now fifteen days since you
  received your appointment."

The Staff-Surgeon evidently thought it an easy task to buy or entrap
twelve or fifteen girls in as many days. Then there was a copy of a
letter addressed by herself to the Cantonment magistrate, which she
had employed some one to write in English for her. This letter stated
that she had brought four new girls with her who had several thousand
rupees' worth of jewelry with them (probably a lie by way of excuse),
but their brothers had accompanied them (to effect their rescue?) and
she asked the magistrate to require the girls to remain in the chakla,
and then their brothers could not get near them. Native men not being
allowed about the chakla, brothers and husbands who might be bent upon
the rescue of female members of their families, who had been enticed
away or stolen by the mahaldarnis, could be kept at a safe distance.

At other times we had opportunities to revisit this large chakla.
There were about one hundred inmates, and accommodations for many
more. The building was scarcely less than a huge fortification. High
blank walls--excepting tiny well-barred windows high up, surrounded
an open space of ground, or court; and the inner side of the wall was
lined with small numbered rooms for the accommodation of the inmates.
Most of the girls, here as elsewhere, because of constant association
with British men, had learned to speak a little English, while a few
spoke quite fluently. Although we always were accompanied by a good
interpreter, yet often we were able to converse quite freely ourselves
with the girls.

Our interpreter recognised one girl on our first visit, whom we shall
call by her nickname, which was "Katy," and asked her if she was not
the girl who had run after her carriage two or three times, begging
the interpreter to take her away. Katy said she had done so, and with
streaming tears reiterated her desire to escape from a life of which
she was so ashamed, and pleaded with us to take her. When we consented
to take her that very day, she faltered, and then decided that she did
not dare try to go until after the following day, which was the day of
the bi-weekly examination, but she said that if we would give her our
address she would come herself on the day following. As we drove away
in our cab, and the girls waved farewell, poor Katy, with pitiful and
despairing countenance, burst into tears. Her face haunted us for days,
and as she did not come of her own accord to us, in a few days we went
after her again.

We learned afterwards that Katy had made ineffectual attempts to come
to us. When we returned to the chakla for her, we found her without
difficulty, and told her our errand. With glowing, happy face, she
arrayed herself in her best garments, arranged her hair neatly and with
childish simplicity, and leaving her few earthly belongings behind, got
into the cab with us. But soon her face clouded, she grew apprehensive,
and said she would have to go and get permission of the Cantonment
magistrate before she could venture to leave. Anticipating not the
slightest difficulty in this matter, when we represented the case to
the magistrate and became surety for the girl's future good conduct
and maintenance by a responsible Mission, we decided that it was best
to let her have her own way. We did not then know India as we learned
it afterwards. But the native policemen, seeing the girl with us, and
being informed or suspecting our errand, refused, on enquiry, to inform
us where the Cantonment magistrate could be found, and misled us in so
far as they gave us any information.

We had a long, wearisome search, from which we learned somewhat of
the difficulties that a poor Government slave-girl would encounter in
trying, unaided, to disentangle herself from a life in the chakla. We
took Katy away in the morning; we drove about, back and forth, mile
upon mile, being sent hither and thither by misleading directions,
and at last, considerably after mid-day, reached the magistrate's
court, and entered. We were received with respect and given seats. In
the course of our search, the girl had told us that her real fear of
leaving without the magistrate's consent grew out of the fact that
she had made one attempt to run away, and had been caught and fined,
and had not yet paid the fine. She felt that if she went away again,
without permission, it would only be to be ferreted out and fined yet
more heavily. The timid girl, however, did not dare admit the whole
truth to us, lest we might not consent to take her at all. Afterwards,
we learned it from most reliable sources.

The girl had a very wicked mother and sister. An Englishman, who had
known her from childhood, said that Katy had frequently come to him,
saying she wished to be good and wanted to learn to read; but no way
opened, apparently, for her to get free from the evil influences by
which she was surrounded; and at last she was overcome, and became the
"kept woman" of a British soldier at an early age. The soldier brought
drink to their house, which she, in ignorance of the very strict laws
to the contrary, permitted him to do. A native woman in the household
of the man who related the facts to us, complained to the magistrate,
and Katy was summoned to appear before him for punishment.

Frightened at the prospect, she managed to escape to a neighbouring
village, was apprehended, brought back, sentenced to seven months'
imprisonment, and a fine of fifty rupees for contempt of court. When
she had served out her sentence (three months before we knew her) the
mahaldarni was allowed (Katy said) to take her into custody and become
surety for the fine. The English gentleman could not tell us whether
the girl's statement that the mahaldarni was allowed to become her
security was correct or not; but he believed it to be, from the fact
that it was then that she went to the chakla and for the first time
became a common prostitute. Learning these facts afterwards, we did
not longer wonder that Katy had feared to try to come away without the
magistrate's consent, and had shown such lack of courage when she faced
him.

Almost immediately upon our seating ourselves in the court-room the
poor girl burst into tears and ran outside and hid round a corner.
It was with great difficulty that we persuaded her to come back and
face the magistrate, who apparently was treating her with the utmost
kindness. After considerable parleying in Hindustani and English, the
magistrate at last acceded to our wishes, and wrote out a permit for us
to take the girl away from the Cantonment, although he explained again
and again that she or any other woman was of course free to go; they
never attempted to detain a woman against her will, etc., etc. But Katy
was not willing to proceed on any uncertainty, and she then asked about
the fine, and was assured that would be all right.

The magistrate then explained that she had been arrested on "some
criminal charge,"--he did not quite know what--had fled the Cantonment,
been arrested and brought back and fined fifty rupees for contempt
of court. He made no mention of her long imprisonment in addition.
After that he began to set forth to her, in Hindustani (the meaning
of his threats we did not fully understand), that if she went out of
the Cantonment she would never be safe from the insults of soldiers,
nor protected from molestation, nor allowed ever again to see her
relatives, etc., etc., until her courage wavered, and she said, "Then
I don't want to go." At this he thundered at her so angrily that
once again she ran from the court-room, and it was with the utmost
difficulty we persuaded her to go back for the final adjustment of
the case. On her return she began to plead to be allowed to see her
friends; and the magistrate, then turning to us, advised us in a kindly
tone to take her to see her mother and sister before removing her
entirely from them.

This the girl herself desired, so we felt obliged to accede, and she
gave the cabman the address in Hindustani. Returning in the carriage,
down an unfamiliar street, we alighted, and Katy ran ahead in all haste
to find her mother, while we followed after. To our astonishment,
we found we had entered the chakla again, from a side we had not
recognised, and by an entrance which we had never before seen. We took
alarm at once, and hastened on toward the wretched old woman who lay
ill on a cot on the verandah, with whom Katy was talking earnestly.

A big, coarse woman (this was Katy's sister, but it must not be
forgotten that we at this time did not know that her family were so
disreputable) came out and sat down on the cot by the sick woman; but
as soon as she heard enough of the girl's pleading to know that she was
asking permission to escape from her wretched existence, she flew into
a passion and struck Katy, and blow would have followed blow had we not
interfered. Poor Katy flung herself dejectedly into a chair, and could
not summon up courage to follow us against all this opposition; then a
British soldier came up and spoke to her and led her away, while two
or three more British soldiers looked on in contemptuous amusement at
the scene. The poor creature was too cowed in spirit, from constant bad
usage, to resist the determination of officials and soldiers to keep
possession of so attractive a slave.

Weigh the soul of that one dark-skinned heathen girl against the
diseased bodies of a standing army of men, and God knows which has most
weight in his sight, even if a whole materialistic nation may have
forgotten. Men and women, Governments and Armies, cannot, combined,
reduce the estimate which He puts upon one immortal soul; but in a
near judgment-day, these will have to drink the full measure appointed
for such a crime as thwarting a woman in her God-given right to lead
a decent moral life. When a Government begins to drag down the moral
character of its subjects, it has begun to dig out its own foundations.

We talked with over three hundred Cantonment women, held to
prostitution by the iron law of military regulation, collected together
by Government procuresses, who were used as the ultimate tools of
administration in carrying out Lord Roberts' military order for a
sufficient number of attractive women, forced to the indecent exposure
of their persons by misnamed "doctors," under penalty of fine or
expulsion from the Cantonment, which was tantamount to starvation;
imprisoned for several days of each month, even when in perfect health,
in the Lock Hospital; imprisoned for an indefinite length of time in
the hospital whenever found diseased; often turned out when seriously
diseased, with their British children, to starve, or to spread disease
at will among the natives, the final scapegoats of British profligacy;
dismissed to starvation when too old to be any longer "sufficiently
attractive" to the soldier, if only a fresh victim could be found to
take the place; universally so poor as to be weighed down by debts, and
receiving a pittance fixed by military usage, that kept many of them on
the verge of starvation.

What were the circumstances that brought women to such a lot as this?
We will give only a few, in bare outlines, of the many cases not
already mentioned:--

  1. A nurse-maid enticed to the chakla by a British sergeant.

  2. A wife brought by her own husband, the man himself being engaged
  by an officer of the regiment as a servant, and allowed to hold his
  unwilling wife in such servitude.

  3. British, granddaughter of a former Governor-General, daughter of
  a General, wife of a Commissioner; eloped with a soldier, and when
  deserted entrapped by a Mohammedan and kept as a slave, to whom
  British soldiers resorted in troops, almost, because a white woman;
  they paid the price of shame to her native master; rescued when almost
  dead. We found her in a miserably dirty bed at a native Lock Hospital,
  where the Government allowed her four annas (about fourpence) a day
  for subsistence. We ourselves rescued another British woman from
  the clutches of the same Mohammedan slave-holder. We found her in a
  fortified room, built on the top of a large house, a neck-breaking
  outside stairway leading to her abode. She had suffered horribly at
  the hands of the British soldiers admitted to her. Her reason was
  injured beyond repair. In the absence of her master, she was guarded
  by a native servant armed with a knife, who had been instructed in
  her presence to plunge it into her if she tried to escape. A very
  courageous gentleman accompanied us, and succeeded in so frightening
  her master that we were permitted to lead her away.

  4. An orphan seized by a wicked woman and reared to shame.

  5. A young girl brought by her own brother and sold to the chakla.

  6. Cabul girl of high birth who lost her father in the Afghan war. She
  was only twelve when left without protection, and her father's groom
  persuaded her to come away with him under promise of marriage; sold by
  him to shame. She wept bitterly, exclaiming, "Oh, the shame of being
  pointed out as a bazaar woman!" We asked her why she did not go to the
  Cantonment magistrate and plead her own case, for she said she had
  money secreted with which she could take care of herself, if once she
  could get away. She replied, "Why should I tell him? I am only a black
  woman; I fear him." When about to return to the south, we revisited
  this station and hunted this woman up, offering to assist her to
  escape; but her courage failed at the last moment, and we were obliged
  to leave her behind to her fate.

  7. An Egyptian woman from Cairo, enticed away from her home when a
  child and sold to an old woman in Quetta, then carried to India.

  8. A Kashmiri woman; ill-treated by her husband, she ran away with
  another man who promised to make her his wife, but sold her into
  shame. "It is a bad job; I don't like it," she said in the best
  English she could control, while the tears were in her eyes.

  9. A hill girl of respectable family lost her parents and her husband
  (perhaps only betrothed, yet possibly already married), before ten
  years of age. A deceitful woman came to comfort her in her grief and
  unprotected condition, and enticed her to travel with her a month to
  assuage her grief; sold her to a British official, with whom she lived
  one year, when he died. She then became a chakla woman. She was only
  sixteen. She said, "It is a bitter life."

  10. A high-caste Brahmin girl, not able to understand a word of the
  language of her captor, found deserted and starving. The captor
  admitted that she was a perfectly respectable girl, yet she was
  examined by the surgeon, her name entered on the list of prostitutes,
  and taken to the Lock Hospital to be prepared for her fate. The poor
  thing was so grateful to be taken in and fed, and little dreamt of
  what would be demanded of her in return. We tried in vain to make her
  understand us, and to warn her of her fate.

  11. Taken in famine time by the daughter of a sepoy (native soldier).
  The soldier sold her at eleven years of age "to sit in the chakla."
  "In all the years of my life, I have not known one day of happiness;
  my heart is full of wounds," was her pathetic ending of the story.

  12. We witnessed the purchase of a girl by a mahaldarni. A woman
  seized the girl as payment for a debt, and bringing her sold her to
  the mahaldarni in our very presence.

  13. Married at eleven, and widowed almost immediately. After three
  years with her family as a widow, she was so miserable that she ran
  away and wandered in the streets. She was arrested by the police, and
  at the age of fourteen put in the chakla.

  14. Her husband was beating her cruelly, at the age of fourteen, and
  she ran away; a policeman seized her and sent her to the Lock Hospital.

  15. Deserted at the age of eleven by her husband; a British man took
  her by force to his bungalow. When he discarded her, her family would
  not receive her again. She was then "taken by the Government and put
  in the chakla."



III.

The Habitations of Cruelty.


IN March, 1892, we arrived at a huge Cantonment about midnight.
As there was no dak bungalow at the place, we spread our rugs on
the settees in the ladies' waiting-room, and slept till morning.
The dak bungalow is an institution kept up by the Government for
the convenience of military men and their families, although other
travellers take advantage of its shelter, and was preferable to an
hotel for our purpose, for our meals were served in our private rooms
always, and we could lead a very retired life. After breakfast in the
dining-room, we went out and engaged a cab, explaining, as was our
custom, to the driver, that we were Christian missionaries, and in
accordance with the teachings of our religion, we were searching out
the most despised and disreputable of women, to tell them of God's care
for them and to see what we could do for them; therefore we wished him
to drive us to see the chakla women of the Cantonment. He looked a
little bewildered, and then drove off with us.

After traversing a considerable distance, he entered a public garden,
and began to drive slowly, that we might enjoy the flowers and foliage.
We called to him, bidding him drive on rapidly, as we did not care
to see the sights of the Cantonment. He nodded assent, and touching
his horse with the whip, drove away in another direction. Presently
he paused before another object to which he was accustomed to take
visitors. Then we called him from his seat to the cab window, and told
him that if he took us out of our way again, we should be obliged
to leave his cab, call another, and dismiss him. We made sure he
understood exactly what we wished, and he admitted that he did, but
intimated that he scarcely thought it a proper place for us to visit.
However, he consented, and drove off, and in a few moments brought
us to an open field where two regiments were encamped. Fortunately,
some drill of an unusual sort was going on, and a good many people
had driven out to witness it; this, therefore, absorbed the attention
of all. The Lord appointed all our seasons for us during our Indian
investigations.

Taking a road leading to the back part of the camp, we left our cab
and driver where several other cabs were standing, and walking along
together, observed by no one, entered one of the ten little tents we
found enclosed in a sort of fence of matting. The women received us
cordially, although with real astonishment at such unusual visitors.
The mahaldarni was not a bad-meaning woman in many regards, and she
told us, with great satisfaction, of a sister of hers who had been
promoted from the rank of a common soldiers' woman to be a mahaldarni,
saying that she had left off her wickedness, prayed four times a day
and read her Koran. She joined with her girls in expressions of utter
abhorrence of the examinations to which the girls were subjected,
saying, "Shame! Shame!"

She told us how the soldiers, when in drink, knocked the poor girls
about in a most cruel manner, and reaching her own conclusion as to
the meaning of our call, advised us not to join their number, telling
us that the city was far preferable. She and the girls told of the
heavy fines to which they would be liable if they did not go to the
examinations, or attempted to leave the Lock Hospital when held there.
She said if they made any fuss about the fine, then they would be
imprisoned. A military guard was placed within the enclosure, in one
of the tents; but he had either gone to sleep, or wandered out to get
a view of the exercises that were going on near by. We gave a simple
gospel talk through our interpreter, and she sang and prayed with the
girls; then we made our way to the women of the adjoining Rest Camp.

Again we entered the enclosure surrounding the little tents, and
reached the women without attracting the attention of the guard. They
told the same story of compulsion and fines continually hanging over
their heads. Almost every Cantonment girl we ever questioned, was held
to her wretched life by debt and fines, so that she could not think
of getting free without being apprehended on account of them. Here
likewise they warned us not to join them, but go rather to the city.
Again we talked of Jesus, the Friend of the oppressed, and after song
and prayer, bade them good-bye.

Returning to our cab, we told our driver to take us to the Lock
Hospital; and after a long drive under the burning sun, we stopped
before buildings enclosed within a very high brick wall with
broken glass on its top to prevent the escape of inmates. A large,
strongly-spiked gateway, with double doors, gave the impression of a
veritable prison; and there, standing in the open gateway, was an
uniformed armed guard. Previous experiences had not led us to expect
anything quite so formidable, although there was generally some sort of
a guard or watchman at hand, and the native physician usually resided
on the premises. We had often said, and promised God, that, sacred as
was the nature of the work, we would never prevaricate in order to
cover up our real object, if closely questioned. We were not ordinary
detectives, playing a part, but Christian women, and the difference was
not to be lost sight of.

Our interpreter had not been instructed as to the full significance
of our work, but was content to ask few questions if only she might
be allowed to follow her bent freely and preach the gospel, which we
gladly encouraged and helped in every way possible, for we should
have felt that our mission was very incomplete had we met these women
solely to hear their pitiful stories, and never utter a word to them
of the love of the Heavenly Father, in the midst of such distressing
surroundings. Our interpreter always carried religious tracts with
her; and while we were hesitating to know how to encounter the armed
sentinel, in the simplicity of her holy zeal she walked up to him,
gave him a tract, and said a few words of a helpful nature. The guard
noticed no more than that some ladies were being delayed at the gate,
so he motioned us through, continuing his consideration of the leaflet,
and forgetting to ask our errand. How easy for God to hide his own as
He had hidden us again and again that day from guard and sentinel! We
have frequently been asked how we escaped observation. We can only say
that we made but little effort on our own part to do this, and trusted
the Lord to do it all for us.

A dozen women gathered around us in a ward of the hospital that day.
With them we had a little service, as usual, after which they eagerly
poured out their sad life stories, and told of the oppressions of
the system under which they were held in an evil life. The hospital
nurse showed us through the wards and the examination room, where we
found the grim rack for the torture of the examination, brutal to the
patient, but convenient for the surgeon to do as much villainy as
possible in a given length of time. No diseases are so rife or dreadful
in their consequences but that their compulsory treatment, when it
involves the indecent exposure of woman or man, is worse in its effects
than the disease itself. And this in the case of actual disease. What,
then, can be said as an excuse for such exposure simply to find out
whether there be disease? Yes, further, what possible plea can be made
when the object of such compulsory exposure is to discover whether the
subject is "fit"[4] for a life of infamy?

Mrs. Butler has well expressed the encouragement to vice that the
compulsory examination of women leads to in the following words: "We
all approve of healing disease and taking care of the sick, no matter
what has brought on their disease, no matter how sinful and degraded
they may be. The Abolitionists have always pleaded for plenty of free
hospital accommodation for men and women afflicted with this curse. But
it will be clear to you that this law is not for simple healing, as
Christ would have us heal, caring for all, whatever their character,
and whatever their disease. This law is invented to provide beforehand,
that men may be able to sin without bodily injury--if that were
possible, which it is not. If a burglar, who had broken into my house
and stolen my goods, were to fall and be hurt, I would be glad to get
him into a hospital and have him nursed and cured; but I would not put
a ladder up against my window at night and leave the windows open, in
order that he might steal my goods without danger of breaking his neck."

But to return to the Lock Hospital mentioned. The nurse produced the
records for our examination. In the correspondence book was the copy of
a letter from the military surgeon, informing the Cantonment magistrate
of six girls suspected of disease, and asking that they be apprehended
and sent to the hospital for examination. That looked simple enough,
and why not?

Imagine yourself the one apprehended, and the case assumes a different
aspect. A policeman comes to your door and reads a warrant for your
arrest as a common prostitute; you ask on what authority; you are
informed that the name of the informant is not made public, because
if a man can be induced to help trace out diseases--it being regarded
as a "point of honour" to inform other men where danger lurks--his
confession must not be made known, it would injure his reputation. (We
are now describing the exact conditions always existent where there is
compulsory examination of women.)

You contend that you have a right to your good name, and that it is a
principle of justice that no one can be punished on secret and unproved
evidence, and that it is punishment of the worst sort to be taken by a
policeman through the streets to a hospital used exclusively for the
treatment of a certain class of disorders. You are then informed that
unless you will go at once without any trouble, you will be taken out
of the town in which you live, set down as a common vagrant by the
roadside, and if ever again found within the limits of the city in
which your parents, brothers, and sisters live, you will be arrested
and put in jail. What will you do? Yet these were exactly the laws
under which these poor women, among whom we were spending the day,
lived.

By such a system of delivering over the bodies of women as public
property, any woman of humble circumstances upon whom any man of
lecherous design casts his eyes, could be made to come to his terms of
existence by the aid of the police force, if necessary, and magistrates
of evil design could condemn any woman to a life of prostitution. And
in this hospital all this wicked compulsion was set down in a book,
every page of which was headed, "Prostitutes attending Voluntary
Inspections."

From the Lock Hospital we drove to a large chakla, and talked with
a group of about twenty girls, among them a little girl of twelve,
and another of four. Everywhere we went among the degraded women of
India, we found children in the chaklas, these Government-regulated
brothels, with their ever-present guards, so that Englishmen knew
perfectly that children were being trained under Government regulation
for prostitution. The advocates of licensed prostitution for India are
fond of insisting as an excuse for licensing the evil, that it does
no great harm because the recruits come from "the prostitute caste."
Repeatedly we made enquiries of Englishmen, native physicians, and in
one case applied to the census office for some information concerning
this special class. Its existence was practically denied, excepting
those cases which can be found in every land, in which women of all
classes may fall into shame and train their daughters after their own
evil ways. It is scarcely necessary in this connection to mention
the temple and nautch girls of India, who are found in civil lines.
They are a wholly distinct class from the enslaved women who are set
apart to minister to the vices of the British soldiers. Among the
latter we found Hindus of all castes, from high-caste Brahmins down;
and we also found Mohammedans, Arabs, Egyptians, Afghans, Kashmiris,
Jewesses,--recruits, in fact, from those among whom "caste" does not
prevail. If it were true that all these chakla women constitute one
caste, for what object did the Government of India, in times past,
provide invariably (so far as our observation extends) for a record
of the "caste" of the women to whom registration tickets were given?
The ticket which we purchased of a woman at Meean Meer in 1892 (a
fac-simile of which is given in this volume, _Appendix B_) recorded her
"name," "caste," "registered number," "place of residence," "date of
registry," and "personal appearance."[5]

But there is a class in India being trained to prostitution, though
not a "caste," properly speaking, and they are getting their training
in the brothels established and managed by Englishmen, and many of the
candidates in this class are the children of Englishmen, who have been
deliberately placed there, or allowed to go there, by their inhuman
fathers. This is, properly speaking, the prostitute class of India,
those born to their fate; the reader may judge whether the existence of
the class justifies licensing it for the purpose.

In the chakla we sang, "Where He leads me I will follow," and its
interpretation constituted our Gospel message. With tears in their
eyes the girls assured us, with characteristic gesture, that we were
"on their eyes and on their hearts"; in other words, had won their
affections; and spoke feelingly of the honour it was to them that
Englishwomen should come to see them, saying that usually Englishmen
forbade their wives to even look at them. One girl said that when at
Cawnpore missionaries used to come to them, and that for days after
their visits her heart was so sore that it seemed as if it would burst.
The girls stood in the doorway, many of them with streaming eyes, and
waved good-bye as we departed, begging us to come again soon.

We hastened to the railway station for the three o'clock train. When we
alighted, we spoke a few kind words to our cabman, for he had served us
most faithfully, all these hours under the mid-day glare of the sun,
after so unpromising a beginning. We wished to pay him well, and asked
him to set his own price on his services. The simple, rough native man
hesitated a moment, stammered something unintelligible, burst into
tears, and averting his face with noble shame, said, "I don't want
anything at all. I never saw anything like this before; I would like to
help, too." Thrusting a coin into his unwilling hand, ample for both
fee and present, we hastened to our seats in the car, and were soon
rolling away to our next destination. We wrote up our notes of the
day's doings on the way, and arrived at our next field of operations
the following morning at two o'clock, stealing into another Cantonment
unobserved, excepting by the Heavenly Father, without whom not even a
sparrow can fall. We give this history of one day as a sample; the work
was heavy and painful; but we encouraged each other often with the
words, "Even if we fall by the way, we could not die in better work."

We visited a Rest Camp at Meerut. As usual, we had no difficulty in
passing the sentinels; God took care of that. We learnt from official
records that the regiment had only been in India two weeks; yet the
complete paraphernalia of vice was at hand. There were fourteen little
tents for women, and near their quarters a huge tent pitched for those
who wished to smoke opium. Think of it, fathers and mothers, boys of
the age of from eighteen years upwards, supplied by their superior
officers, before they could have made a demand for the same, with every
convenience for giving themselves over to debauchery! The sight of
their fresh young faces touched us deeply.

At another place, away up on the northern frontier, we found only
five girls; the others had somehow escaped their cruel bondage. As we
entered the gateway of the mud wall that surrounded their quarters,
a native man standing near threw up his hands in great astonishment,
exclaiming, "O God! ('Allah'), how wonderful that ladies should come to
such a place!" It was a dreary, weird scene. The evening was piercingly
cold, and we were well wrapped. The old mahaldarni and her girls
were trying to warm themselves by a wretched little pot of charcoal,
stretching their thin fingers by turns over the coals.

While we talked, the sudden night of a country without a twilight
came on, although it was not really very late. One of the girls
lighted a native lamp of the rudest sort--a bit of wick floating in an
earthenware cup of oil--and set it in a niche in the wall. The room
was unfurnished excepting the _charpoy_, or cot bed, on which we sat.
The girls and mahaldarni sat, native fashion, on the floor, their
cotton chuddars and skirts fluttering in the cruel wind that came in at
the open archway, for door there was none.

They said the men of their regiment were very bad, and often when
drunk beat them and robbed them, not only refusing to pay them any
money, but even taking away their cotton quilts and selling them to
their own native servants for a few pice with which to buy drink. They
described the case of one woman who was beaten terribly by a soldier,
and cut in the arms and breast; after this, several of the girls had
effected their escape. We have often spoken of this as one of the most
deeply shaded pictures in our memory, not only because of the dreary,
comfortless surroundings, but because of the cruelty and oppression
that weighed these helpless women down, from which there seemed no hope
of escape. We talked to them out of the fullness of our sympathy, and
promised to pray and work in their behalf, that they, and others like
them, might have an opportunity to turn to a good life.

But turning from the physical injury inflicted on these poor women, we
wish to present a view of their mental sufferings. It has been urged
by many advocates of the regulation of vice that the whole nature of
a woman was changed by her sinful life--that she had no sensitiveness
and no deep sense of the degradation of her position. We utterly
deny this on behalf of the scores of women with whom we have talked
in India--whether of high or of low caste, Hindoo or Mohammedan, and
of whatever nationality; whether brought up in virtue and afterwards
betrayed, or brought up from infancy in vicious surroundings. We
deny it even in regard to the mahaldarnis placed over the women, whom
avarice might blind, and the ordinary routine duties of their position
might harden. Yet when their womanly feelings were appealed to, they
always responded, and felt shame with and for the women under their
care.

In all our conversations there was shown a most remarkable patience,
on the part of the women, in regard to the various inconveniences and
hardships which the regulations entailed upon them. The fire of their
hatred and indignation all centred upon _the heart of the regulations,
the examinations_, and the violation of womanhood which these
examinations were felt to be. It is of no use for any one to deny to us
that these women have deep feelings in regard to their wrongs and their
shame. We have felt the beating of their aching hearts against our own;
we have heard histories that throbbed with the strong agony of betrayed
innocence; we have seen a hopeless woe in eyes that will haunt us for
ever.

At Peshawar, the women said, when speaking of the great hardship
of being turned out of the Cantonment, "Where can we go to? We are
prostitutes. No one would give us work." And again, "Every one under
this Government is treated well but ourselves; _we only are despised_."

We do not present these facts with any thought of taking our position
with those who argue that the better regulation of vice implies a
better protection of the degraded women; but rather to show that in the
working out of such regulations the _woman_ is absolutely lost sight
of, and only the _prostitute_ is considered. Every interest in the
woman's character, happiness, health, life itself, is made subservient
to the health and convenience of the British soldier. Every assertion
that would put a humanitarian gloss on the regulation of vice is utter
hypocrisy.

At Meerut, where there were a good many women present, one, without
any question whatever on our part, suddenly broke forth into the most
intense expressions of disgust at the Governmental regulation of vice,
in which those girls gathered about her sympathized, one especially
taking part in the conversation from time to time, and corroborating
what was being said. She said, "The Queen does not approve of this; it
is the Commander-in-Chief and the officers who are doing these things!
Oh, what a shame that the Government does these things!" Then she burst
into a passion of indignation, describing in vivid language and with
a natural eloquence of gesture the whole shameful proceeding, and the
humiliation to which they were subjected.

Words fail to convey the force, and fire, and pathos with which that
poor, untaught woman pleaded the cause of her sisters. It was one voice
out of many protesting against this cruel wrong, and representing the
undying dignity of a woman's nature, even when forced into a deeper
abyss than she ever voluntarily chose to enter. We asked if the other
women felt as this one did, and they all answered indignantly, "We
all hate it." The first woman cried out, "It is very disgusting; oh,
_shame_!" We told them it was a grief to us that those who called
themselves Christians should do such things, and that they ought not to
bear the name. She replied bitterly, "Yes; the Commander-in-Chief, the
Colonel, and all of them, all the way down--your Christian men!--they
all favour these things. The Queen does not countenance it, for she has
daughters of her own; and she cares for her daughters in India also. It
is the Commander-in-Chief" (meaning Lord Roberts).

The accounts we have given in previous pages reveal the extremely
tender age at which some of these girls were thrust into a life of
shame by court proceedings under the Contagious Diseases Acts, when
they were openly enforced. Two Benares girls declared they were taken
up by the police at fourteen, and one Sitapur girl said she was sold
to a mahaldarni at eleven. Much has been said of the horrors of
child-marriage in India, and these atrocities should not be minimized,
even though we bear in mind the usually slender type of Eastern
manhood; but what shall we say when the robust British soldier has
had placed at his mercy a little girl of fourteen years old, of the
delicate Oriental type; and this done by regular process of law "_to
preserve his health_"?

Then again considering the heathen training of these women, we were led
to expect that we should find blindness of the moral sense in relation
to this sort of wrong-doing. On the contrary, they expressed great
shame and humiliation, never tried to justify their sinful acts, spoke
almost universally of their hatred of the life, shed bitter tears,
and told us how burdened their hearts were in thinking of their sins.
Unlike what we met elsewhere in speaking of religion to the natives,
they had little desire for controversy. With not a single exception,
we were made welcome, treated courteously, and listened to and blessed
for our message. Even in the case of the mahaldarnis we found them not
inaccessible, but inclined to expressions of contempt for the whole
system of regulation, and of apology for being the hirelings of such a
system--an excuse which must have more weight than in a country where
industries are open to women. Rahiman of Meerut was an exception. She
said she considered her business perfectly legitimate, because she was
in a "Government position."

Several times we asked the women, "What do you wish us to do for you?"
and were surprised at the answer. Desperately poor as many were, there
was never an appeal for money; rather they said, "Pray for us;" or, "If
you would build us homes, so that we could go to them, and not sin any
more, what more could we ask?" and, "If you will help us to have the
examinations stopped." Above all, we were astonished at the appeals
made to us concerning the latter outrage. We told none of them our
whole object in coming among them, yet with great care they described
and expressed their abhorrence of the examinations, as well as the
wickedness and illegality of them; and in two or three instances they
mentioned that they had heard of ladies interested in their behalf, and
suggested the possibility that we might do something for them. In one
instance several of the women, after telling us of their humiliation,
clasped their hands together, and lifting their eyes to heaven, prayed
to God that He would "help us to help them." They invariably exonerated
the Queen from all blame in this matter, saying, "She is a woman
herself; she would not do this. She cares for her daughters in India."

Says Mrs. Josephine Butler: "It is impossible not to think of the
fathers and mothers of the young Englishmen, mere boys, who go out to
India as soldiers, and who are trained in this disgusting manner by
the military authorities; not only in the indulgence of their vices,
but in cowardly and brutal cruelties towards the weaker sex. It seemed
a grand object indeed on the part of Lord Roberts and his subordinates
to aim at sending back their discharged soldiers to England free from
physical disease, regardless of their manliness, their moral character,
their respect for women, and decent habits of life! Would not the loss
of these be bought too dearly by the mere exemption from physical
disease, even if this could be made possible?"

After months of toil, we were now far up towards the north-western
frontier of India. We requested our cabman to drive us to the quarters
of the Government women of the Cantonment. We left the cab just outside
the narrow street. As we walked past the native shops and turned into a
little sort of lane, a woman shouted in great concern from her doorway
to us, "Why do you come here? Don't come here; all are prostitutes who
live here." With a smile of re-assurance we replied, "We know it, and
you are just the women we are seeking; we have a message for you."

With surprise, she then welcomed us most warmly and invited us in,
saying she would go and call all the women and bring them to hear the
message. In a few minutes chairs had been borrowed for us to sit upon,
and nine native women were clustered on the floor at our feet.

We both exclaimed regarding the remarkable personal appearance of
the woman who had addressed us first. She closely resembled, in fine
bearing and apparent intellectuality, a much-beloved mutual friend in
Chicago, a woman of more than local fame in scientific pursuits; it
touched us deeply. With utmost simplicity and confidence this woman
came and seated herself by Mrs. Andrew's side, leaning her arm across
her lap, and many a time during the interview that followed, her
earnest, wistful eyes met ours, while Mrs. Andrew gently stroked her
shoulder, her heart almost breaking with pity as the woman told her sad
story.

A plaintive native song was sung by our interpreter, and tears flowed
freely. After that the simple Gospel message was given. They told us
then some of the painful details of the conditions under which they
were living, saying that they must either meet these conditions or be
expelled from the Cantonment, and added, "If we are expelled, where
shall we go? we must leave all our friends, and no one will give us
work. It means great hardship; we would starve." Speaking of the
hateful examinations, they said the Queen had forbidden these things,
but the officers yet compelled them to go on.

The woman at Mrs. Andrew's side told us the following: "Some time ago
a lady in Calcutta saw a woman weeping as she was going to the Lock
Hospital with other women. The lady asked her why she wept. She told
why she was obliged to go, and how she hated the examinations.

"The lady could not understand this, but took the woman home with her,
and closely questioned into the matter. Then the lady said to her,
'This ought not to be,' and promised that she would do all she could
for them. Then the lady went home to England and talked to the Queen.
She spoke with wonderful power in behalf of the poor women of India.
She said to the Queen that she (the Queen) was a woman, and these in
India were women, and their shame was the Queen's shame, and for
them to be outraged was as though she (the Queen) was outraged, that
it was a shame for _women_ to be treated so when a woman was Queen.
Then the Queen ordered it to be stopped. But the officers still carry
it on." This she added sorrowfully, all the other women joining in
the assertion. Then a sudden thought came into the woman's face, and
she asked: "Are you like that lady of Calcutta, going to try to do
something to help us?" We told them we would work and pray for them
that help might come and homes be provided for them. They blessed and
thanked us over and over. We told them, "We are your sisters;" they
replied, "_We are your slaves_."

Then the woman whom we have especially described lifted her hand and
with impressive solemnity uttered a vow that she would no longer lead a
life of shame.

The next morning we went back to the same place and stopped before
the open door. The old mother was sitting on the floor by a little
charcoal fire preparing the breakfast. The two daughters of the house
were putting their simple little abode in order for the day. The
penitent one came forward and smiled so faint a welcome, and seemed so
embarrassed at our coming, that we at first thought she was offended;
but they exclaimed almost instantly, "We were awake at midnight last
night talking of you, and we said it must have been the true God who
had sent you to tell us of your religion." We replied that they had
been sorely on our hearts, so that we could not sleep, and that we too
were awake at midnight, talking of them and praying for them. They then
poured out blessings upon us, with hands clasped in prayer.

As we talked earnestly and lovingly to them, through our interpreter,
the one who had made the solemn vow came forward and knelt beside
Mrs. Andrew, who was standing, and timidly took her hand. Mrs. Andrew
laid it on the poor girl's shoulder as on the day before, but the
interpreter said, "Put your hand on her head; she is asking you to
bless her." Tears streamed from the eyes of the penitent, and she shook
with sobs as Mrs. Andrew fervently blessed her in the name of our God,
and pleaded with Him for the way to open for her escape from bondage.
Then in like manner the other daughter came and was blessed. Then the
poor old mother threw herself with her forehead on the ground, laying
her hands on Mrs. Andrew's feet, and while Mrs. Andrew prayed over her,
groaned and cried bitterly, saying, "I am a sinner, I am a sinner. For
twenty-five years I led a life of shame, and brought up my daughters to
it."

We then wrote down their names, promising to pray for them, a pledge
which we have faithfully kept ever since.

FOOTNOTES:

[4] An official form of expression.

[5] For forms of tickets of registration of prostitutes see
Departmental Committee Report (1893), pages 12, 331, 334, and 335.



IV.

The Contagious Diseases Acts.


THE advocates of State-regulated fornication contend that diseases due
to vice will be best checked by licensed prostitution, combined with
medical care. The Abolitionists hold that morality alone is sufficient,
and that vice is not necessary. It is a square issue; shall it be
immorality and medicine, or shall it be morality?

The Regulationists believe that vice is necessary; the Abolitionists
believe that vice is not necessary, and that virtue must be demanded. A
memorial signed by one hundred and twenty-three British women, of whom
over half belong to the titled aristocracy, presented to the British
Government April 24, 1897, declares:--

"We feel it is the duty of the State, which of necessity, collects
together large numbers of unmarried men in military service, to protect
them from the consequences of evils which are, in fact, unavoidable."

A memorial, on the other hand, of sixty-one thousand four hundred and
thirty-seven British women, and presented to the Government July 31,
1897, asserts:--

"No permanent diminution of disease will ever be attained by measures
which do not strike primarily at the vice itself."

The leader of the sixty-one thousand and more, Mrs. Josephine Butler,
answers to the statement of the one hundred and twenty-three: "The
confidence of ultimate victory based on a foundation which cannot be
shaken, enables us to regard with composure the forward advance and
claims of materialism and fleshly indulgence, and to compassionate
those--furious against us to-day--who will be beaten to-morrow, and who
will be forced, before the 'great cloud of witnesses' in heaven and
earth, to confess themselves defeated and deserving of defeat."

The cause of venereal disease is promiscuous relations carried to
excess. The hope of eradicating such disease, then, by licensing its
cause, betokens the extreme of moral blindness, and contradicts all
science. Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell says: "We may as well expect to
cure typhoid fever whilst allowing sewer gas to permeate the house;
or cholera, whilst bad drinking water is being taken, as try to cure
venereal disease whilst its cause remains unchecked."

A recent official plea for licensed prostitution in the Cantonments
of India declares: "The efforts to teach the soldiers habits of
self-control" have "signally failed." We wish for a moment to consider
the efforts that have been used in the past. There lies before us a
copy of the "Report of the Army Health Association." It was printed at
Meerut, India, in 1892. We have also the subsequent reports for several
years. In speaking of the efforts put forth to teach self-control, much
is made of the work of this Association (see Departmental Committee
Report, 1897, page 13), as a means that has been used. This report of
the Army Health Association has printed on its cover such texts as,
"Keep thyself pure," "He that soweth to his flesh shall of the flesh
reap corruption," etc.; giving the impression that it is a religious
document. In fact it is interspersed all through with Scripture
quotations.

The introduction is signed by a Major-General, and the body of the
report is written by an army chaplain, secretary to the Association,
who has the title of Bachelor of Divinity. Four reverends beside, army
chaplains, are named among the list of officers of the Association.
The language employed in the report is often very obscure, and needs
close analysis to get at its real meaning. The introduction is a plea
for the re-establishment of the abolished system of Regulation, and
is little more than the expression of a desire to have legal sanction
for what they were already doing illegally, as the report shows, and
it is doubtless for this very reason that the language is so obscure.
In one place it speaks of the "Gospel duty of healing diseases in a
compulsory way," and as a precedent refers to the "Gospel record of
healing even when a voice had come from the healed protesting against
the cure." Certainly blasphemy could scarcely go further than to liken
the compulsory indecent exposure of a woman to a miracle of our Lord.
Every soldier should "do his best," says the report, "by the blessing
of Almighty God, to resist all temptation leading to the evil." Close
inspection proves that in this case "the evil" in the mind of the
writer is not the vice but the disease. The soldier is recommended to
the task of attaining to "self-command on pass," _i.e._, when outside
the region of licensed brothels.

The report states that a "Handbook" has been circulated "to all fresh
arrivals in India," and the closing chapter of the report is a reprint
of that Handbook, which is especially designed for army chaplains to
circulate among the soldiers as a "religious" tract. Interspersed with
the quotations of Scripture texts, is abominable instruction to the
effect that a young man who will confine his visits to the Government
licensed brothel can trust the Lord to keep him from contracting
disease. This "religious" tract promises to keep infected women out of
the chakla, and warns the soldier not to go "in an underhand way" to
houses where he will not be protected from "disease."

O mothers! can you conceive of what would be your feeling to discover
that your eighteen-year-old boy, as is the son of many an English
mother, was under such "gospel" instruction as this! "We shall never
forget what we owe to Lord Roberts," says the report; and we might
have anticipated that the author of the "Infamous Memorandum" would
likewise be the supporter of such measures for the instruction of young
soldiers. Sir George White, who succeeded Lord Roberts as Commander of
the Indian forces, said, in the Viceregal Council held in India, July
8, 1897, that "Every effort should also be made to warn young soldiers
of the consequences of immorality in this country, to point out to them
the terrible risks which they run, and to appeal to their higher moral
instincts and to their pride in their manhood to avoid connections
that carry with them grave danger that they will return home shattered
wrecks, unfit alike for military duty or civil life."

There is not one word here as though evil connections were likewise to
be avoided, even if they were not supposed to carry danger of physical
disease as a result. The "moral" teaching seems to have been all of
that immoral sort that points toward the Government house of shame
rather than to the seventh commandment. How many young soldiers may
not have met their first temptation by having a superior officer point
them to the Government-regulated chakla! Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell says
truly: "The first indispensable condition in the prevention of disease
is the steady discouragement of promiscuous intercourse. Now I assert
positively that such discouragement has never been seriously tried in
the army, by Government, but only by unofficial efforts--efforts which
are most valuable, but entirely lacking in the force of organization,
and in the important recognition and help which Government alone can
afford."

It is easy to _assume_ that the compulsory periodical examination of
women will check diseases due to vice; but the assumption has never
been proved. The statistics of the years during which the C. D. Acts
prevailed in certain military stations in Great Britain, as compared
with the statistics of later years, show a marked decrease since
repeal took place, and therefore that the compulsory examinations
in no way diminished disease, but rather the contrary. And when an
unbiased person thoroughly investigates the history of the controversy
on the subject, and is made acquainted with the course of deceit
which has been practised in the past by Anglo-Indian[6] advocates of
licensed vice, in order to maintain an odious system, a belief in
Indian military assertions will not be inspired. The statement is
being heralded to the world that over half the British army in India
is suffering from diseases due to vice. Yet Lord George Hamilton,
Secretary of State for India, was obliged to explain in the House
of Commons, January 25, 1897, that while it had been reported that
the aggregate of admissions to hospital for venereal diseases among
the British troops in India amounted in 1895 to 522 per thousand,
"This does not mean that 522 men per thousand were separately and
individually admitted, still less does it indicate that 522 soldiers
per thousand are incapacitated for duty from this cause. It is
calculated on the latest returns that an average permanent reduction
of 46 per thousand is the loss entailed by these diseases." In other
words, instead of over half being incapacitated from military duty,
less than one in twenty is off duty from this cause mentioned.
The larger number, which is calculated to startle the public into
submission to the demands of certain Anglo-Indian officials, has been
secured on the assumption that every "admission" into hospital means a
fresh case, whereas it has been conceded that all re-admissions from
relapse, and every stage of the progress of disease which requires
a new diagnosis, has been reckoned as an "admission." A Member of
Parliament who has been enquiring about the hospital records, says:

  "I have before me the hospital sheet of a man who was in hospital
  from January 1st to January 25th in one year. During that time the
  medical description of his disease was changed four times, and the man
  is formally entered and discharged and re-admitted on each of these
  occasions, the date of each discharge and admission being entered
  in the column provided for the purpose. So that this one man, who
  has been only once in hospital during the year, actually furnishes
  four 'admissions' to the official record. The same man was again in
  hospital from the 1st to the 30th of May, in the following year,
  during which time the diagnosis being three times changed, he was
  entered as admitted and discharged three times."

Statistics compiled on this basis are absolutely worthless for the
purposes of argument, and indicate, when so used, a lack of conscience
as to exact truthfulness. The official figures of the Indian Army
(included in the Report of the Departmental Committee of 1897, strongly
advocating a return to licensed prostitution), lie before us. It cannot
be said that such a report would be likely to minimize the amount of
disease, yet this report, on page 9, distinctly states: "In 1895 an
average of 45 men per thousand, or 3,200 in a force of 71,031 British
soldiers in India, were constantly in hospital for venereal diseases."
Certainly this is sufficiently conclusive. The statement is heralded
to the world that all England is becoming infected from the troops of
diseased soldiers who return yearly to the home-land. One advocate of
licensed prostitution in India says that "thirteen per cent." of the
British soldiers are "annually invalided home hopelessly incurable for
military purposes." But referring to the same official statistics,
embodied in the Departmental Committee's Report, we find that from
the year 1887 to the year 1895, 681 men out of the force of 70,000
and more, were invalided home from these diseases, or, on an average,
76 men annually out of the whole force of 70,000; that is, _one-ninth
of one per cent._ Such unworthy attempts to frighten an unwilling
Christian public into acceding to the return to a system of licensed
prostitution, cannot be too strongly condemned. Many well-meaning
persons, on the assumption that "figures will not lie," are repeating
these exaggerated assertions, and will not take the trouble of
investigating for themselves. The Army Sanitary Commission testified
in 1894 that "a compulsory Lock Hospital system in India has proved a
failure." There could be no higher authority to quote; and the attempt
to check diseases of this sort by the compulsory Lock Hospital system
had then been carried on for the good part of a century in India. If
the case could not be proved by such a prolonged experiment, involving
such injustice to women, surely all honest people should be ready to
favour its abandonment.

But it is proposed now in certain quarters to examine men as well as
women. Two wrongs do not make a right. Equality of degradation is not
the sort of equality for Christians to desire. Bring the test home.
Could the reader, without committing sin, go to a physician to be
examined in order to discover whether he or she is "fit" to practise
fornication? Then the State that requires such an act becomes guilty
in the sight of God of committing the act. The guilt of that which is
done under actual compulsion rests wholly upon the State or individual
that thus enforces wrong-doing. The one who advocates the compulsory
examination of women stands guilty before God as the perpetrator of the
outrage. It is a fearful thing when the State becomes the perpetrator
of such sin. We know it is argued that the women and men subjected to
such regulations would be only those who are willing to submit. We
will dwell on that point a little further on; at present it is enough
to say, that because a thief is willing to steal, the State is no less
guilty that obliges him to steal.

Certain women are, it seems, being deceived by the pretence that
laws are to be passed which will compel men to attend the periodical
examination. What is the use of women clamouring for such a law as long
as _men enact and enforce all our laws_? Men will never legislate
themselves into the degradations and inconveniences of the compulsory
periodical examination, and go to reside in hospitals as long as they
are afflicted with disease. Will the Cantonment magistrate leave his
judicial bench to go and sit in the Lock Hospital idly until he is
no longer a source of danger to the community? Will the colonel of a
regiment leave his soldiers to mutiny while he goes to reside in a Lock
Hospital for a term of weeks? Such talk is the merest nonsense until
only men of good morals control military affairs, and if they did there
would be small demand for Lock Hospitals in India. The young soldiers
could be readily trained to decency were it not for the utterly
dishonouring views of life held by most of the high-titled officials
over them. On this very proposal to examine men, the Secretary for War,
Lord Lansdowne, said in the House of Lords, in the debate that took
place May 17, 1897: "I have discussed that proposal with many high
authorities, and I am bound to tell your lordships that the conclusion
to which I am disposed to arrive is that this practice of regular
inspection did not produce the desired effect; and that it was, on the
contrary, regarded, and rightly regarded, by the men as a brutalizing
and degrading practice." It has therefore been boldly determined and
declared that men shall not be subjected to periodical examination
(although there is not the faintest possibility of their ever being
subjected to this humiliation by physicians of the opposite sex), for
it is "brutalizing and degrading."[7] Yet it is these very men who
are _directly_ responsible for bringing disease back to England; for
the native women do not go to England. The argument is, that since it
brutalizes and degrades men to cause them to be examined, that they
may not propagate disease in England, therefore the native women of
India must be brutalized and degraded. It is useless to assert that
the practice will not degrade women; we know that the moral nature
of a woman is at least as susceptible of being injured by enforced
immodesty as that of a man; in fact, as soon as it would serve any
purpose in making a point in the interest of self, these very men would
boldly proclaim, probably, the greater moral susceptibility of woman.
It seems the extreme of servility for women to come to the front at
this time, and in the face of the utter repudiation of all intention
of examining men, declare for the examination of women. When men will
not yield their dignity one jot, even for the sake of preserving the
health of those women of England who are to become their future wives,
what insolent hypocrisy for them to persuade deluded women to help them
to bring women under practices so "degrading and brutalizing!" What
infinite capacity of servility in the nature of women who will advocate
such degrading, brutalizing treatment of women!

But, we may be asked, Shall women show no concern for the "innocent
wives and children" of diseased men? Again we ask, Which wives and
which children--the British or the Indian? There are hundreds of such
wives and children who have been forsaken by husbands and fathers.
There is almost a nation of Eurasians who curse the day they were
given an unwelcome existence. And their mothers, in large numbers,
were honestly married, to their best belief and intention. Here are
the _real_ wives and the _real_ children in the sight of a just God,
and to them should England's attention be first turned. The chaklas
hold many such unwilling prisoners, left there by treacherous husbands
and fathers. Some day this wife of the officer or soldier will be
turned out to perish of the disease her system could no longer throw
off, and the children will either be retained as soldiers' prostitutes
or sent out to share the fate of the diseased mother. The women of
England are being besought to turn their eyes on the future wives of
British officers and soldiers; it would be for England's lasting good
would they but persistently keep their eyes on the British officers'
and soldiers' _present_ wives and children in the far-off East. Were
attention more persistently called to the Indian wife of the British
soldier, there would be much less likelihood of his finding opportunity
to entrap an innocent wife in the home-land.

It was suggested, in the first instance, by Sir George White, successor
to Lord Roberts as Commander-in-Chief of the forces in India, and
re-incorporated in the despatch of the Secretary of State as to
immediate steps to be taken to check venereal disease, that female
medical assistants be employed to conduct the examinations. It is our
belief that respectable women-physicians wish to treat disease--not
prostitution. Even if such were given the full control of Lock
Hospitals, which is not likely, we wonder how many would like to return
to their own country bearing certificates for faithful service, such
as Mahaldarni Ezergee of the Cantonment of Rawal Pindi displayed to us
with such evident pride, that she had been trained in other besides
the ordinary duties of a mahaldarni: "The soldiers were remarkably
healthy while the prostitutes were under her charge." Again, another
officer had testified: "Few soldiers were in the hospital while the
women were under her care." The surgeon of the regiment had testified:
"Disease has been reduced to a minimum among the soldiers," while
the women were under Ezergee, "superintendent of the prostitutes."
This is what Lady Cook describes in a recent American periodical as
"ministrations to women," while the certificates show that everything
that was done was valued only as it protected the soldiers in vice;
the indications as to the health of the women are never once even
commented upon--all the work for women was done _with reference to
men_. This being the fact, it is no wonder that in the official reply
from India, dated May 18, 1897, and signed by the Viceroy, Sir George
White, and others, it is declared that "It is doubtful whether the
women possessing the necessary medical qualifications, and of a status
sufficiently good to preclude the possibility of their receiving bribes
from the women they have to examine, would be willing to undertake the
work."[8]

As regards the examination of the women, we take a chapter out of the
history of our India work, in illustration, as recorded in our Journal:


  MEERUT, India, February 8, 1892.

  At half-past seven this morning we went down the Sudder Bazaar to the
  neighbourhood of the Lock Hospital, it being examination day. The
  building is well placed for observation, being at a point where five
  streets meet, and several other streets run close by. The hospital
  is a foreign bungalow with a verandah in front, inclosed in a high
  brick wall. Already the girls, in gaudy apparel and flashy jewelry,
  were assembling, and in a few moments we counted thirty girls standing
  or sitting around, outside the building and outside the gate in the
  street. They came walking and riding in _ekkas_ (native carts), and
  two loads came in cabs. Some of them had several miles to come from
  the Rest Camp. The vehicles waited for them across the street, under
  the shade trees. The girls went in by twos or threes, as summoned.
  A tall native policeman stood about, apparently to keep order. The
  street was one of Meerut's busiest thoroughfares. Men and boys lounged
  here and there, and even tiny children looked on with interest and
  curiosity. At one time we noticed not less than twenty-five men and
  boys gathered about and discussing the scene. A police station was
  close by, and an unusual number of men lingered in front of it,
  discussing the women, as their glances and manners indicated. One
  Eurasian woman brought a girl, evidently held as a slave to make money
  for her; she seemed reluctant to even trust her girl to go alone into
  the hospital, when her turn came; and as soon as she emerged again,
  seized her and led her away, the policemen shouting after her in
  derision, "Mem Sahib! Mem Sahib!" (the name for "lady," applied, as a
  rule, to white women), to which the Eurasian gave no response.

About a hundred women were examined that morning, waiting their turn
on the public street, while the crowd gathered round to discuss the
women kept by the Government for British soldiers. No wonder the
Commander-in-Chief has decided that the female medical assistants who
could be induced to manage such an affair would hardly be "sufficiently
good to preclude the possibility of their receiving bribes." The Lock
Hospitals of the Orient, as we studied them in many Cantonments of
India, and also in Singapore and Hong Kong, are for the treatment of
prostitution rather than for the treatment of disease, for the reason
that only those who could be quickly restored to health to go on in
their occupation are likely to be retained any length of time for
treatment. We have already referred to the practice of turning cases
of secondary, or advanced, disease out of the Cantonment. The position
at the head of one of these hospitals is not likely to tax one's
scientific resources much beyond instructing the native women how to
perform ablutions, so strongly urged by Lord Roberts in his Circular
Memorandum, in administering douches, and in diagnosticating and
keeping in hospital all cases of catamenia. We do not marvel if male
surgeons have grown tired of the monotonous round, and with a seeming
burst of generosity propose to give the position to medical women;
particularly, if by such "generous" expressions of appreciation for the
usefulness of women, they can lead over-credulous fine ladies into the
conclusion that at last all the objections to the C. D. Acts have been
met.

In spite of holding a degrading position the verdict of the world is
"A man's a man for a' that"; but not so the woman who connects herself
with an Eastern Lock Hospital--her dignity would never sustain the
shock. Already the official conclusion is that no woman of intelligence
or honesty would accept such a position. Women cannot afford to
become the scavengers of the profession. We remember interviewing an
Englishwoman in charge of a very large Lock Hospital in an Eastern
city; and after this we went directly to the adjoining general
hospital. We were welcomed by the nurses and treated most cordially
until we mentioned, with design, the Englishwoman at the neighbouring
hospital, and that we had been talking with her. A frozen response
abruptly ended further sociability, and we learned thus that even
underling nurses of other hospitals held themselves as in a position to
snub the chief superintendent of a Lock Hospital in the East.

From the time that the abominable nature of the Contagious Diseases
Acts of England and India were made known, and the Acts held up to
public execration and outlawed, like a condemned criminal, this System
has gone seeking a new _alias_ that its identity might be hidden
from the inconvenience of exposure. Many times these laws have been
unmasked, and they have never been able to survive the exposure of
their real name, which was at the first, "Contagious Diseases Acts."

Over and over again has this criminal Law, when caught sneaking
about, denied his real name. Like a fatal birthmark, which no power
can eradicate, so this abomination has its birthmark, which, when
seen, fixes the identity beyond all question. That birthmark is _the
compulsory examination of women_. This cannot be made to serve the
desired purpose without all the essential features of the C. D. Acts.
It makes not the slightest difference whether the law is called the
Health Act, as in Australia, Getz's _Projet de Loi_, as in Norway,
the Women's and Girls' Protection Ordinance, as at Singapore, the
Cantonment Acts or the Cantonments Act, or what not--the test of the
law, as to its identity with the old infamous C. D. Acts, is, whether
women are obliged to submit to compulsory examination. "In fact, the
compulsory examination of women _is_ the C. D. Acts." Let this one
point be put into law, and all the rest goes without saying. The battle
has always raged around this one central point.

To prove that the compulsory examination of women necessitates the
regulations that always attend it, let us suppose that in a community
this one point is provided for by law, and that the officers of the
law are left to enforce the measure, by whatever regulations are
necessary:--

  The law demands merely that impure women must be examined regularly
  for the protection of the public health.

  But the police officer sees at once that to secure this point a list
  must be kept of the women, when examined, that notice of requirement
  can be sent to those not coming voluntarily. Thus _registration_ of
  prostitutes comes to pass.

  But after examination, those found diseased must be placed by
  themselves for treatment. Thus a hospital for prostitutes is
  established.

  Then provision must be made to compel those who are unwilling to
  attend the examinations to do so, for it has been the invariable
  experience that few women will go regularly for examination unless
  compelled to do so, and also there must be means of enforcing them to
  remain in hospital. Thus the hospital becomes a _Lock Hospital_, and
  _fines and imprisonments_ are imposed on delinquents.

  But compulsion cannot be secured without the aid of the police and the
  magistrate, and it is most difficult to follow up women, prove their
  identity, hale them to examination and to Lock Hospital without being
  able to keep them located in one tolerated quarter or house where they
  may be found--hence _segregation_ is introduced; and this is also done
  to keep women with whom association is supposed to be safe--because
  under constant medical and police surveillance--separate from those
  with whom it is supposed to be a risk to associate.

  Now we discover that the compulsory periodical examination of women
  of impure life, when carried out in actual operation, creates a
  necessity for all the essential features of every C. D. Act that has
  ever been known, namely: _Compulsory examination_; _Registration_;
  _Lock Hospitals_; _Fines and Imprisonments_; _Police Surveillance_;
  _Segregation_.

Yet another thing is needful for the operation of this law requiring
compulsory periodical examination, namely, measures for extending the
operation of the law, so that, as new women are likely to become a
source of contamination, they also may be brought under its operation,
and for the practical and easy operation of the measure, compelled to
take up their residence in segregated quarters. _This is the special
field of activity in the operation of the law_, and is a deadly menace
to the most ordinary liberties of women. People will loudly advocate
that "something must be done" to confine the houses of ill-fame to
certain quarters of a city, without the slightest care as to how it
is done, so long as they need not become intimately acquainted with a
disagreeable subject; they will advocate measures of the most deadly
consequences to others more defenceless than themselves, and to the
ultimate moral tone of the very society in which they move, and yet
heartlessly refuse to consider the responsibility that rests upon them
for their conduct. "Something must be done," they say, and the police
force must attend to the details; they are too loathsome even to be
considered, yet they refuse to understand that these very loathsome
details which they require the police to work out _must utterly ruin
the character of the police_ into whose hands they have betrayed all
the decent rights of womanhood.

What does it mean to women for men to assume the right to arrest all
suspicious characters and oblige them to live in a certain house or
street, and to appear at the examinations at the Lock Hospitals? Let
the banker sitting in his bank, or the merchant in his shop, consider
what it would mean for him to be accosted in his own place of business,
taken off immediately to the Lock Hospital, examined, and if the doctor
so ordered, sent immediately into exile in a hospital for libertines,
with no chance to set his house in order or to defend his character
from the charge of being a libertine! And even if the charge were true
would he not think the punishment too severe? And then, suppose it were
the case that, at the end of the imprisonment in the hospital, he were
required to reside for the rest of his days in a certain street? This
is _exactly_ what is done with women when once the principle is set up
that compulsory periodical examinations must take place. But the reply
is, No women of property or consequence would ever be so treated. Very
true; yet are not these often utterly profligate? Certainly. So this
is a law which will be operated only in the case of the lowly. Yes,
it is a piece of legislation on the part of the mighty to degrade and
rob the daughters of the poor of their most ordinary rights, and it
deserves the _most extreme execration_ that human language is capable
of, on that very account. The day has passed by when it is safe to try
to enunciate such sentiments among a free people. "What are the women
making all this row about?" said one of the daily journals of London,
during our India work; "no _high-born_ ladies will ever be put to
inconvenience by such a law." Ah! that was one of the principal reasons
why such a row was made.

What does it mean to arrest a suspected case and send her to the
segregated quarter for residence, where any man can assume the right to
insult her and demand entrance at her door at any hour? It means that
the law takes hold of a woman who may have occasionally done wrong and
forces her to do wrong habitually; for after segregation no one will
give her honest work. That law is radically wicked which confirms a
human being into a habitual breaker of one of God's ten commandments.

And supposing the girl has not actually done wrong, but has conducted
herself imprudently, and brought just suspicion on herself? To put her
under the ban of such a law means to create a prostitute by law. That
law is radically wrong which can be operated with such deadly effect
on society as to actually create evil. Yet everywhere that the C. D.
Acts have been operated such cases have occurred. The mayor of a city
in South Africa told us that when a proposition for the introduction
of these regulations was being entertained by the City Council of that
place, and every effort was made to secure his approval, he was one day
accosted by an alderman on the street, who plucked him by the sleeve,
and pointing out a perfectly respectable-looking woman who was passing
by, said, "Now, if we could get our law we could get that woman." He
started back in horror, thinking to himself, "And if he could get his
clutches on that woman by such a law, why not on any woman?"

Policemen are not supposed to be infallibly virtuous; and supposing
they could be bribed or blackmailed? A policeman in Queensland
confessed that he had taken a bribe to deliver a pretty girl over
to the power of a libertine by having her registered as a common
prostitute, and that he carried out the dastardly crime. A Christian
woman in Cape Colony heard of the arrest as a common prostitute of a
virtuous girl of her acquaintance, and went to the court to secure her
release. There was a keeper of a house of ill-fame whom she recognised,
who came to make accusation against the girl. The Christian worker
appealed to a policeman, whom she knew as a church-member and a man of
good repute, to stand with her for the girl's defence; but the evil
woman took him to one side and she distinctly overheard her threaten
to blast his reputation if he interfered. The magistrate took the word
of this evil woman, which was corroborated by the falsehoods of the
policeman, and in spite of her protestations, the girl was registered.

Another case was told us by a Wesleyan minister's wife; it occurred in
England, before the repeal of the Acts. Her most intimate early friend,
a lovely young Christian girl, had a brother who quarrelled with a
policeman who threatened revenge. He watched his opportunity, arrested
the sister, and gave his oath that she was a common prostitute; she was
forced through the examination and registered, and when at last found
by her brother, was a raving maniac as a result of the day's awful
experience, and died shortly afterward in a madhouse. We might multiply
the instances we have ourselves personally heard on good authority, and
relate some of the many cases known to the history of the movement for
repeal, but there is no space for further enlargement.

Again we say there is something radically wrong with this law, when
women can be so fearfully wronged in its operation, should the police
officers and magistrates be either wicked or weak. Practically such a
law delivers the reputation of women wholly over to the power of the
police. But, some one says, let no case be settled on suspicion; let
proof be brought. The question arises, How secure the proof? In India
it was considered sufficient by Lord Roberts to teach the soldiers
that it was "a point of honour" to save other soldiers from disease by
informing against women; but it has frequently been observed that the
soldier will usually point out another woman rather than the one he
has actually associated with, and women are haled to the examinations
who may never have seen the informant before. It detracts nothing from
the peril of girls and women when the uncorroborated testimony of a
self-confessed libertine can be used against them, and the frequency
with which evil men will combine to utterly break down the testimony
of a young woman in case of seduction, and the unblushing testimony
of these men to their own shameful conduct, which is often treated as
a joke by the magistrate, shows that the reputation of a woman is no
safer in the hands of a combination of libertines. Nothing is much more
difficult than to actually _prove_ a woman a prostitute, and short of
absolute proof, the thought of registration, segregation, imprisonment
in a Lock Hospital, etc., is intolerable.

Again, a single act of fornication does not prove prostitution, and
how many acts shall constitute proof? Practically, these are things
that the law never has considered at all; but wherever the compulsory
examination has been established, secret information from libertines
is received and acted upon with little question as to its veracity,
and the whole system has immediately degenerated into a costly effort
on the part of the State, paid for by the taxes of respectable people,
to pander to the wishes of libertines, and keep the houses of ill-fame
filled with attractive and healthy inmates, and thus the State becomes
itself the great purveyor of vice. We have said before repeatedly, and
say again, that there is no real evidence that prostitution has been
made safer by the periodical examination of women, because the false
security in vice greatly increases the amount of vice, which is itself
the cause of the diseases in question. Not only does correct reason
testify to this, but also statistics uphold this statement.

We have now shown that the compulsory examination of women brings into
existence, of necessity, every feature of what is commonly called the
C. D. Acts; and that, as that compulsory examination is of itself a
sin, so every feature of the enactments necessary to carry out that law
is at each step liable to fearful abuse, and the system as a whole is
ruinous to the morals of any community.

FOOTNOTES:

[6] A term applied to British residents in India.

[7] When Lieut-General Lord Sandhurst was questioned before the
Royal Commission of 1871 as to the advisability of soldiers being
periodically examined by male physicians, he replied that he preferred
to treat his soldiers "as reasonable men, not as brutes." Let women
show at least equal consideration for women.

[8] Perhaps they had in mind such a case as the woman we interviewed
at Cantonment Bareilly. Her father was Scotch, she said--her mother,
Portuguese; she had been trained by Dr. C----. She went every day to
the brothels and examined the women. _She owned the brothels_, and
resided with an official to whom she was not married. (See page 133,
Departmental Committee Report, 1893.)



V.

Pleading for the Oppressed.


MANY times in the course of our conversations with the little women of
India we had promised before leaving them to do what we could to secure
relief and help for them. In the simplicity of their faith and lack of
practical knowledge, several of them had ventured to intimate that we
might go to England and see the Queen, and tell her their troubles.
"For," they said, "the Queen does not countenance it; for she has
daughters of her own, and she cares for her daughters in India." "The
Queen is a woman, and we also are women, and our shame is the Queen's
shame; and for us to be exposed is as though the Queen were exposed; it
is a shame for women to be so treated when a woman is Queen."

At Peshawar, at Lucknow, and at Meerut, the girls had held us at
parting until they had solemnly lifted their eyes to heaven and asked
God's blessing on us, and asked Him to help us to help them to get
deliverance from their oppression. God heard the prayer, although their
knowledge of Him was probably very obscure. The sacred promises we gave
them and gave Him to help them, can never be set aside without bringing
guilt on our own souls. They depend upon us to voice their sorrows and
plead their cause, by solemn compact with them and God. May He keep us
faithful to the trust!

We carefully prepared the report of our investigations and forwarded
this to Miss Forsaith, of London, Secretary of the British Committee
of the Federation for the Abolition of State Regulation of Vice. Then
as the summer was too far advanced to hold any meetings in India, we
proceeded to Australia, New Zealand, and Tasmania, in the interests
of our regular work. But in the early part of the year 1893 we were
summoned to England to give evidence in person concerning the condition
of things in the Cantonments of India, which went to prove that,
although the C. D. Acts had been ordered to be repealed, the same state
of things was being maintained, under the Cantonments Act of 1889,
and that the resolution of the House of Commons of 1888 had been
disregarded.

A Departmental Committee was appointed by the Government to receive
our evidence. This Committee was composed of Mr. George W. E. Russell,
M.P., Under-Secretary of State for India (Chairman); The late Right
Hon. Sir James Stansfeld, M.P.; General Sir Donald M. Stewart, Bart.,
G.C.B., Commander of the Forces in India, before Lord Roberts; Sir
James Peile, K.C.S.I.; Mr. H. J. Wilson, M.P., with Major-General O. R.
Newmarch, C.S.I., as Secretary. The first sitting of the Committee, at
the India Office, London, was April 11, 1893. Before this Departmental
Committee we appeared day after day until the full report of our
statements had been made. In the course of the giving of this evidence,
we described with accuracy the records which we had seen in the various
Lock Hospitals of the ten Cantonments visited when in India, and a
telegram was sent by the chairman of the Committee, Mr. George Russell,
giving our description and requesting that these records be impounded
by the India Government and forwarded to London for reference. Then our
full statement was despatched to India for reply.

Meanwhile, Lord Roberts, who had returned to England, had been
interviewed by a reporter of _The Christian Commonwealth_, who placed
before him some of our statements regarding the Cantonments of India.
Lord Roberts pronounced them "simply untrue," and declared that he had
recently made a tour of investigation through the Cantonments, and knew
that our statements were false. His open charges of falsehood against
us were heralded throughout the Empire, and freely discussed by the
Press from the time they were made in April to the time of our second
appearance before the Committee in August.

Upon the receipt of our evidence in India there was a Special
Commission appointed by the Indian Government, to collect evidence
in refutation of our charges, two members of it being instructed to
proceed to England therewith, and to give personal testimony in behalf
of the Indian Government.

The Special Commission did not come before the Committee until August,
and we spent much of the interim in addressing public meetings
throughout Great Britain, and arousing interest in the subject. Many
large and important meetings were also addressed by such well-known
leaders as Mrs. Josephine Butler, the late Sir James Stansfeld, M.P.,
Mr. Henry J. Wilson, M.P., and Mrs. H. J. Wilson, Mr. James Stuart,
M.P., and many other Members of Parliament. At the annual conferences
and assemblies of the various denominations, the subject was taken
up; many ladies of the Women's Liberal Federation and of the British
Women's Temperance Association, and of other bodies, presented the
matter in their meetings, and ministers of all denominations lent
their help. At all these meetings resolutions were passed condemning
legalized vice, and from all of them memorials were sent to the
Government, protesting against the condition of things prevalent in
the Cantonments of India. It was truly touching to witness the intense
interest manifested in the subject by the common people, the class from
whom the soldiers are so largely drawn, and for whose sake military
officials claimed that it was necessary to establish the chakla system.
The mothers and fathers of British lads had their own opinion as to
what was necessary for their boys.

"I'll buy him off! I'll buy him off!" exclaimed one woman to us, with
streaming eyes, at the close of one of our meetings. "My boy enlisted
to go to India without my consent and then repented, and I thought it
would teach him a lesson to compel him to abide by his word. He has
already got as far as Gibraltar, I think; but I'll send the money and
buy him off. I cannot consent to let him go out under officers who
will teach him that vice is necessary." Another mother expressed great
indignation at our statements regarding the temptations put in the way
of young soldiers by their superiors, and declared she would write to
her boy and obtain his contradiction of them. The reply came back,
and the almost broken-hearted mother caused it to be conveyed to us,
together with an exhortation that we should "cry aloud and spare not."
It was to the following effect:

"Yes, mother, all those ladies say is true, and much more that they do
not know, and you would hardly believe. I have been so harassed and
persecuted that sometimes I have gone to the chakla, pretending to sin,
but God knows I have not; it was the only way to escape their merciless
persecution."

We have been informed many times that there were military officers who
sneered at virtuous soldiers as lacking proper fighting qualities, and
who deliberately fostered in their soldiers animal propensities, for
the sake of the ferocity of disposition that attends licentiousness.

The names of the special Commissioners were: Mr. Denzil Ibbetson and
Surgeon-Colonel J. Cleghorn, M.D., Inspector-General of Civil Hospitals
throughout the Punjab. In addition to these witnesses from India and
ourselves, Lord Roberts, Quartermaster-General Chapman, and Mr. Hyslop
Bell, of Darlington, were called before the Departmental Committee to
give evidence.

The statements of Lord Roberts and of General Chapman, who were called
before the Departmental Committee in August, proved to be matters of
intense interest, especially as regarded their disagreement as to Lord
Roberts' knowledge of the Infamous Memorandum. Lord Roberts testified
that, when the Resolution of 1888 was carried in the House of Commons
not permitting the compulsory examination of women or the licensing
of prostitution, he understood those measures to mean _abolition_,
not modification, of measures for the regulation of prostitution, and
proceeded accordingly. The Resolution meant the abolishing of the
periodical examination, of licensing, of compulsion, of regulation,
etc. He declared that he knew nothing of the Infamous Memorandum which
had been issued in his name, and that he "entirely disapproved" of
some of the contents of that circular, saying, "I certainly would not
have approved of that part of the Circular which referred to providing
them with pretty young women." Lord Roberts was confronted with a
mass of evidence which he little expected. After his own sweeping
contradictions of our statements, he was shown the report from the
Cantonment of Meean Meer which the Special Commission had brought from
India, and in which nearly every statement we had made was "admitted."
Other _prima facie_ evidence of the truth of our statements convinced
him that our testimony was not to be broken down. As he left the
Committee it was with the conviction that General Chapman was next
to be called, and would give most disagreeable evidence against him
as regarded the Infamous Memorandum and its authorship. Lord Roberts
proceeded immediately to Scotland, and from thence wrote the following
letter of apology:--

  DUNBAR, Scotland, 11 August, 1893.

  Having read the reports of Mr. Ibbetson's Committee, in regard to the
  working of the Rules dealing with the abolition of Lock Hospitals,
  etc., in Cantonments in India, and also the reports of the officers
  commanding the seven stations which the Committee did not visit, I
  frankly admit that the statements of the two American missionary
  ladies, who made a tour through Upper India in the cold weather of
  1891-92, for the purpose of inquiring into the matter, are in the main
  correct.

  I hoped and believed that the orders issued to give effect to the
  Resolution of the House of Commons had been everywhere obeyed. In some
  stations the Rules have been strictly enforced, but in others it now
  turns out this has not been completely the case.

  I deeply regret this, and I feel that an apology is due from me to the
  ladies concerned. This apology I offer unreservedly.

  In doing so, I would remark that I think it would have been better
  if the missionary ladies had been commended to the care of the
  authorities in India. We could have assisted them to carry out the
  work on which they were engaged; omissions and shortcomings would
  have been remedied at the time; a great deal of unpleasantness would
  have been avoided; the ladies themselves would have found their task
  considerably lightened; and there would have been less chance of their
  drawing wrong deductions from some of the circumstances which came
  under their notice, as in sundry instances they would seem from Mr.
  Ibbetson's Committee Report to have done. This was owing, no doubt, to
  a want of knowledge of the language, and of the habits and customs of
  the people of India.

  ROBERTS.

This letter was accompanied by a short note to the Chairman requesting
him to annex the letter of apology to the official report of the
proceedings of the Committee.

A few days later General Chapman came before the Committee and
testified with regard to the Circular Memorandum: "It was prepared
at Simla, after the Commander-in-Chief [Lord Roberts] had completed
his annual inspection, and had freely discussed with the officers in
command the various measures which it was proposed to adopt." General
Chapman described the manner in which it was done as follows: The
Commander-in-Chief gave the instruction that the Circular be prepared;
then it was drawn up by officials in the General's office under his
supervision. The Surgeon-General was consulted; then the Circular was
issued under the authority of the Commander-in-Chief. It was sent first
to the Military Department of the Government of India, and then sent
in every direction to all the authorities in India. He said he "could
not have issued" the Circular "unless Lord Roberts had seen it; that
would have been perfectly impossible." When questioned particularly
as to Lord Roberts' knowledge of that part of the document which,
as Lord Roberts expressed it, called for "pretty young women" to be
provided for the soldiers, General Chapman said of these sentences:
"He certainly did approve of them." When asked how it was that the
Secretary of State laid the blame on him (General Chapman), in the
House of Commons, he replied: "Sir John Gorst said it was necessary to
put the blame on somebody, therefore he put it on me."

In the meantime a box had arrived from India containing the hospital
records, which had been impounded by the Indian Government, on the
request of the Chairman of the Committee, and they furnished a large
quantity of _prima facie_ evidence, in the very handwriting of the
British officials. These books being placed in our hands, we were
able to verify the statements we had given in evidence concerning
these records, and were also able to place official documents before
the Committee which disproved some of the statements which had
been conveyed to England from India by the hand of the two Special
Commissioners. As this well illustrates the utter unreliability of
many Anglo-Indian official assertions, we will copy a condensed
and simplified extract from the proceedings of that session of the
Committee at which we placed official document against official
document, and pointed out irreconcilable differences.

The reader must try to imagine us sitting in one of the spacious rooms
of the India Office. At the head of an oval polished table sat Mr.
Russell, the chairman; to his left sat General Newmarch, Sir Donald
Stewart, and Sir James Peile. To the chairman's right sat the late Sir
James Stansfeld, whose prerogative it was to conduct the examination;
next to him were Mr. Casserley, Q.C., counsel for our side, and Henry
J. Wilson, M.P. At the opposite end of the table from the chairman
sat the stenographer and ourselves. It is to be understood that Mr.
Stansfeld asks the questions and we answer:

  _Question_--We will pass to the book of requisition for tickets. [This
  was a book from which many leaves were torn, leaving counterfoils on
  which were memoranda signifying that the extracted leaves were given
  to the Cantonment Magistrate, calling for tickets for women, who were
  thereby certified as under the charge of the physician, and licensed
  to practise prostitution.]

  _Answer_--I have it.

  _Q._--And you can number the counterfoils; how many requisitions to
  the Cantonment Magistrate for licensed tickets does it say on the 1st
  of May, 1892?

  _A._--Twenty-one.

  _Q._--Does it say on counterfoils of tickets in respect of the
  nineteen new requisitions on 15th June, 1892?

  _A._--It does.

  _Q._--Therefore that is evidence that the issue of tickets at any rate
  endured longer than May?

  _A._--Yes, longer than the 1st of May; it shows that it continued
  until the 15th of June, 1892.

  _Q._--At any rate, on the 15th of June a requisition was made for
  nineteen tickets?

  _A._--Nineteen tickets.

  _Q._--According to the Military Reports before us, page 18, on
  line 940: "Women were registered, tickets issued, and bi-monthly
  inspections made between March, 1890, and May, 1892; it was brought to
  my notice in May, 1892 that tickets were being issued to prostitutes
  in Meean Meer; I ordered the discontinuance of the practice at
  once, and it was reported to me on the 17th of May, 1892, that no
  registration of prostitutes in any form whatever then continued;"
  and it appears from what you have now produced, that at any rate
  requisitions were made as late as the 15th of June; that is so, is it
  not?

  _A._--Yes.

  _Q._--Of those requisitions on that date, the 15th of June, as well as
  on several other dates, do you find some, and how many, issued for the
  Royal Artillery Bazaar?

  _A._--I counted twenty that were for the Royal Artillery Bazaar women.

  _Q._--Have you seen the Report of the Commanding Officer for the
  regiment dated 19th June, 1893, and does it state that no tickets had
  been issued for the regiment since February, 1891?

  _A._--Yes, I saw that statement; it is page 2 of the supplementary
  sheet, line 95, under Meean Meer. The statement of Captain Goff,
  commanding the Royal Artillery. That note says, "No registration of
  prostitutes or issue of tickets in any form whatever has ever been
  carried out by the Royal Artillery since the present battery came to
  the station, February, 1891."

  _Q._--What you find is that twenty tickets were issued?

  _A._--It is since February, 1891, according to this book some twenty
  tickets have been issued for the Royal Artillery.

  _Q._--Up to what date?

  _A._--Up to June 15th, 1892.

  _Q._--You produce a ticket here which you obtained from one of the
  women; what was the date of that ticket; was not the date of the year
  1892?

  _A._--It was dated 1892; that we procured at the Artillery Bazaar.

  _Q._--Did I understand you to say that you found twenty tickets were
  issued to the women of the Artillery?

  _A._--Yes, twenty counterfoils left are of the Royal Artillery.

  _Mr. Stansfeld to the Committee_--That fact, which is testified to by
  the counterfoils of this book, is inconsistent with the statement of
  the Commanding Officer in his Report.

These are but a few of the many instances in which the official records
sent to London for inspection, contradicted the testimony of military
officers.

The first sitting of the Departmental Committee was April 11, its
last sitting August 15, and its report was circulated in Parliament
September 11, 1893.

With the acknowledgment from the Commander-in-Chief of the truth
of our statements, a most sweeping victory had been gained for the
cause; no under-official could very well dispute the word of the
Commander-in-Chief of the army. Lord Roberts' remark that "the ladies
themselves would have found their task considerably lightened" had
they been "commended to the care of the authorities in India," was the
source of a good deal of amusement on the part of our friends, and led
to many a sarcastic comment on the part of the public press; some of
which ran somewhat as follows: "As Lord Roberts freely admitted that
he did not know these things, certainly had the ladies appealed to him
they need not have come back so loaded with information; this would
have greatly lightened their task." "As there was a regulation which
allowed any suspicious characters to be expelled from the Cantonments
without assigning a reason therefor, the application of this regulation
would greatly have 'lightened their task,'" etc., etc.

What had been fully established by the evidence cannot be better
expressed than in the recent utterance of the British Committee for the
Abolition of State Regulation of Vice, _i.e._:--

"The fact was fully established that the so-called voluntary system had
been completely overridden by _extra-legal_ practices, of which the
provision placing, or interpreted to have placed, venereal diseases
under the same rule as 'cholera, small-pox, diphtheria, or typhoid
fever,' became the fulcrum or pivot." The thing which now remained to
be done was to embody the Resolution of the House of Commons of 1888 in
a law which must be passed by the Government of India, that could not
be longer evaded or disobeyed. After much discussion and consideration,
the Secretary of State for India directed that the Cantonment
regulations which related to the removal to hospital of those persons
suspected of contagious or infectious diseases, must be so altered
as to admit of the treatment of contagious diseases due to vice in a
manner that would not be liable to abuse of or injury to the reputation
of women.

Accordingly the Cantonments Act of 1889 in so far as it provided for
the compulsory examination of women suspected of contagious diseases
due to vice, and their forcible detention in hospital under penalty of
expulsion from the Cantonment, was altered to apply only to cholera,
smallpox, diphtheria, or typhoid fever. This was done to protect the
character and reputation of women, for it had been conceded on all
sides that hitherto the only method practicable for getting hold of
suspected women was on the information of male libertines, and that
such persons when questioned as to the source of their contagion,
generally sought to cover their own wrong-doing or protect their real
partner in sin by accusing some other woman, often a perfectly innocent
person.

This new Act, called the Cantonments Act Amendment Act, was passed on
February 8, 1895. The point which was gained by the passage of this
new Act was one of great importance, namely, that there were moral and
social questions involved in the treatment of contagious diseases due
to vice which could not be overlooked in the medical management of such
disorders without serious consequences. It was, in the nature of the
case, impossible to place these diseases on the same footing as other
contagious disorders. The reasons for this position have been recently
expressed very concisely and forcibly by the British Committee, in the
following language:--

  "1. It casts no stigma on the name or character of a person to assert
  that he, or she, is affected with 'cholera, smallpox, diphtheria, or
  typhoid fever,' and it can be ascertained whether such statement be
  true without shock to the feelings of the most refined. The opposite
  is the case with venereal disease, in regard to which a mis-statement
  is a virtual libel, and a compulsory examination is an indecent
  outrage. 2. As regards the former classes of disease, no conceivable
  measures can have any moral bearing; whereas in the latter class
  compulsory (and in some of its relations, even voluntary) submission
  to examination or treatment has the gravest moral consequences both
  to the individual and to the community. 3. The procedure under the
  rules you propose is as follows: The medical officer is informed by a
  soldier that a certain woman is diseased. Believing that, he orders
  her for examination at the hospital. She may be perfectly honourable
  or perfectly healthy. In either case if she refuses to attend she is
  held to be diseased and is expelled from the Cantonment. We submit
  that the whole of this procedure, though it may be in words the same
  as in a case of cholera, is in fact utterly different in the means
  by which information is secured, in the nature of the evidence as to
  fact, and in the consequences to the woman who disputes the fact. The
  operation of the rules, so far as venereal disease is concerned, is
  not general.

  "In the Report of the Special Indian Commission appointed in 1893
  by the Government of India to inquire into the working of the
  regulations, it is stated that so far as venereal disease is concerned
  the operation of the rules is 'practically confined by sheer force of
  circumstances to women.' ... 'Even with regard to them information is
  difficult to obtain, for a man often does not know, and still oftener
  will not tell, which woman has diseased him.' ... 'Except in the not
  infrequent cases where a woman herself applies for medical aid, this
  (_i.e._, information necessary to proceed upon) can only be obtained
  from men who have been diseased by them.' It is clear, then, that a
  man, as the result of an admittedly immoral act, becomes an informer,
  and in many cases a false informer, upon whose testimony the State has
  to rely for submitting the woman to the most degrading process. We
  submit that there is no parallel between venereal disease and cholera,
  either in the procedure here indicated, or in the effect of that
  procedure on moral conduct, or in the position in which it places the
  State."



VI.

Some Anglo-Indian Moral Sentiments.


WE have referred to the discrepancies between the statements of Lord
Roberts and of General Chapman; between Lord Roberts' first attempt to
discredit our evidence and subsequent admission of its truth; between
the records that had been kept at the Lock Hospitals which we visited
in India and the statements sent home by the Special Commission.
All these things must tend to weaken the faith of the public in
Anglo-Indian representations. They all accord in spirit with the gross
exaggerations which have been put forth, as though a veritable scourge
of such diseases was at the door of England. As to the prevalence of
disease, "Between fifty and sixty per cent. of our Indian army," is
found to be, in actual fact, only _four and one-half per cent._ (see
page 69), and "Thirteen per cent. annually invalided home hopelessly
incurable," is found to be, in actual fact, only _one-ninth of one per
cent._

"Our power is being sapped--our race defiled--and we are forced to
ask ourselves if no means can be devised of stopping so gigantic an
infliction." What does this mean in exact figures? How "gigantic"
in reality is this infliction? The official figures of the very
document which was meant to originate the alarm, the Report of the
Departmental Committee of 1897 shall testify. The latest year reported
in this document is 1895, and as the law which effectually forbade the
compulsory examination of women was passed on February 8, 1895, the
figures show the result only of _less than eleven months_ covering
the existence of that law. Out of a force of 71,031 soldiers in India
nineteen more men were sent home to England, "hopelessly incurable"
from vice, in 1895 than in the year 1894. _Nineteen cases_ represent
the size of this "gigantic infliction" which has been made the occasion
of raising such a cry of alarm, and a demand for the return to licensed
prostitution and the re-enslavement of thousands of native women by
compulsory examination measures.

In the year 1894, 111 men were sent home invalided from this cause, and
in 1895, 130 men were sent home--an increase of nineteen cases. We do
not wish to minimize the evil of even these few cases; but is a decent
nation prepared to hazard an attempt to purchase immunity from disease
by plunging into brazen defiance of God's seventh commandment? What
about the "gigantic [immoral] infliction" of the atheistic assumption
that chastity is a sanitary failure, and fornication a necessity?
There is no comparison between the "gigantic infliction" upon England
of a teaching to defy God's commandments in the fancied interests of
physical health, and the presence of nineteen additional diseased
soldiers in a population of thirty-five millions.

But if we continue the study of the table of statistics found on page
9 of the Report referred to, we find that eighty-four more men were
sent home to England in 1894 for diseases due to vice, than during the
previous year, 1893. If the increase of disease in 1895 over 1894
is to be attributed to the Amendment Act of 1895, to what shall we
attribute the much more pronounced increase of 1894 over 1893? Again,
there were forty more men sent home invalided in 1891 than in 1890;
and forty-three more sent home in 1888 than in 1887, and none of these
years were under the Amendment Act of 1895. Therefore it is proved
that variations and increases have taken place that have had nothing
to do with the Amendment Act of 1895, which, when it serves the object
of advocates of licensed vice, is held wholly responsible for the
insignificant variation of an increase of nineteen cases. In view of
these facts, we must declare our solemn conviction that the agitation
for a return to legalized prostitution in India is not due to any
feeling of alarm on account of the spread of contagion in the case of
the _originators_ of the agitation, but that an attempt is being made
to frighten an unwilling Christian public into a reluctant consent to
return to a system which regards the whoremonger as a necessity, the
commandments of God a farce, and the slave trade in women an important
part of the business of the State.

Life in India does not tend to the elevation of British morals, and
this not because of the climate, as some contend. The industrial
conditions are all against good morals, and are closely analogous to
the conditions that prevailed in the Southern States of America before
the Civil War. Wages are so low in India as to constitute the native
the virtual slave of the Anglo-Saxon. By means of the pitiful wages
paid for work, not one-half the comfort is provided by white masters
to Indian servants that was secured to the black men in America, by
the few of those owners of slaves who were really humane. The very
fact that the slave was a rather scarce article and a good price
paid for him in America, made it to the interest of his owner to look
after his health and comfort to a certain extent. We are not defending
slavery--it is an abomination in the sight of God, whether it exists
under the disguise of abnormally low wages or shows itself openly;
and slavery is always a greater moral curse to the master than to
the oppressed. England virtually owns a whole nation of slaves in
her control of India, and the effect of this fact upon the morals of
that country will depend wholly upon whether she rules to redeem her
subjects or to enrich herself. The worst feature of all in slavery is
the appropriation of women by their masters. And this form of villainy
is always excusing itself by slandering the oppressed women.

"This life is not _a life of shame_ in the sense in which this is true
in England. Most of these women are prostitutes by caste and _can feel
no desire to give it up_," says the Report of the Special Commission
of 1893. "They are accepted as safeguards to society, and are not
themselves ashamed of their calling," says a high military officer.
"They feel no shame about this; they are never recruited from seduced
girls, as in England," says another of these high and mighty officers,
who know so much better how these girls feel and what they desire
than do the poor slaves themselves. To be sure, they sob and cry and
petition for deliverance, and protest their outraged feelings against
the examinations; but that merely proves what hypocrites they are, and
how cleverly they can play a part. "They are as artful as a waggon-load
of monkeys," said one Anglo-Indian to us; the "most vicious and
degraded of the population," says another. And yet they are, many of
them, the offspring of British men. One would imagine them gray-haired
in the service of Satan, from these accounts, and yet General Viscount
Frankfort states in the Report of the Special Commission of 1893: "It
is roughly estimated that 50 per cent. [of the girls of the chakla]
are of the age of fourteen to sixteen or so;" and in reply to our
evidence as to some of the girls being as young as "from fifteen to
sixteen years of age," Major General Sir W. Elles, K.C.B., replies,
"The probability is that prostitution is practised at even younger ages
than this." In reply to our further statement that many girls are kept
at the point of starvation, are always in debt, and cannot escape on
this account, even if otherwise the way might be open, Colonel T. G.
Crawley, commanding Allahabad District, makes the following calculation
(page 360, Departmental Committee Report of 1893):--

  "It stands to reason that the women could not be in debt, for if a
  woman only received six men daily for twenty-three days in a month, at
  the rate of only four annas [about fourpence] per visit, that would
  represent thirty-four rupees eight annas, and even allowing one-fourth
  of this to go to the mahaldarni, rent two rupees, and food at the
  rate of four annas daily for thirty days, a woman would have fully
  seventeen rupees [a little more than one pound] a month clear."

This for the health of British soldiers and their "future wives" and
"unborn offspring" in England! and fifty per cent. of these victims
from fourteen to sixteen years of age! And will women physicians be
induced to attempt the task of keeping these mere children in health
under such conditions?

Anglo-Indian sentiment would not long content itself with the loss of
its highly prized C. D. Acts. The military officials had professed to
abrogate them when they hid them away under the cloak of the Indian
Cantonment Acts, and then again when they hid them under the cloak of
the Cantonments Act of 1889; but they were at last fairly caught by the
Cantonments Act Amendment Act of 1895, which tore away from them the
pretence of "only treating this as any other contagious disease."

Regulation had been in operation in India, in one form or another, for
the largest part of a century, and statistics show a steady increase
of disease, with slight variations, during all that time. And the Army
Sanitary Commission, the highest British medical authority, had in 1894
pronounced this prolonged experiment with licensed vice a failure, in
the following unequivocal language:--

  "The facts, so far as we can ascertain them, lead us to the conclusion
  that a compulsory Lock Hospital system in India has proved a failure,
  and that its re-institution cannot consequently be advocated on
  sanitary grounds. In stating this conclusion, we may add that we are
  merely repeating the opinions which the Army Sanitary Commission have
  uniformly held, that venereal diseases in the army of India could
  not be repressed by such restrictive measures, and in support of
  this statement, we may refer to the Memoranda on the Indian Sanitary
  Reports which have issued from this office for many years."

Yet a Departmental Committee was secured in November, 1896, by
Anglo-Indian influence brought to bear upon the Government, to examine
into the matter and report on the prevalence of diseases due to vice;
and it reported, as was expected, in favour of a return to the system
of legalized vice. The Departmental Committee reported at the beginning
of the year 1897, on statistics no later than the year 1895. Now the
Cantonments Act Amendment Act became a law in India, February 8,
1895, and how much time elapsed before this Amendment Act came into
_practical operation_ remains yet to be shown; yet an attempt is made
to show that incalculable mischief has been done during these eleven
months of the actual existence of the law which abolished licensed
prostitution. The official statistics of which they make use do not at
all justify the calculations and conclusions they have drawn therefrom.

At about the time of the report of the Departmental Committee, there
was formed in England an association with the object of securing the
re-establishment of legalized vice in India. The names of high British
military officials make up its membership list, in large part. The
association printed a pamphlet, based upon the Departmental Committee's
Report in favour of a return to the old conditions, a Report that was
calculated to frighten the public, if possible, into acceding to their
demands, on the supposition that a fearful scourge was upon them, and
that no time was to be lost in getting it under check. Then Lord George
Hamilton, on March 26, 1897, sent a dispatch to the Government of
India, calling attention to the Report of the Departmental Committee,
and ordering stricter measures for the suppression of diseases due
to vice, but adding: "There must be no provision of women, ... no
registration, ... no compulsory examination of women," etc., but urging
that it was "imperatively necessary that this disease should not be
exempted from the measures adopted to prevent the spread of other
contagious diseases." "If there be any compulsion, it is precisely of
the same kind as that which has been accepted as necessary and enforced
without any objection in the case of diphtheria or typhoid fever."

Now the first quotation given effectually contradicts the second, at
the point of the compulsory examination of women; and such instructions
were, in fact, a virtual order to repeal the Amendment Act of 1895,
very covertly expressed, and so it was recognised immediately by the
British Committee for the Abolition of State Regulated Vice, which
promptly issued a memorial on the subject addressed to Lord George
Hamilton, Secretary of State for India.[9]

On April 21, 1897, there appeared in the London _Times_ part of a
letter from Lady Henry Somerset to Lord George Hamilton, in which she
"expresses gratification at finding incorporated in a document of
such importance a statement of inspiring and controlling principles."
She notes with satisfaction the "inclusion of this disease among
other contagious diseases," as the "only rational and scientific
principle on which its eradication can be attempted." "It is not
however, proposed to carry out this principle to its full logical
result; and herein lies the point on which she finds herself at issue
with Lord George Hamilton." At the end of the letter is affixed the
system of legislation best suited to the end, in the opinion of Lady
Henry Somerset, and it will be seen at a glance that her propositions
would indeed carry out the principle to its full, logical end. A
special importance attaches itself to these propositions, because
of the strategic position held by Lady Henry Somerset as president
of the British Women's Temperance Association of England, and first
vice-president of the World's W.C.T.U., and her action put her in
absolute opposition to the purity department of both those societies.

The scheme proposed by Lady Henry Somerset is here given in her own
words:

  "1. A quarter of each Cantonment should be reserved for such women
  as are permitted to remain in camp, and all such women should be
  compelled to remain in houses or rooms specifically reserved to each
  by a registered number. The admission of men to this quarter should be
  strictly supervised.

  "2. No woman should be allowed to remain in this quarter unless
  periodically examined by properly qualified women doctors.

  "3. No soldier should be allowed to enter this quarter without having
  undergone a like examination and having the same report.

  "4. A register should be kept recording the name of each soldier
  entering the quarter, the number of the house to which he goes, and
  the date of such entry.

  "5. On any woman being found to be diseased in this quarter, or on
  any soldier found to be suffering in like manner, all such persons
  that the registered visits show to have rendered themselves liable
  to contagion should be put in quarantine until such time as their
  immunity can be verified.

  "6. All consorting with women outside this quarter should render the
  offender liable to severe penalty."[10]

The _Shield_, official organ of the British Committee for the Abolition
of State Regulated Vice, in its issue of May, 1897, comments as follows
upon this scheme:

  "The suggestions above quoted embody the most complete State
  Regulation of prostitution which we have ever seen described, in
  its baldest and most absolute form, and imply the most complete
  identification of the State with the purely animal side of the
  matter which has ever been proposed. They seem to emanate from a mind
  influenced for the time solely by the idea of equality between man and
  woman, to the exclusion of other considerations. Such proposals seem
  indeed to make the sexes equal, but it is an equality of unspeakable
  degradation for both."

On May 14 and 17 occurred a debate in the House of Lords on the
question of a return to legalized prostitution in India, in which
reference was made to Lady Henry Somerset's letter in _The Times_,
and to another memorial which was shortly "to be made public," and
which was signed by a very large number of ladies, as an indication
that women were no longer, as formerly, opposed to the system of State
Regulation of Vice.[11]

On May 25 _The Times_ published the text of this Memorial, which
is signed by ladies of the aristocracy, together with a few other
prominent women, numbering in all one hundred and twenty-three.

The Government of India proceeded at once to repeal the Cantonments
Act Amendment Act of 1895, in the Viceregal Council held at Simla July
8, which action had received the approval of Lord George Hamilton
by telegram, July 6, 1897. Since that day, therefore, the military
authorities have been set free to return to the establishment of
brothel slavery, the registration and compulsory examination of women,
the employment of procuresses, and all the infamies which we have
described as existing when we visited India in 1892.

Meanwhile, the women of Great Britain have arisen in mighty protest,
and a Memorial signed by 61,437 women of the United Kingdom, addressed
to Lord George Hamilton, as representative of Her Majesty's Government,
was presented at the India Office on Saturday, July 31, 1897, as
follows:

  "It declares the unaltered and unalterable hostility of the
  signatories to every form of State Regulation of Immorality, whether
  embodied in the system which was known as the Contagious Diseases Acts
  or in any other form, including the slightly modified and more subtle
  garb of certain Indian Cantonment rules.

  "It objects to the principle of all such legislation, a principle
  based on the assumption of the necessity of vice. It opposes the
  system in all its forms, because it inevitably becomes, in regard
  to women, an engine of the most shameful oppression, removing the
  guarantees of personal liberty which the law has established, and
  putting their reputation, their freedom, and their persons absolutely
  in the power of the police; while in respect to those women who come
  immediately under its action, it cruelly violates the feelings of
  those whose sense of shame is not wholly lost, and further brutalizes
  even the most abandoned.

  "The Memorialists, while deploring the existence of disease and
  favourable to moral methods of diminishing it, urge that no permanent
  diminution of disease will ever be attained by measures which do not
  strike primarily at the vice itself, and express the hope that the
  Government of our country will be withheld from the crime of ever
  again entering into any compact with evil by its attempted regulation."

We have been deeply impressed with the thought that, in our search
for the cause of the present moral confusion, we need to go further
back than the influence of high-placed military officers and ladies
of the aristocracy. There have arisen occasions in the past when the
Christian public have been able to successfully resist the invasions
of materialistic and immoral counsels, although they were advocated
by the rich and mighty. Only the blind can be led by the blind:
those who have clear vision will not follow such leadership. Whence
this far-reaching influence, then, which has blinded the eyes of so
many? Alas! these are the days of a paralysed faith, and faith is as
indispensable a faculty of the human mind as is reason.

The re-enthronement of faith is the need of the hour. Science we have,
and scholarship: but hesitancy and doubt rule the scientific spirit,
and timidity is the vice of the scholar. The soldier who hesitates and
doubts and grows timid will not win a single battle. His must be the
prophetic spirit of faith which "laughs at impossibilities, and cries,
It shall be done." But the Church militant has been ridiculed out of
the warrior spirit, and has laid aside its mightiest weapon, faith;
and as to leadership, many are pointing to science and scholarship and
crying, "These be thy gods, O Israel!" Science and scholarship have
their place and their power, but they are not the Christian's mightiest
weapons. Learning cannot take the place of the inspiration of faith;
statistics can never teach morals as forcibly as "Thus saith the Lord."
More than this: statistics can never overturn the "Thou shalt not" of
an Almighty God.

David has essayed to go forth to meet Goliath, well loaded down with
Saul's armour, and David will meet with the defeat he deserves if he
does not repent of the folly of matching such weapons against one who
defies the armies of the living God. The warfare is a spiritual not a
carnal one. What wonder that with such weapons courage has failed, the
citadel is imperilled, and "counsels of despair" are urged. But these
shall not prevail. That unrepentant soul shall not go unpunished by
the wrath of a just God, who enters into complicity with the vice of
fornication by consenting to the proposal for its State management.

But can this vice ever be actually exterminated? Probably never
entirely by human law; but neither can stealing, so far as we are able
to judge. The vice of stealing is likely to continue so long as the
city of London exists, in spite of the most excellent human laws. Shall
we then license stealing? No one who has a purse to be protected would
advocate such rash legislation.

A conclusive answer to the plea of "a necessary evil" has been already
given by our Judge. Looking upon the vices of those about Him, and the
inevitable crop of increasing vice, with its attendant misery, to which
his people were tending, He cried: "It must needs be that offences
come; but," He added, "_woe to that man_ by whom the offence cometh!"
And shall we listen to proposals to set aside the sentence of Divine
Justice for the tradition of men, and embody in human legislation the
teaching, "It must needs be that offences come; but _peace_ to that
man by whom the offence cometh"? Let us rather, answer every specious
array of misleading statistics, every false doctrine of medicine,
every fresh cry of alarm, every blasphemous utterance against Christ's
sufficient power to redeem, every infidel attack upon the sanctity of
God's holy law, with the inexorable "Thou shalt not" of God's eternal
commandment.

FOOTNOTES:

[9] "Lord George Hamilton himself instigated disregard of his own
command by sanctioning the repeal of the law which had embodied it,
upon a pretext so grotesquely irrelevant that an admission of its
ingenuousness is tantamount to a charge of imbecility against the
sanctioning Minister."--_The Shield_, November, 1897.

[10] Lady Henry Somerset addressed a letter to Lord George Hamilton,
January 27th, 1898, withdrawing these propositions. But alas! such a
tardy withdrawal cannot undo the mischief wrought to the native girls
of India by the repeal of the Cantonment Acts Amendment Act of 1895
(see Appendix C).

[11] Additional colour was given to this, later, by Lady Henry Somerset
placing the name of Lord Roberts (author of the "Infamous Circular
Memorandum," the history of which we have given in chapters 1 and 5) on
the Advisory Board of the Duxhurst Inebriate Home of the B.W.T.A., at
the Annual Conference of the Association in June, 1897.



APPENDICES.


A. FAC-SIMILE REPRODUCTION OF THE CIRCULAR MEMORANDUM ISSUED BY LORD
ROBERTS.

B. FAC-SIMILE OF A REGISTRATION TICKET.

C. LETTER TO LORD GEORGE HAMILTON.



Appendix A.


[Transcriber's Note: The following text is the transcription of a
page of a multi-part document.]


  _The photographic reduction of the following document was originally
  issued by the Friends' Association for Abolishing the State Regulation
  of Vice. It is here reproduced by their permission._


  The Names of the Commander-in-Chief and of the Quartermaster-General
  who were in office on the date of issue of each of the Circular
  Memorandums mentioned in the following Parliamentary Return.

  _According to the Indian Army and Civil Service List, 1870 to 1876;
  India List, 1877 to 1886._

  --------------------+-------------------+-------------------------------
    Date of Circular. |Commander-in-Chief.|  Quartermaster-General.
  --------------------+-------------------+-------------------------------
  20th July, 1870     |LORD NAPIER[*]     |COL. P. S. LUMSDEN.
  20th November, 1871 |    Ditto          |         Ditto.
  23rd August, 1872   |    Ditto          |         Ditto.
  30th September, 1873|    Ditto          |{        Ditto or
                      |                   |{MAJOR-GEN. E. B. JOHNSON.
  8th July, 1875      |    Ditto          |COL. F. S. ROBERTS.
  8th May, 1876       |{ Ditto or       } |MAJOR-GEN. F. S. ROBERTS.
                      |{SIR F. P. HAINES} |
  19th August, 1876   |SIR F. P. HAINES   |         Ditto.
  28th February, 1878 |    Ditto          |         Ditto.
  24th November, 1880 |    Ditto          |         ----
  23rd April, 1883    |SIR D. M. STEWART  |MAJOR-GEN. SIR C. M. MACGREGOR.
  26th November, 1883 |    Ditto          |         Ditto.
  12th July, 1884     |    Ditto          |         Ditto.
  17th June, 1886     |SIR F. S. ROBERTS  |MAJOR-GEN. E. F. CHAPMAN.
  --------------------+-------------------+-------------------------------
  [*] Lord Napier of Magdala

  On the 4th and 7th Aug., 1893, Lord Roberts disclaimed knowledge of
  the contents of the Circular Memorandum of June 17th, 1886 (see pages
  63 and 84 of Parliamentary Return [C. 7148], of 1893). But on the 11th
  Aug., 1893, Lieut.-Gen. E. F. Chapman, who was Quartermaster-General
  at the time, gave very different evidence (see pages 85 to 90 of
  the same Return). He stated that Sir F. S. (now Lord) Roberts, the
  Commander-in-Chief, went on his usual cold weather tour of inspection
  in the early part of 1886, when he would have the fullest opportunity
  of consulting the general officers of his command on the subject.
  On his return to headquarters he discussed the matter with the
  Surgeon-General and the Quartermaster-General. The result of their
  deliberations was drawn up by the latter official, sent to Sir F.
  S. Roberts for his approval, and then issued by his authority to
  the subordinate military officials. A copy was sent to the Military
  Department of the Government of India for their information, and the
  receipt thereof acknowledged by them.


[Transcriber's Note: The following text is the transcription of a
page of a multi-part document.]


  Fac-simile copy (reduced) of Lord Roberts' Circular Memorandum.

  EAST INDIA (CONTAGIOUS DISEASES)
       --------------------


  RETURN to an Address of the Honourable The House of Commons, dated 4
  June 1888;--_for_,


  "COPY of a CIRCULAR MEMORANDUM by the QUARTERMASTER GENERAL in INDIA,
  dated 17th June 1886."


                    --------------------
  India Office,  }                       J. A. GODLEY,
  4 June 1888.   }                Under Secretary of State for India.
                    --------------------


                         (_Sir John Gorst._)


                    --------------------
  _Ordered_, _by_ The House of Commons, _to be Printed_, _4 June 1888_.
                    --------------------


  LONDON:
  PRINTED BY HENRY HANSARD AND SON;

  AND

  Published by EYRE and SPOTTISWOODE, East Harding-street, London, E.C.,
  and 32, Abingdon-street, Westminster, S.W.;
  ADAM and CHARLES BLACK, North Bridge, Edinburgh;
  and HODGES, FIGGIS, and Co., 101,  Grafton-street, Dublin.


[Transcriber's Note: The following text is the transcription of a
two-page memorandum within the multi-part document.]


  COPY of a CIRCULAR MEMORANDUM by the QUARTERMASTER GENERAL in INDIA,
  dated 17th June 1886.


  (No. 21.)

  CIRCULAR MEMORANDUM.--Addressed to General Officers Commanding
  Divisions and Districts


  Cantonment Lock Hospitals
  -------------------------

  Office of Quartermaster General in India,
  Army Head Quarters, Simla,
  17 June 1886.

  [Sidenote: _Vide Précis_ of Circulars attached]

  IN former years His Excellency the Commander in Chief has frequently
  impressed on General and Commanding Officers the necessity for adopting
  stringent measures to reduce the chances of venereal disease spreading
  more widely amongst the soldiers of the Army.

  2. At the present time His Excellency desires me to give prominence
  to the following points which appear to be specially deserving of
  consideration by the Military and Medical authorities in every command.

  The treatment of venereal disease generally is a matter calling for
  special devotion on the part of the medical profession.

  To mitigate the evil now experienced, it is not only necessary to
  deal with the cases of troops in hospitals, but to arrange for a
  wider-spread effort which may reach the large centres of population,
  and, in this view, His Excellency has suggested to the Government of
  India the desirability of establishing a Medical School from which
  native practitioners trained in the treatment of venereal disease may
  be sent to the various towns throughout the country.

  It can no longer be regarded as derogatory to the medical profession to
  promote the careful treatment of men and women who are suffering from a
  disease so injurious, and in mentioning the step which his Excellency
  has taken, he desires me to indicate the extreme importance in the
  first instance of medical officers being prepared to study and practice
  this particular branch of their professional work, under the assurance
  that their doing so must certainly result in the recognition of their
  efforts.

  Whether or not the Lock Hospital system be extended, it is possible to
  encourage in every Cantonment, and in Sudder and Regimental Bazars,
  the treatment of those amongst the population who are suffering from
  venereal disease. The bulk of the women who practise the trade of
  prostitution are willing to subject themselves to examination by Dhais
  or by Medical Officers, if by their so doing they can be allowed to
  reside in regimental bazars.

  Where Lock Hospitals are not kept up, it becomes necessary, under
  a regimental system, to arrange for the effective inspection of
  prostitutes attached to regimental bazars, whether in cantonments or on
  the line of march.

  The isolation of women found diseased, and their maintenance while
  under treatment, becomes also a question to be dealt with regimentally.

  In the regimental bazars it is necessary to have a sufficient number of
  women, to take care that they are sufficiently attractive, to provide
  them with proper houses, and above all to insist upon means of ablution
  being always available.

  If young soldiers are carefully advised in regard to the advantage
  of ablution and recognise that convenient arrangements exist in the
  regimental bazar, they may be expected to avoid the risks involved
  in association with women who are not recognised by the regimental
  authorities.

  The employment of Dhais, and insistance upon the performance of the
  acknowledged duties, is of great importance.

  The removal of women who are pronounced to be incurably diseased
  from cantonment limits, should be dealt with as a police question in
  communication with the civil authorities.

  In regard to the soldiers themselves, there are means at the disposal
  of Commanding Officers to enforce a more careful avoidance of contact
  with women who are diseased, where venereal is largely prevalent, the
  increase of the regimental police in controlling the movements of the
  men is imperative.

  Frequent medical inspections should be ordered, and every endeavour
  should be made to make the men realize their own responsibility in
  assisting their officers, by indicating the women from whom disease has
  been acquired.

  Much may be done to encourage a feeling amongst the men that it should
  be a point of honour to save each other where possible from risk in
  this matter.

  The medical inspection of all detachments before leaving or entering a
  cantonment should be enforced by General Officers.

  In conclusion, His Excellency desires me to impress upon all concerned
  the necessity for meeting the present difficulty by increased
  individual effort.

  However much legislation may be desired to check the spread of disease,
  it is necessary to abandon a sense of false modesty in dealing with
  the matter in question, and to recognise that, as in the case of all
  other diseases, its open treatment, and the widespread knowledge of
  its disastrous effects, are the surest means of effacing it in each
  locality.

  (By order)

  _E. F. Chapman_, Major General,

  Quartermaster General in India.


[Transcriber's Note: The following text is the transcription of a
page of a multi-part document.]


  RELATING TO CONTAGIOUS DISEASES (EAST INDIA)
  ------------------------------------------------------------------------

  _Précis of Circulars issued in the Quartermaster General's Department
  regarding the adoption of stringent Measures to reduce the chances of
  Venereal Disease spreading more widely amongst the Soldiers of the
  Army._
  -----------------+------------------------------------------------------
   Number and Date |                       PURPORT.
    of Circular.   |
  -----------------+------------------------------------------------------
  No. 43, dated    | I. Officers commanding troops on the line of march to
   20th July 1870. |  ensure the effective inspection of prostitutes
                   |  attached to their regimental bazars.
                   |
                   | II. When any woman is found to be diseased, measures
                   |  are to be adopted for her isolation on the march,
                   |  and her transfer to the first or nearest Lock
                   |  Hospital for treatment.
                   |
  No. 87, dated    | Forwards a copy of a report by the Sanitary
   20th November   |  Commissioner with the Government of India, reviewing
   1871.           |  the working of the rules for the prevention of
                   |  venereal disease amongst British troops for the year
                   |  1870, and calls special attention to the necessity
                   |  of officers commanding stations affording more
                   |  efficient and energetic means for preventing the
                   |  admission of casuals to the vicinity of the
                   |  barracks.
                   |
                   | Any increase of disease should at once be met by
                   |  increased energy on the part of Station and
                   |  Regimental authorities, and especially of Regimental
                   |  Police.
                   |
  No. 51, dated    | Forwards copy of a communication from the Government
   23rd August     |  of India to that of Bombay, regarding the disposal
   1872.           |  of incurable women attending Lock Hospitals, in
                   |  which the former approves of a proposal to employ an
                   |  incurable woman on small wages in the duties of the
                   |  hospital at Mhow.
                   |
  No. 80, dated    | Directs that the practice of levying registration
   30th September  |  fees from prostitutes be discontinued.
   1873.           |
                   |
  No. 90, dated    | Calls attention to Circular No. 87 of 1871, and
   8th July 1875.  |  strongly impresses upon Officers Commanding
                   |  Divisions, Districts, and Stations, the necessity
                   |  for strengthening the regimental police of corps
                   |  when venereal is on the increase at a station, it
                   |  being the general impression that the disease is
                   |  not, as a rule, contracted from the registered
                   |  women, but from unlicensed prostitutes who wander
                   |  about the lines as hawkers, or are employed as
                   |  coolies by the Public Works Department.
                   |
                   | 2. Requests that it may be pointed out to regimental
                   |  Commanders, and the Lock Hospital Sub-Committees,
                   |  whose special duty it is to supervise the working
                   |  of the Lock Hospital rules, how important it is that
                   |  they should more actively exert themselves to check
                   |  the prevalence of this disease.
                   |
  No. 35, dated    | The Commander in Chief in India having had under
   8th May 1876.   |  review the annual reports on the working of the Lock
                   |  Hospitals at certain stations, His Excellency
                   |  regrets to find that the results are not
                   |  satisfactory when compared with those of previous
                   |  years.
                   |
                   | 2. The Lock Hospital rules, as they stand, appear
                   |  to meet all requirements, but it is considered that
                   |  much greater vigilance and interest on the part of
                   |  the local authorities is required for their
                   |  efficient working.
                   |
                   | 3. The authorities most concerned in working out
                   |  these rules are Commanding Officers of Regiments
                   |  and Batteries, their Medical Officers, and the
                   |  Sub-Committees, and their attention is called to
                   |  the following points:--
                   |
                   |   I. The number of women on the register is not
                   |    in proportion to the number of men who visit
                   |    them.
                   |


[Transcriber's Note: The following text is the transcription of a
page of a multi-part document.]


  COPY OF CIRCULAR MEMORANDUM
  -----------------+------------------------------------------------------
   Number and Date |                       PURPORT.
    of Circular.   |
  -----------------+------------------------------------------------------
                   |
  No. 35, dated    |   II. The improvement of the conditions under which
    8th May 1876   |    the women ply their trade, such as greater
    --_contd._     |    privacy, facilities for ablution, &c. &c.
                   |
                   |   III. The kind treatment of the women and every
                   |    reasonable inducement being held out to them
                   |    to attend the Lock Hospital when suffering
                   |    from disease.
                   |
                   | 4. Commanding Officers of regiments and batteries
                   |  are to report at once to the General Officer
                   |  Commanding, when any increase of venereal disease
                   |  occurs amongst their men. Such reports to show the
                   |  supposed causes of the increase, and the measures
                   |  adopted for its suppression, and after remark by
                   |  the Deputy Surgeon General to be forwarded to the
                   |  Quartermaster General's Office.
                   |
                   | 5. The Lock Hospital Sub-Committee are to be
                   |  assembled at least once a month, and their reports
                   |  forwarded to General Officers Commanding.
                   |
                   | 6. It is considered that a Careful attention to these
                   |  points will contribute considerably towards checking
                   |  the spread of venereal disease, and His Excellency
                   |  hopes that no effort will be spared by either
                   |  Regimental, Medical, or Local authorities to ensure
                   |  more satisfactory results than have hitherto been
                   |  obtained.
                   |
  No. 67, dated    | The annual reports on the working of Lock Hospitals
   19th August     |  during the year 1875, show that much venereal
   1876.           |  disease was contracted when on the line of march;
                   |  Commanding Officers' attention should therefore be
                   |  called to Circular No. 43 of 1870, and to the
                   |  Medical Regulations which direct the Medical
                   |  examination for venereal disease of every unmarried
                   |  soldier on the day of his arrival at a new station
                   |  from the line of march; and the effective inspection
                   |  of the prostitutes accompanying the regimental
                   |  bazars.
                   |
  No. 11, dated    | As it would appear that the great increase which
   28th February   |  prevails in a regiment on the line of march is
   1878.           |  attributable in a great measure to illicit
                   |  prostitution, requests that the necessity for the
                   |  exercise of greater care and vigilance on the line
                   |  of march may be urged upon regimental authorities.
                   |
                   | 2. If necessary, some restriction should be placed
                   |  on the men going out of camp, by posting picquets
                   |  in different directions, and strengthening them
                   |  when cases of venereal increase.
                   |
  No. 68, dated    | Draws attention to Circular No. 67 of 1876, and
   24th November   |  requests that the instructions therein contained
   1880.           |  regarding the medical examination of all unmarried
                   |  soldiers on first arrival at a new station may be
                   |  carried out, care being taken that the examination
                   |  of the men is conducted with the utmost decency.
                   |
                   | 2. These medical examinations are of importance in
                   |  detecting the existence and arresting the spread
                   |  of venereal disease.
                   |
  No. 23, dated    | Forwards for information and guidance an extract from
   23rd April      |  a ruling of the Chief Court, Punjab, regarding the
   1883.           |  registration of women convicted of practising
                   |  illicit  prostitution.
                   |
  No. 69, dated    | The Commander in Chief requests that careful
   26th November   |  attention of Cantonment Committees and Lock Hospital
   1883.           |  Sub-Committees may be directed to the following
                   |  points, wherever free quarters for registered women
                   |  have been, or may hereafter be, established:--
                   |
                   | 2. Where cantonment funds can afford it, experienced
                   |  and reliable Dhais should be employed to supervise
                   |  the registered women.
                   |


[Transcriber's Note: The following text is the transcription of a
page of a multi-part document.]


  RELATING TO CONTAGIOUS DISEASES (EAST INDIA)
  -----------------+------------------------------------------------------
   Number and Date |                       PURPORT.
    of Circular.   |
  -----------------+------------------------------------------------------
                   |
  No. 69, dated    |3. Such Dhais should be well paid if the fund can
   26th November   | afford it, and they should be held responsible
   1883            | that:--
   --_continued._  |
                   |   I. The women under their charge consort with none
                   |    but Europeans.
                   |
                   |   II. That they do not entertain a man in any house
                   |    but the one allotted them as quarters;
                   |
                   |   III. That a woman is sent to hospital immediately
                   |    she is found to be diseased;
                   |
                   |   IV. To ensure the latter, the Dhai should examine
                   |    the women daily between the periodical inspections
                   |    of the medical officer.
                   |
                   | 4. Soldiers who have been diseased by registered
                   |  women, have been frequently known to attribute it
                   |  to women met in their walks outside the bazaar,
                   |  and the diseased woman has thus been allowed to
                   |  practise her trade in this state for sometime
                   |  without detection.
                   |
                   | 5. Every house should therefore be numbered outside,
                   |  or in some conspicuous spot inside, and a soldier on
                   |  reporting himself sick should not be required to
                   |  personally point out the woman from whom he
                   |  contracted the disease, but merely to give the
                   |  number of her house.
                   |
                   | 6. If the Dhai does her duty, these measures should
                   |  lead to the early detection of disease amongst
                   |  registered women.
                   |
                   | 7. Each house should be provided with a urinal and
                   |  means of ablution, and such other preventive
                   |  measures, within the means of the Cantonment Fund,
                   |  as suggest themselves to local committees should be
                   |  freely resorted to.
                   |
                   | 8. His Excellency will be prepared to sanction any
                   |  reasonable expenditure from cantonment funds on the
                   |  measures therein suggested.
                   |
  No. 42, dated    | Requests that the attention of Officers Commanding
   12th July       |  Stations may be drawn to the desirability when
   1884.           |  constructing free quarters for registered women,
                   |  of providing houses that will meet the wishes of
                   |  the women.
                   |
                   | 2. Unless their comfort and the convenience of those
                   |  who consort with them is considered, the results
                   |  will not be satisfactory.
                   |
  -----------------+------------------------------------------------------



Appendix B.


[Transcriber's Note: The following text is the transcription of
a two-part document. In this first part, text surrounded by the
tilde ("~") character indicates it is handwritten in this document.]


  FAC-SIMILE OF A REGISTRATION TICKET OF EXAMINATION

  Issued to a Prostitute in India, in 1892, notwithstanding the
  Resolution of the House of Commons of June 5, 1888, condemning such
  registration. The form employed is the one authorized by the East India
  Contagious Diseases Act of 1866, which was repealed in 1888.

         *       *       *       *       *

  ~1892~

  Ticket of Registered Prostitutes in the Cantonment of Meean Meer,--

  Name, _________~Begum 1st~_________________________________________

  Caste ______~Mohamedun~____________________________________________

  Registered number, ____~1~_________________________________________

  Place of residence in Cantonment, ___~Sudder Bazar~________________

  Date of Registry, ______~4-3-90~___________________________________

  Personal appearance, ______________________________________________

  _________________________________________________________________

                                                ~signature~

                                    ~offs.~  Cantonment Magistrate,
                                                          Meean Meer,
                             A. B. P., S. B., M. M.
  ~DMM~


[Transcriber's Note: In this second part, text surrounded by the
tilde ("~") character indicates it is handwritten in this document.
The string "~initial~" represents the undecipherable initials or
signature of an examining Medical Officer.]


  ----------+---------------------------------------------------+---------
            |        _Date of Medical Examination and_          |
            |         _Signature of Medical Officer._           |
   Year     +------------+-----------+--------------+-----------+
   and      | Date of    |           | Date of      |           |Remarks.
   Month.   | inspection | Signature | inspection   | Signature |
            | in the 1st | of Medical| in the second| of Medical|
            | half month.| Officer.  | half month.  | Officer.  |
  ----------+------------+-----------+--------------+-----------+---------
  18~92~    |            |           |              |           |
            |            |           |   ~15./92~   |           |
  January   |   ~1st~    |           |   ~23./92~   |           |
            |            |           |   ~27 /92~   |           |
            |            |           |              |           |
  February  |   ~1st~    | ~initial~ |   ~15 /92~   | ~initial~ |
            |            |           |              |           |
            |            |           |              |           |
  March     |            |           |              |           |
            |            |           |              |           |
            |            |           |              |           |
  April     |            |           |              |           |
            |            |           |              |           |
            |            |           |              |           |
  May       |            |           |              |           |
            |            |           |              |           |
            |            |           |              |           |
  June      |            |           |              |           |
            |            |           |              |           |
            |            |           |              |           |
  July      |            |           |              |           |
            |            |           |              |           |
            |            |           |              |           |
  August    |            |           |              |           |
            |            |           |              |           |
            |            |           |              |           |
  September |            |           |              |           |
            |            |           |              |           |
            |            |           |              |           |
  October   |            |           |              |           |
            |            |           |              |           |
            |            |           |              |           |
  November  |            |           |              |           |
            |            |           |              |           |
            |            |           |              |           |
  December  |            |           |              |           |
            |            |           |              |           |
            |            |           |              |           |
  ----------+------------+-----------+--------------+-----------+---------



Appendix C.


LETTER TO LORD GEORGE HAMILTON.

The following is the full text of the letter of retractation which Lady
Henry Somerset addressed to Lord George Hamilton, January 27, as it
appeared in the London daily papers of February 8, 1898:--


  EASTNOR CASTLE, LEDBURY, _Jan. 27, 1898_.

  DEAR LORD GEORGE HAMILTON,--Your lordship invited me ten months
  ago to give you my view of the dispatch that has been addressed to
  the Government of India on the health of the army, and in a letter
  in which I did so I ventured to suggest some methods, moral and
  disciplinary, which seemed to me the only ones likely to succeed,
  because they had at least the merit of being logical.

  I was led to do so by two considerations: first, the dispatch in
  question seemed to imply that the Government would give every
  encouragement to every form of elevating agency, and so emphasize the
  altered spirit in which the subject was approached, and that such
  suggested supervision would only affect an incorrigible minimum;
  and second, that the system I had in mind would be so drastic and
  penal in its nature as to make State interference odious and finally
  impossible. That was ten months ago; and in that time nothing has
  been done of which the public has heard to strengthen the forces that
  make for moral improvement.

  What has been done, viz., the repeal of the Indian Acts of 1895,
  which prohibited inspection, has been in a direction exactly
  opposite. It seems to have been the object of the Government to
  obtain the maximum of impunity, with the minimum of protest, from
  those who desire to see the State shape its actions according to
  Christian views of ethics. I need not tell your lordship I am not
  writing to say how strongly I am still opposed to the course which
  the Government has taken; but I find that my letter to your lordship
  of last year has been taken by many to mean that I am on the side of
  the accepted view of State regulation, and I am from time to time
  quoted as a sympathizer with such views. I am therefore writing to
  withdraw any proposals made in that letter for this reason--that the
  events of the past year have convinced me of the inadvisability and
  extreme danger of the system that in April last I thought might be
  instituted.

  The absence of any serious effort by the Government to bring about
  a higher standard in the army is a final proof to me that, as long
  as regulation of any kind can be resorted to as a remedy, it will
  always be regarded as the one and only panacea. My view was that it
  would be instituted as an odious but possibly effective auxiliary
  to moral efforts. I find it will always be accepted as a convenient
  substitute. I take the liberty of addressing this explicit withdrawal
  of an endorsement in whatever form of the principle of regulation;
  because it was in a letter to your lordship that I originally
  incurred the responsibility. I trust, therefore, to your lordship's
  indulgence to forgive me for troubling you further in the matter.--I
  remain, my lord, yours very truly,

  (Signed)      ISABEL SOMERSET.

       *       *       *       *       *

The following comments on the above letter appeared in _The Christian_
(London), February 17, 1898:


  REGULATION NO REMEDY.

  In our last issue we inserted in full the letter of Lady Henry
  Somerset, in which she withdrew from her unfortunate position in
  relation to the State regulation of vice in India. We refrained, for
  the time being, from comment, that her retractation might speak for
  itself. We feel, therefore, the more free to remark upon it now.

  We rejoice, in the first place, that it has come at all, for it
  justifies the principles for which we and other repealers have
  contended all these years. Lady Henry is convinced of "the
  inadvisability and extreme danger" of her former proposals, and
  recognises now that "as long as regulation of any kind can be resorted
  to as a remedy, it will be regarded as the one and only panacea ...
  [and] will always be accepted as a convenient substitute [for moral
  reform]."

  It is therefore with thankfulness that we note her ladyship's
  "explicit withdrawal of an endorsement in whatever form of the
  principle of regulation."

  This is all good so far as it goes, but it does not go far enough;
  and, alas! it comes too late, for it can never undo the fearful harm
  her action last year was the means of doing.

  A public retractation is a hard and painful process, and we sympathize
  with Lady Henry in the mental strain which it must have cost her. But
  she has not been the only sufferer. It were no small thing to cause
  division and discord in so gigantic an organization as that over which
  she presided, so that at the present time the movement is crippled and
  its machinery out of gear. This might well have elicited an expression
  of regret, which we hope may yet be forthcoming in some communication
  to the Association she has so grievously wronged.

  But more than this. Encouraged by her act, the Government claimed
  the women of England as its supporters, defied moral sentiment, and,
  on the crest of the wave of this unhappy dissension, carried the
  re-enactment of the infamous C. D. Acts among our sisters in India.
  It will take long and weary years of uphill work to undo the mischief
  that her ill-advised and hasty action wrought. Meantime, how many
  Indian women will have succumbed to a shameful life and gone down to a
  dishonoured grave?

  The weakest point of Lady Henry's letter is the erroneous assumption
  on which it is based: that her proposals themselves were moral,
  and that if the Government had instituted reforms they might have
  successfully co-existed with regulation. But how can regulation under
  any circumstances be a remedy? The very terms are self-contradictory.
  What is morally wrong can never be experimentally right, and this
  proposition neither casuistry nor expediency can set aside. The only
  remedy is obedience to the law of God; and if material aids be needed,
  let them be found in some active measures for the mental, moral, and
  spiritual improvement of our soldiers in their leisure hours. This is
  where reform is needed.

       *       *       *       *       *

The foregoing Letter, together with the article from _The Christian_,
were printed in full in _The Shield_ (the official organ of the British
Committee of the Federation for the Abolition of the State Regulation
of Vice) of March, 1898, with the following


  NOTE BY THE EDITOR.

  "We are glad to see that Lady Henry Somerset has now withdrawn from
  the proposals for the Regulation of Vice with which her name has
  become connected. At the same time we regret that she still appears
  to think that her scheme could possibly have done good if side by
  side with it had been some moralizing agency. Our position is and has
  uniformly been that Regulation is essentially under all circumstances
  a demoralizing agency, and must be so from the very nature of the
  case; and that the provision of women certified fit for immoral
  purposes is necessarily disastrous whatever be the concomitants of
  such a proposition."


       *       *       *       *       *


Transcriber's Notes

The old-fashioned English names of towns and cities in South Asia that
are used in the text have been retained. Variations in the spelling of
other words are unchanged unless noted in the following.


* Corrections to the Original Text

The following misprints and other errors have been corrected:

Page 23 - the word "prostitutues" changed to "prostitutes" ("a system
of compulsory examination of prostitutes").

Page 42 - the text "to be longer" changed to "to be any longer" ("when
too old to be any longer 'sufficiently attractive' to the soldier").

Page 101 - the word "analagous" changed to "analogous" ("are closely
analogous to the conditions").


* Other Changes

The following changes to the original text have been made for clarity
or consistency:

The title "Commander-in-chief" changed to "Commander-in-Chief"
throughout to match the formal title used in original documents.

Page xi - "Anglo Indian" changed to "Anglo-Indian" in CONTENTS.

Page 42 - the word "unbiassed" changed to "unbiased".

Page 87 - "the C.D. Acts" changed to "the C. D. Acts".

Page 103 - "prized C.D. Acts" changed to "prized C. D. Acts".

Page 107 - the text "World's W. C. T. U." changed to "World's W.C.T.U."


* Notes

The words "bazar" and "bazaar" appear throughout the text. The authors
normally use "bazaar" in their narrative while the facsimile copies of
Army documents in Appendix A show both spellings being used.

Appendix A (pages 114-121) is a transcription of the facsimiles of
original documents. The resulting text has been slightly reformatted
to fit within a page width of 72 characters but retains the general
layout of the original documents along with their inconsistent spelling.
In regard to this latter point the following issues are noted:

  Page 117 - "his Excellency" is inconsistent with other references
  to "His Excellency" in the same document.

  Page 118 - the word "insistance" rather than "insistence" is used.

Appendix C (pages 124-127) uses the word "retractation". This is
correct in the context in which it is used. It is a rarely used
noun, defined in the GNU version of the Collaborative International
Dictionary of English as meaning "the act of retracting what has been
said; recantation."


* Changes to Footnotes

The footnotes have been re-indexed using numbers and collected
together at the end of each chapter.


* Variations in Spelling

The following variations of a word, rank or descriptive term are
present in the original text and have been retained. The variations
occur because the authors use one spelling in their narrative but
retain any different spelling which occurs in text that they quote:

  "bazaar" and "bazar"
  "Hindoo" and "Hindus"
  "Lieut-General" and "Lieut.-Gen."
  "memoranda", "memorandums" and "memorandum"
  "Mohammedan" and "Mohamedun"
  "smallpox" and "small-pox"
  "today" and "to-day"





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