Part 7

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.