Part 8

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) ------------------------------------------------------------------------