[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of things in the Cantonments of India, which went to prove that, although the C. D. Acts had been ordered to be repealed, the same state of things was being maintained, under the Cantonments Act of 1889, and that the resolution of the House of Commons of 1888 had been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.