“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.