This last item alone would not enable one to form any idea of the number of sufferers from this terrible scourge. There are in London nine great hospitals, besides smaller ones, and dispensaries in every parish, or division of a large parish, and other means of gratuitous medical assistance. Suppose the smaller medical foundations put aside, and their patients thrown into the aggregate of the great hospitals, we should have 22,617 venereal patients. Suppose the private practice of the London army of medical men to yield only half as many more, we have 35,000 venereal patients in London only. Without reckoning the Lock Hospital, parish doctors, barracks, and all the other institutions, one would very readily imagine that London alone furnished 50,000 venereal patients per annum.
Again, on the number of single men and widowers in London above twenty years of age (upward of a quarter of a million), the venereal cases, if in the same proportion as among soldiers and sailors, would in the same period amount to 30,000 and upward.
There is, however, another way of conjecturing the amount of disease introduced into the community by prostitution, which English writers have adopted. The Medico-Chirurgical Review, a periodical of high standing, speaking of the extent of venereal disease and its effects on the population, says:
“There is every reason to believe that, to represent the public prostitutes of England, Wales, and Scotland, fifty thousand is an estimate too low. We presume there will be no objection made to the assumption that, unless each of these fifty thousand prostitutes submitted to at least one act of intercourse during every twenty-four hours, she could not obtain means sufficient to support life. The result of the evidence contained in the first report of the Constabulary force of England was that about two per cent. of the prostitutes of London were suffering under some form of venereal disease. But yet we will descend even lower, and presume that of one hundred healthy prostitutes, if each submits to one indiscriminate sexual act in twenty-four hours, not more than one would become infected with syphilis; an estimate which is, without doubt, far too low, yet, if admitted to be correct, the necessary consequence will be, that of the fifty thousand prostitutes, five hundred are diseased within the aforesaid twenty-four hours.
“If we next admit that a fifth of these five hundred diseased women are admitted to hospitals on the day on which disease appears, it follows there are every day on the streets four hundred diseased women. Let it be supposed that the power of these four hundred to infect be limited to twelve days, and that of every six persons who, at the rate of one each night, have connection with these women, five become infected, it will follow that there will be four thousand men infected every night, and, consequently, one million four hundred and sixty thousand in the year. Farther, as there are every night four hundred women diseased by these men, one hundred and eighty-two thousand five hundred public prostitutes will be syphilized during the year, and hence one million, six hundred, and fifty-two thousand, five hundred cases of syphilis in both sexes occur every twelve months. If, then, the entire population had intercourse with prostitutes in an equal ratio, the gross population of Great Britain, of all ages and sexes, would, during eighteen years, have been affected with primary syphilis. Be it remembered, we do not assert that more than a million and a half of persons are attacked every year, but that that number of cases occur annually in England, Wales, and Scotland, though the same individual may be attacked more than once. Although it is evident that all the estimates used for these calculations are (we know no other word that expresses it) ridiculously low, yet we find that more than a million and a half cases of syphilis occur every year, an amount which is probably not half the actual number. How enormous, then, must be the number of children born with secondary syphilis! how immense the mortality among them! how vast an amount of public and private money expended in the cure of this disease!”
CHAPTER XXVII.
MEXICO.
Spanish Conquest.—Treatment of Female Prisoners.—Mexican Manners in 1677.—Priesthood.—Modern Society.—Fashionable Life.—Indifference of Husbands to their Wives.—General Immorality.—Offenses.—Charitable Institutions.—The Cuna, or Foundling Hospital.
The social condition of Mexico is of importance, as it was formerly the chief seat of Spanish domination in America, and its manners and government gave the key to all the other colonies and viceroyalties which owed allegiance to the crown of Spain. Whatever the state of the native population may have been when Spanish leaders and their myrmidons burst upon them, and broke up the kingdom of the Mexican emperors, they rapidly succumbed beneath the lust, avarice, and cruelty which were ever the distinctive features of Spanish warfare and conquest in every clime and against every people. Of the enormities perpetrated by these soldiers, the history of the Mexican conquest gives us innumerable instances; but one solitary example, from Bernal de Diaz, will be enough. He tells us that when they took women prisoners, they made a division of them at night for the sake of greater peace and quietness, and that they branded them with the marks of their owners. They were thus at liberty to choose the handsomest of the Indian women, and reserve them for their own uses. What these uses were can be easily supposed. The fate of less favored female prisoners is left in doubt; they were turned over to their savage allies, to be butchered in cold blood, or otherwise disposed of as most convenient.