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of things in the Cantonments of India, which went to prove that, although the C.D. Acts had been ordered to be repealed, the same state of things was being maintained, under the Cantonments Act of 1889, and that the resolution of the House of Commons of 1888 had been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

“I’ll buy him off! I’ll buy him off!” exclaimed one woman to us, with streaming eyes, at the close of one of our meetings. “My boy enlisted to go to India without my consent and then repented, and I thought it would teach him a lesson to compel him to abide by his word. He has already got as far as Gibraltar, I think; but I’ll send the money and buy him off. I cannot consent to let him go out under officers who will teach him that vice is necessary.” Another mother expressed great indignation at our statements regarding the temptations put in the way of young soldiers by their superiors, and declared she would write to her boy and obtain his contradiction of them. The reply came back, and the almost broken-hearted mother caused it to be conveyed to us, together with an exhortation that we should “cry aloud and spare not.” It was to the following effect:

“Yes, mother, all those ladies say is true, and much more that they do not know, and you would hardly believe. I have been so harassed and persecuted that sometimes I have gone to the chakla, pretending to sin, but God knows I have not; it was the only way to escape their merciless persecution.”

We have been informed many times that there were military officers who sneered at virtuous soldiers as lacking proper fighting qualities, and who deliberately fostered in their soldiers animal propensities, for the sake of the ferocity of disposition that attends licentiousness.

The names of the special Commissioners were: Mr. Denzil Ibbetson and Surgeon-Colonel J. Cleghorn, M.D., Inspector-General of Civil Hospitals throughout the Punjab. In addition to these witnesses from India and ourselves, Lord Roberts, Quartermaster-General Chapman, and Mr. Hyslop Bell, of Darlington, were called before the Departmental Committee to give evidence.

The statements of Lord Roberts and of General Chapman, who were called before the Departmental Committee in August, proved to be matters of intense interest, especially as regarded their disagreement as to Lord Roberts’ knowledge of the Infamous Memorandum. Lord Roberts testified that, when the Resolution of 1888 was carried in the House of Commons not permitting the compulsory examination of women or the licensing of prostitution, he understood those measures to mean abolition, not modification, of measures for the regulation of prostitution, and proceeded accordingly. The Resolution meant the abolishing of the periodical examination, of licensing, of compulsion, of regulation, etc. He declared that he knew nothing of the Infamous Memorandum which had been issued in his name, and that he “entirely disapproved” of some of the contents of that circular, saying, “I certainly would not have approved of that part of the Circular which referred to providing them with pretty young women.” Lord Roberts was confronted with a mass of evidence which he little expected. After his own sweeping contradictions of our statements, he was shown the report from the Cantonment of Meean Meer which the Special Commission had brought from India, and in which nearly every statement we had made was “admitted.” Other prima facie evidence of the truth of our statements convinced him that our testimony was not to be broken down. As he left the Committee it was with the conviction that General Chapman was next to be called, and would give most disagreeable evidence against him as regarded the Infamous Memorandum and its authorship. Lord Roberts proceeded immediately to Scotland, and from thence wrote the following letter of apology:—

Dunbar, Scotland, 11 August, 1893.

Having read the reports of Mr. Ibbetson’s Committee, in regard to the working of the Rules dealing with the abolition of Lock Hospitals, etc., in Cantonments in India, and also the reports of the officers commanding the seven stations which the Committee did not visit, I frankly admit that the statements of the two American missionary ladies, who made a tour through Upper India in the cold weather of 1891–92, for the purpose of inquiring into the matter, are in the main correct.

I hoped and believed that the orders issued to give effect to the Resolution of the House of Commons had been everywhere obeyed. In some stations the Rules have been strictly enforced, but in others it now turns out this has not been completely the case.

I deeply regret this, and I feel that an apology is due from me to the ladies concerned. This apology I offer unreservedly.

In doing so, I would remark that I think it would have been better if the missionary ladies had been commended to the care of the authorities in India. We could have assisted them to carry out the work on which they were engaged; omissions and shortcomings would have been remedied at the time; a great deal of unpleasantness would have been avoided; the ladies themselves would have found their task considerably lightened; and there would have been less chance of their drawing wrong deductions from some of the circumstances which came under their notice, as in sundry instances they would seem from Mr. Ibbetson’s Committee Report to have done. This was owing, no doubt, to a want of knowledge of the language, and of the habits and customs of the people of India.

Roberts.

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.”

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