The Committee protests against the very common assumption that prostitution is a necessary evil, and urges that the Government by actively encouraging self-restraint and good moral conduct in the Army, should impress upon the soldiers that vice, and not only disease, is to be feared and avoided. In particular they would suggest that habitual immorality which incapacitates soldiers from service should be treated as a military offence, and they gladly note the recommendation of the Indian Government in their Despatch of May 18th, 1897, advising penal stoppage of pay for admission to hospital on account of venereal disease.
Mrs. Fawcett said :--This is an immensely long resolution, almost a speech in itself. The Executive Committee decided to draw it up in its present form because it was felt to be desirable to place in the hands of the General Committee some facts and figures drawn from official sources, which are very often ignored or misrepresented. Advocates of legislation on the lines of the Contagious Diseases Acts almost invariably assume in their letters and speeches, that it is a well-known fact that disease is diminished by these regulations, and that we, who oppose them, resist, on moral grounds, the application of a remedy of known sanitary efficiency. We, therefore, desire to place in your hands figures taken from the statistics published by the Government, which show that the exact reverse of this is the case. We rely throughout on official statistics and official documents supplied by the Government, and they show that the whole time the system known as the Contagious Diseases Acts was in operation, whether in England or in India, there was a continuous and rapid increase of venereal disease in the Army.
I omit on the present occasion all further reference to the English figures, merely saying that you may rely upon the accuracy of my statement that the official statistics show that there was a large increase of venereal disease in the Army in England the whole time the Contagious Diseases Acts were in operation here, and a very considerable reduction of it since their repeal.
On the Indian case I must dwell more at length. The Acts were in operation in India from 1865 to 1889, twenty-four years. In those twenty-four years admissions to hospital for venereal diseases increased from 212 per 1,000 men in 1865, to 480 in 1889; that is to say, that within the period when the Acts were in operation the disease considerably more than doubled. That is one of the things it is very important you should remember. Another is that the figures refer to "admissions" and not to men. Thus, when it is said that venereal disease in the Army in India amounted in 1895 to 520 per thousand men, it does not mean that more than half of every thousand men in the Army have been treated in hospital for this disease: it means that there have been 520 admissions to hospital, and the same man may be, and in many cases is, admitted over and over again. We make no charge whatever of dishonesty on the part of those who are responsible for drawing up the statistics: hospital figures, I believe, are always kept in this way; if a man is admitted five times to hospital in the course of a year, he is five admissions, but of course he is not five men. Many articles have been written, and many speeches have been made, on the assumption that he is five men, and it is against this misunderstanding of the facts that I particularly warn you.
This is fully admitted by those of our opponents who are conversant with the facts. Lord George Hamilton, in reply to a question in the House of Commons on this point, said that it was of course an error to speak as if more than half of our Army in India were invalided on account of this disease, and he said that he estimated the permanent reduction of the fighting strength of the Army in India from this cause to be 43 per 1,000. General Sir George White, the retiring Commander-in-Chief in India, published a General
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