Order in the course of July, 1897, in which he dealt with this point. He said -
"The Commander-in-Chief has reason to believe that the records of many station hospitals show that a majority of venereal cases are confined within a narrow circle of men who are admitted again and again, and thus swell the number of admissions."
This fact is very important to remember, because it is one of the things that completely vitiates the comparison as regards venereal disease of our Army with foreign Armies. They have conscription and can always get as many men as they want; they, therefore, get rid of men who constantly break down in health from venereal disease. In the debate in the House of Lords, Lord Lansdowne admitted that the comparison between the English Army and continental Armies was very fallacious and misleading.
But while we fully recognise these things as modifying in some degree the blackness of the picture which has been drawn by military authorities of the condition of the Army in India, the bare facts, when all exaggerations have been cleared away, are bad enough; there was a continuous and appallingly large increase of admissions to hospital all the time the Acts were in operation and their net result was a sanitary failure.
We who oppose this kind of legislation say it was bound to be a failure, because it aimed at making vice safe rather than at making any attack on vice itself. We point to the parallel of pauperism. Many of us have had occasion to learn through bitter experience that if any measure is adopted for the relief of pauperism which aggravates the causes which produce it, pauperism advances by leaps and bounds; and the same thing is true of the subject before us; if you persuade men that you are going to do something which will enable them to indulge in vice without risk to health, you remove one of the great barriers to vicious self-indulgence, and foster the very evil you are endeavouring to control.
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It must not be supposed for a moment that the sanitary failure of the C.D. Acts was not recognised by the sanitary authorities in India. Over and over again the Army Sanitary Commission in its reports commented on the failure of the Acts to achieve the end they had in view. In one of these reports we find the following sentence:
"If the rules cannot be worked so as to secure better results, the question must soon be asked whether they are not positively injurious by leading men to depend on a security from disease which does not exist."
The following is an extract from the Report of the Army Sanitary Commission, published as a Parliamentary paper No. 318, of 1895. The report itself was published 1892:
"While there is no doubt whatever as to the vast extent of this evil, there is great difference of opinion as to what may or can be done to check it. Many people treat the whole matter as if both the cause and the remedy were very simple. The lock hospitals, they say, have been abolished, and hence venereal diseases prevail; re-establish these hospitals and this prevalence will be checked; hundreds of soldiers who now fill the hospitals will then be doing their duty and, instead of labouring under a disease which they may very likely transmit to their children, they will then be healthy and in due time the fathers of healthy families.
"If these opinions were correct we should not hesitate to urge that the lock hospital system should be re-established in India without delay, and that it should be carried out with unremitting care and attention; but unfortunately the facts do not support such opinions. The lock hospital system was in force throughout Indian cantonments for many years. It was one of the first matters affecting the health of the British soldier in India which engaged the attention of the special Sanitary Department created in that country in 1864. The rules for the prevention of venereal diseases were prepared
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