On this vast subject I can only refer to-day to two practical methods of gradually extirpating venereal disease from our army in India.

The first is the steady discouragement by Government of promiscuous intercourse.

The second is the removal of the idleness which curses our soldiery in an army of occupation.

The first indispensable condition in the prevention of disease is the steady discouragement of promiscuous intercourse.

Now, I assert positively that such discouragement has never been seriously and steadily tried in the army by Government, but only by unofficial efforts—efforts which are most valuable, but which are entirely lacking in the force of organization and in the important recognition and help which Government alone can afford.

In the ‘Memorandum of the Army Sanitary Commission,’ No. 2, published this year, on the first page appears the following noteworthy statement—so utterly misleading as to amount to virtual falsehood:

‘The efforts to teach the soldiers habits of self-control having so signally failed, those responsible for the maintenance of the efficiency of the army in India may well be excused if they look about for some effective means of arresting the progress of the disease and preserving their battalions fit for service.’

Now, what are the Government efforts here referred to which are said to have failed?

In examining the circulars issued from the Quartermaster-General’s Department from 1870 to 1884 for the adoption of stringent measures ‘to reduce the chances of venereal disease,’ it is found that the recommendation consists in instructing the soldiers how to cleanse themselves after dangerous sexual indulgence! No circular is issued from the Quartermaster’s Department requiring that the soldier shall be taught how to control his ignorant instincts and honouring such control (that is left to scattered individual effort), but official instruction is confined to the vain endeavour of teaching him how to satisfy lust without extreme risk! Surely this is adding hypocrisy to culpable disregard of the national welfare.

It is encouragement to continence which the young soldier needs; and remember that numbers of these soldiers are enlisted between eighteen and twenty-five years of age—an age when every physician knows that the male organization is being consolidated, and when continence is invaluable in helping the physical forces to build up a fine strong manhood. Encouragement to self-control, therefore, must be afforded from the soldier’s first introduction to Her Majesty’s service.

It must begin with the recruiting sergeants, who should be moral men, and understand that continence in the soldiers will be regarded with the highest honour, as preservative of physical efficiency and moral bravery.

The inspectors of recruits, and especially the medical staff, must give the important instructions needed by soldiers of how to restrain their passions.

The sexual organs are not a permissible subject of trade, and purchase of the female body should be discouraged in all the manifestations that official influence or human law can legitimately reach. The army surgeons must themselves know the physical reasons why the practice of immorality can never be rendered safe, and by object-lessons taken from the military hospitals they can teach ignorant soldiers that no death is to be feared in comparison with the shocking results of incontinence. They can indicate the rational means of physical exercise and mental discipline by which the eager passions of youth can be controlled, whilst at the same time they insist upon the necessity of a non-stimulating diet in tropical climates.

The chaplains of the army have the next and still higher duty to perform towards each undisciplined youth who is given up body and soul to the absolute direction of the army authorities. No chaplain should be appointed to our Indian army who is not only himself a moral man, but who has also learned the physical possibility and immense advantage of self-control, and is thus able from the basis of physiological knowledge to rise to the higher plane of religious instruction. Without such physiological knowledge, as a sound support of well-grounded spiritual faith, his sacred calling may seem a badge of hypocrisy, more deadly and destructive from the profound responsibility of the position which he has ventured to fill.

The immense influence which commanding officers may exert by their own example and sympathy cannot be enlarged on here. But until such influences are brought to bear on the recruits by the Government, it is not true to state that efforts to teach self-control have signally failed, for they have not been made.[11]

Our responsibilities to the people of India, where England has become the paramount Power, are very weighty. These responsibilities are due to its women as well as to its men. It is stated that, according to the last census, there were the enormous number of 38,047,354 girls under fifteen years of age in our Indian Empire. What is the duty of a Christian Government to this helpless mass of human beings? The formation of poor young Indian women into a class purchasable by white soldiers—a class despised by their own people, with no refuge before them, but when used up turned out to die—is a dire and dastardly disgrace to any Government calling itself civilized. The removal of temptation by forbidding our soldiers to purchase our young Indian sisters, and, if necessary, excluding them entirely from the cantonment, is a distinct duty on the part of any Government that seriously means to banish venereal disease from our army.

The second urgent preventive measure which should engage our military authorities is the removal of that dangerous idleness which is a constant temptation to the soldiers through so many weary hours of every day. This subject can only be referred to here, for, although of extreme importance, its practicability and adaptations must first of all be thoroughly discussed by military men intimately acquainted with the exigencies of army life. But it is a paramount duty to provide constant useful employment and healthy recreation for our soldiers in every army of occupation, during the cooler hours of the evening in tropical climates, when such employment becomes possible as well as imperative.

The remarkable organization of an army is the most powerful training-school, in good or evil, for the poorer classes of men, that we possess. The conversion of an army of occupation into a school of the industrial arts needed in its maintenance—with rewards for industry, sobriety, and self-control—must surely be in the power of any Government that resolutely determines to accomplish such a noble transformation. The saving in health and even in money would be a great economic gain. The Government that carried out such a grand result would be a mighty benefactor to our race.

It is impossible now to go fully into the various branches of this vital subject, but I would say to my younger medical sisters, who will carry on here the grand work of medicine when I have entered upon another sphere of life, that I most earnestly counsel them to recognise that the redemption of our sexual relations from evil to good, rests more imperatively upon them than upon any other single class of society. It will be a cowardly dereliction of duty to refuse any longer to study this grave subject of venereal disease now again forced upon our attention, because the subject—which concerns both sexes equally—is a repulsive one.

To us medical women, the special guardians of home life, has been opened the path of scientific medical knowledge, which, as science, embraces both mind and body; and it is by our advance, independently but reverently, in that path, guided by our God-given womanly conscience, that we shall be able to detect clearly the errors in relation to sex, which lie at the root of our present degeneracy.

It is not conspicuous public action that is required from us, but the thorough realization of true physiology.

We must ourselves recognise the truth, and instruct parents, that it is a physiological untruth to suppose that sexual congress is indispensable to male health. We must warn our young men that no loose woman picked up in the streets, or in a brothel, or in her own house, can be pronounced physically safe, no matter how attractive she may seem to be. We must warn our poor young women patients that yielding to the solicitations of a supposed lover may unfit them to become healthy wives and mothers. We must persistently arouse the conscience of parents to the very grave risks that their daughters run in uniting themselves to men of former loose life.

This is the confidential but imperative duty of true physicians. It is by quiet but never-ceasing effort to spread the true view of scientific medicine amongst our patients, and wherever the opportunity occurs, that our influence as Christian physicians will gradually permeate society, and cause truth to prevail over error.

If you perceive that the principles I have laid down are sound, then hold to them firmly as the most precious truth.

Meet together to mature practical applications of those principles by intercommunication of experience and mutual encouragement, feeling sure that where two or three meet together in the everlasting Spirit of the Christ, you will find, as I have found during a long life, that light and strength will be given you, and as earnest followers of the Great Physician you will take part in that mighty work of regeneration, which from our present small beginnings will, I fully believe, grow and transfigure the twentieth century.