Plymouth, Aldershot, and Chatham, in especial, were in a shocking condition before the Acts came into force; but during the years in which they were administered by the police, a diminution of disease by more than one-half was seen in the Army and Navy, and the registration of the women led to a very great falling-off of the numbers who obtained so shameful a living. Evidence given before the Royal Commission upon the Contagious Diseases Acts in 1872 proved this beyond question, and also proved that these women not only had no objection to the medical examinations, but regarded them and the hospitals as very great benefits. The shocking revelations as to the social condition of Plymouth, Devonport, and Stonehouse, afforded by the evidence of the police, cannot be more than hinted at in this place. It is sufficient to say that over 2000 women were put upon the registers, either as occasionally or habitually living a loose life, and that all classes were to be found in these documents, but especially girls employed behind the counters of shops during the day. The police seem everywhere to have been conscientious in the execution of their duty, and to have performed ungrateful and delicate tasks with great discretion. The registers were private and strictly confidential official documents, and both the medical examinations and the police visits to suspected houses were conducted with all possible secrecy, the police in the latter case being plain-clothes men, and not readily to be identified by the public. And yet, in spite of the very evident benefits derived from the Acts and deposed to before the Commission by such unimpeachable authorities as the foremost medical officers of the Army and Navy, commanding officers, clergymen of the Established Church, Wesleyan ministers, the entire medical and nursing staffs of hospitals, and the police authorities themselves, these Acts were repealed, in submission to the outcries of the ‘mules and barren women,’ who, headed by the rancorous Mrs. Josephine Butler and the gushing sentimentalists from the religio-radical benches of the House of Commons, called public meetings, and shrieked and raved upon platforms throughout the country: a chorus of shocked spinsters and ‘pure’ men, whose advocacy of what they called, forsooth, ‘the liberty of the subject’ and the abolition of what they falsely termed the ‘State licensing of vice,’ has resulted in a liberty accorded these women to spread disease far and wide. The nation, the men of Army and Navy, have reason abundant to curse the sentimental women, the maiden aunts, the _religieuses_, the gorgons of a mistaken propriety and a peculiarly harmful prudery, whose interference with affairs which they were not competent to direct has wrought such untoward results.