The scheme proposed by Lady Henry Somerset is here given in her own words:
"1. A quarter of each Cantonment should be reserved for such women as are permitted to remain in camp, and all such women should be compelled to remain in houses or rooms specifically reserved to each by a registered number. The admission of men to this quarter should be strictly supervised.
"2. No woman should be allowed to remain in this quarter unless periodically examined by properly qualified women doctors.
"3. No soldier should be allowed to enter this quarter without having undergone a like examination and having the same report.
"4. A register should be kept recording the name of each soldier entering the quarter, the number of the house to which he goes, and the date of such entry.
"5. On any woman being found to be diseased in this quarter, or on any soldier found to be suffering in like manner, all such persons that the registered visits show to have rendered themselves liable to contagion should be put in quarantine until such time as their immunity can be verified.
"6. All consorting with women outside this quarter should render the offender liable to severe penalty."[10]
The _Shield_, official organ of the British Committee for the Abolition of State Regulated Vice, in its issue of May, 1897, comments as follows upon this scheme:
"The suggestions above quoted embody the most complete State Regulation of prostitution which we have ever seen described, in its baldest and most absolute form, and imply the most complete identification of the State with the purely animal side of the matter which has ever been proposed. They seem to emanate from a mind influenced for the time solely by the idea of equality between man and woman, to the exclusion of other considerations. Such proposals seem indeed to make the sexes equal, but it is an equality of unspeakable degradation for both."
On May 14 and 17 occurred a debate in the House of Lords on the question of a return to legalized prostitution in India, in which reference was made to Lady Henry Somerset's letter in _The Times_, and to another memorial which was shortly "to be made public," and which was signed by a very large number of ladies, as an indication that women were no longer, as formerly, opposed to the system of State Regulation of Vice.[11]