Genre:

Regular Feature, Editorial, News-Commentary

Subjects:

Telegraphy, Sex, Hygiene, Public Health, Morality, Medical Practitioners, Gender, Imperialism, Hunting, Natural Imperialism, Extinction

    Reports that in the General Post Office reforms announced in the budget the 'free delivery of telegrams' outside of London will be extended 'to an area of three miles instead of one, as at present'. Until now people outside of the mile limit have had to 'pay sixpence porterage for every telegram that [they] receive, equal to a tax of 100 per cent. on the cost of the telegram'. Meanwhile, the 'great nation which lives in the metropolitan area is to have its telegrams delivered free at any hour of the night and day, and on every day of the week'. (416) Prints a letter that George F Hamilton, the Secretary of State for India, addressed to the Indian Government, which seeks to 'diminish the prevalence of venereal disease among the British troops serving in the East' without resorting to measures that could be viewed as encouraging vice, by obliging women who will not attend a hospital to leave the cantonment and also by employing female hospital assistants. The British committee of the Federation for the Abolition of the State Regulation of Vice is nevertheless fiercely resisting 'even this minimised concession to the clamour of the doctors and the officers', and Josephine E Butler has warned that the proposals mean that 'the door is left wide open [...] for the easy and speedy reintroduction of the whole system of regulated vice in one form or another'. (420) Relates the findings of David S Jordan, who 'made investigations on the subject with scientific aid', regarding the protection of fur seals from being hunted to extinction. He recommends that all that is necessary is to 'round up the adult male seals in a three hundred acre body of salt water which could be surrounded with three miles of fencing, and to brand all the female fur seals by a series of bars across the skin of the back, so as to deprive their skins of any market value'. (423)