Average Number of Beds Required, and the Probable Expense.

I may be told, perhaps, that the number of beds required, and the expense of their maintenance would be so great, that my plan would become impracticable. I have met this objection in my recent work on "Prostitution." There I state that if we wish to provide accommodation in proportion to the number of beds devoted to females in Paris and Berlin, we should require 800 beds, if in proportion to the five great capitals or Europe, we should require 1,400. The expense of maintaining them is estimated at £24 10s. per bed: thus we could maintain the 800 beds for £20,000, or the 1,400 beds for £34,000. Let my readers recollect that if economists should grumble at such an expenditure, statistics show us that we spend upwards of this sum annually in curing the men among the 40,000 quartered in the eight garrison towns, independently of the subsequent injury to the health of and invaliding in the army.

If we try to form some estimate of what venereal disease is at present costing the community or what the page 19 individual would save by the introduction of the Contagious Diseases Act among the civil population, so as to protect our adult male population from the effects of syphilis, we may arrive at a serious, but, I believe, approximate estimate.

Dr. Farr is my authority for stating that, in the year 1868, there were 474,500 men in the metropolis between the ages of twenty and forty. If, therefore, it costs £56,000 to cure the venereal patients among 46,000 soldiers, it must at present be costing £577,670, or upwards of half-a-million, to cure the venereal cases among the 474,500 men liable to be affected in the metropolis, supposing that the venereal disease is as common among the adult civil population, as it is among Our soldiers.