PORNOLATION RELEASE

form of slavery! Within a few
years, nearly all the respectable Chinese women had disappeared from
Hong Kong. Chief Inspector Whitehead testified before the Commission:
"When an unlicensed brothel [i.e., a native house accused of being
such] is broken up, the women have to resort to prostitution in most
cases for a living." During 1869, one poor woman signed a bond to
deport herself for five years rather than be taken to the Lock
Hospital. But the "protected women," with their nursery of children
they were raising for brothel slavery, being the mistresses of
foreigners, were not persecuted in this manner, so, by a kind of mad
infatuation the Government seemed bent on encouraging and developing
immoral women and driving decent women either into prostitution, or,
by the reign of terror, out of the Colony. In 1869, five women
were charged before the Registrar General, and three of them were
discharged as innocent. Then the Registrar General decided _to make
the punishment of the first of the remaining two depend upon the state
of health of the second_. This second was examined and found diseased,
and in consequence of that fact, the first one was fined fifty dollars
or two months' imprisonment! The Commission speaks of this as a
"somewhat curious" case. We wonder how the punished woman described ...

Court, to take a hopeful
view of the future of this important subject.'"

CHAPTER 12.

THE CHIEF JUSTICE ANSWERS HIS OPPONENTS.

The Acting Attorney General at the time of Sir John Smale's first
pronouncement against slavery had suggested to Governor Hennessy that
Sir John Smale's statements should be sent to London to the Secretary
of State for the Colonies; and he and other advisers recommended that
no prosecutions in connection with "adoption" and "domestic servitude"
should be instituted, pending the receipt of instructions from the
Home Government. The Chief Justice concurred in these views, and also
suggested that the Chinese be told that no prosecutions as to the past
should take place, but that in future, in every case where _buying and
selling_ occurred in connection with adoption or domestic service, the
Government would undoubtedly prosecute.

to me that it has
been recognized and accepted as an ordinary out-turn of Chinese
habits, and thus that until special attention has been excited it
has escaped public notice. But recently the abomination has forced
itself on my notice. In some cases convictions have been had; in
two notable instances, although I called for prosecution, the
criminals escaped. They were Chinese in respectable positions,
and I was given to understand that buying children by respectable
Chinamen as servants was according to Chinese customs, and that to
attempt to put it down would be to arouse the prejudices of the
Chinese. The practice is on the increase. It is in this port,
and in this Colony especially, that the so-called Chinese custom
prevails. Under the English...

brothel-keepers of Singapore
are probably banded together in the same way, and in proportion to
the number of brothels should be more than twice as numerous as
those in Penang. These brothel-keepers have their confederates in
China, who search for girls and young women in the same way that
the coolie-brokers search for the men, and these unfortunate young
persons are brought to Singapore in batches under escort in the
same way as the men, but are taken from the ships in closed
carriages instead of being driven through the town like sheep, as
the men are. All these young women and girls, who are brought
to Singapore for immoral purposes, with the full knowledge and
consent of the Government, are taken direct from the ships to the
office of the Protector of Chinese, to be questioned as to their
willingness to lead a life of shame; but the value of this
interrogation may be inferred from the fact that the subordinate
officer to whom this duty is generally assigned is not acquainted
with the language spoken by the women. As a further precaution
against the illegal detention of women and girls in brothels, a
Government notice is posted in each of these houses, to the effect
that the inmates are perfectly at liberty to leave whenever they ...

go away at any time they wished; the
Colonial Surgeon was in charge of it. But we asked him how it happened
that the degraded women knew enough to go there in such numbers; he
said they might be ill, and any doctor in a private capacity would
send them. He had sent them, and would like to send a good many more,
when they were very ill. He told us of going over the records, for
years back, and of finding that the average of time spent in the
brothel by these girls was three years and a half, while, if they
stayed in Canton, they would be life-long prostitutes. He made much
of this point, and argued that it was better for them to come
to Singapore in order to be set free by the Protectorate, but
acknowledged that many of them became concubines (in "following a
man," as the Chinese express it). He spoke of domestic slavery in
Singapore, but declared it was slavery of a very mild sort. We asked
who came with the Chinese girls when they came to the Protectorate.
He answered, "Oh, a friend--the woman or 'mother' who owns them." We
asked if nothing could be done against these traffickers in girls; he
said they could not often get sufficient proof against them. We saw in
one of the records something about "women traffickers," and pressed
him to know why these could not be caught and banished by means of ...

of their
occupants, and escaped. Later she was married and returned to
China.

No. 5. In a dark, dismal room where the sun never shone lay a poor
Chinese woman helpless with rheumatism. She had a baby girl 10
months old and was too sick to care for it. The invalid felt...

room where the sun never shone lay a poor
Chinese woman helpless with rheumatism. She had a baby girl 10
months old and was too sick to care for it. The invalid felt
forced to put the child in the hands of a friend she trusted, who
promised to care for it, and advanced money for the sick woman.
When the mother got better she worked two years and saved until
she had enough money to buy the child back, but the cruel woman
who had got possession of it refused to give it up unless paid
three times as much as was originally borrowed. The mother could
not do this, and finally, hearing of the Mission, reported the
case there. The baby was traced to a horrible den in Church alley,
where it was in the possession of a notorious brothel-keeper. The
mother...

would have been forwarded
last year, in the belief that they might have induced a less
unfavorable view by Lord Kimberley of my judicial action as to
these matters, and with the more important object of presenting
what appears to me to be the great gravity of the evils I have
denounced, as they affect the moral status of the Colony, in order
that some remedy may be applied to them.... I am informed that His
Excellency the Governor has been unable to obtain the opinion of
the Attorney-General on the points raised." ...

It is impossible not to feel that this neglect on the part of someone
at Hong Kong to forward the Chief Justice's letters until the first of
these was a year old (for they were actually sent in August, 1881),
was a designed obstruction of his endeavors to set himself in the
correct light, and to enlighten the Christian public of Great Britain
as to the abuses existing at Hong Kong.

that the Chief Justice had not before
he left the Colony, realized the public opinion of the Chinese
community on the subject of kidnaping. In sentencing a prisoner
for kidnaping, on the 10th of March, 1881, Sir John Smale said he
was bound to declare from the Bench that, to the credit of the
Chinese, a right public opinion had been growing up, and on the
25th of March, 1881, (the last occasion when Sir John Smale spoke
in the Supreme Court of Hong Kong), he said, in a case in
which the kidnapers had been convicted--This case presents two
satisfactory facts first, that a Chinese boat woman handed one of
these prisoners to the police, and that afterward an agent of the
Chinese Society to suppress this class of crime caused the arrest
and conviction...