THE HONGKONG GOVERNMENT GAZETTE, 4TH FEBRUARY, 1880.
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they came under this power by procreation, by agnation, by adoption, or by gift or purchase. Such a "family" may be a combination of many households, of brothers and their descendants in two or more generations, not necessarily dining at the same table, not necessarily tilling the same fields, but necessarily held together by common subjection to the same patria potestas and the common use of the same ancestral hall with the common worship of the same oldest ancestral tablet. This explains the common occurrence in our Law Courts of half a dozen men, acknowledging each to be the son of a different father, yet persisting in calling themselves brothers. The purchased slave, the hired domestic, the wife, are as truly related to the head of such a family as the latter's own son. The son differs from the family slave only by the nearer chance he has of wielding some day himself the patria potestas. It seems strange to us, brought up, as we are, in the ideas of cognate relationship, but it is nevertheless a fact that simple purchase and adoption-which latter is invariably a money bargain- should constitute kinship, so much so, that law and custom make no distinction whatever between adoptive and real connection, and that the purchased slave enters into the circle of relationship in the family. Few foreigners have comprehended the extent of social equality which this conception of the family practically engenders. The amount of influence which woman, bought and sold as she is, really has in China, and there within her proper sphere, within the family, is little understood. The depth of domestic affection, of filial piety, of paternal care, which is ingrained in every member of this collossal aggregation of families called China, has never been fathomed yet, and is almost unin- telligible to the members of modern European Societies which in their haste to constitute a social order, in which every personal relation shall be based on the free and intelligent agreement of indi- viduals, almost forget that they are building up the rights of the individual on the ruins of the family and developing social equality and individual liberty at the expense of domestic affections and filial piety. Who would glibly decide that this modern intellectual individualism of the West, with all the development it has wrought in science and mechanics, is an undoubted advance upon the filial piety and intuitive faith of Chinese patriarchalism?
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Having thus a definite place within the pale of the family, and thereby secured against being reduced to the condition of mere chattelhood, though subject to a patria potestas which is shared in by every other member of the family, the Chinese family-slave has not a position peculiarly galling. His master is of the same blood with him. Slavery in China is not an incident of race as in the West but an accident of misfortune. The master knows that any turn of fortune may reduce him to the position of a slave. The slave knows that his master, though he be the highest official in the Empire, is under the same patria potestas in relation to the Emperor, in which he, the slave, stands in relation to his master. There is really little in the position of a Chinese family-slave which allows a close comparison with the condition of a slave under the Roman Law, or of a negroe in the hands of his West-Indian or American master. Considering that the legal definition of the term slavery (see Wharton, Law Lexicon, London, 1872,) is "that civil relation in which one man has absolute power over the life, fortune and liberty of another," the question arises, can such a position as that occupied by the Chinese slave be seriously called slavery, in the legal acceptation of the term, or is it not rather the position of a bond-servant than a slave that he occupies?
To answer this question, it is necessary to define exactly who are slaves in China, how such slavery arises or perpetuates itself, and then place side by side with it the existing system of domestic servitude as it practically obtains in China.
The only classes of persons in China answering to some extent the aforementioned legal_defini- tion of the term slavery are convicts, eunuchs, and persons who sold themselves into or were born in hereditary family-slavery. Chinese convicts, as also occasionally prisoners of war, are sometimes attached, in the position of slaves, to military stations on the frontier, or presented to military officers on the frontier as domestic slaves. They are treated as outlaws, but may not be killed with impunity. Most of them eventually become permanent settlers and have their liberty restored to them, or they may be pardoned and return as free men to their families. Female convicts also are occasionally sold into domestic slavery in official families. But if such a female slave is given in marriage, she becomes free, and if she bears a son to a free man, whether as wife or concubine, that son may succeed to his father's property. As to eunuchs, who are principally employed in the Imperial Palace, or in the Palaces of the Princes, who are by law bound to keep and supply eunuchs, they are either provided by parents who have their children made eunuchs to secure to them the easy life in the Harem, or they are persons who for some reason or other submitted to the same operation, or they are the sons of rebels who were male eunuchs by order of the Government. These eunuchs, though the victims of a barbarous custom, are not outside the pale of the family, and occupy a fixed position in it guaranteed by the law. to private or ordinary domestic slaves, not being convicts, it must be understood, in the first instance, that no free parent can sell his children into hereditary slavery. The law, whilst recognizing and legalizing hereditary slavery, severely punishes any tendency to mix the once existing social ranks. Hereditary slaves, therefore, if not convicts, are either born in hereditary slavery or they are persons who deliberately sold themselves into such slavery, by stress of poverty or with a view to gain the protection of a wealthy family. Such a sale must be the free and voluntary act of the individual, must have the sanction of him who wields the patria potestas over the individual, and the deed must be approved, stamped and registered in a public Court. The owner of such a slave is bound by custom to provide him with a wife and the descendants of such a marriage arc then hereditary slaves.
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