256
CARL SMITH
A festival demands she appear in her most precious ornaments and her most attractive gowns. Then there is nothing to do but to confess to her gambling addiction, or, as many did, seek escape from her predicament by suicide through use of “the opium pot or hempen rope.”
There was, however, a third way out, for according to Dr. Ho Kai "some tread the path of infamy and dishonour.” adding that "this may have been done with the connivance of their worst enemies, the gambling agents."
After paraphrasing the ten suggestions for the suppression of gambling contained in the Chinese petition, he proceeds to remark on the next evil, sly brothels. These were brothels which operated without licence. In those days the Government licensed and inspected houses of prostitution.
With proper Victorian prudery, he said: "I feel conscious that this is a subject that requires very delicate handling, and it is on that account and my sense of pain and disgust whenever the subject is approached that I desire to be excused from dwelling upon it at any length.”
Dr. Ho Kai advocated severe measures for the suppression of these evils. He proposed as penalties flogging and imprisonment with hard labour. An editorial suggested that Dr. Ho Kai was thus unintentionally advocating class legislation a topic we shall return to in a later article.
With some irony the editor suggests: “We do not suppose that this Chinese delegate wishes there to be one law in Hongkong for foreigners and another for Chinese; and yet, on the other hand, it seems as if he must have had some such idea, as it is scarcely credible he meant to suggest that foreigners who engaged in gambling should be flogged."
The editor asks Dr. Ho Kai some rhetorical questions: "Are the gamblers on the Stock Exchange to be flogged and imprisoned with hard labour? Are the whist players in the various clubs and at numerous private houses, and the men who bet a few dollars at the