# War
## Land Bo
## Misce
which we wish to lay before your Excellency and which we respectfully beg that your Excellency would condescend to listen to. In the peninsula of Macao, the coolie traffic is very prevalent, and in nine cases out of ten, kidnapping
has been
practised in which fathers are severed from their sons, wives from their husbands, younger
brothers from their elders, and
in which the parties themselves are separated from their native country for ever and lost in a land beyond the windy seas, suffering all the miseries of a separation with no hope of ever returning alive. This is indeed a circumstance the mere mention of which is enough to break one's heart, the mere relation of which sufficient to distress one's feelings, and it may be compared to nothing less than setting up of pitfalls in a place for ensnaring people. Ever since the establishment of emigration, the number of able-bodied men who have been thus decoyed from the Province of Kwangtung has, at a rough calculation, probably not been less than several millions. Consequently, the people of China most deeply lament this state of things and are ever desirous of devising means for their rescue but without any effectual result. We have heard that a former governor of Macao had once contemplated
means of suppression, and for a time
this excellent proposition met with universal approbation; but why he did not carry out his intention we are unable to say. Kidnapping persons to sell them as slaves is against the laws of Great Britain, and is an offence which her legislation does not tolerate. It is, moreover, a subject which is at present engrossing the attention of her Parliament with a view to effectual plans being devised for the total eradication of the evil. All the people of China who have heard of this undertaking have, with one voice, expressed their gratitude, and with hands across their foreheads, congratulated themselves, for they indulge in the hope that the poor people who have been decoyed to a foreign land, will have now the chance of seeing the light of heaven again (deliverance). How is such an act different from raising a dead man to life whose flesh and bones have already undergone decay? This is indeed an opportunity that should not be lost. When we think of the lives of several millions of people who have been driven and placed in certain death, the matter is indeed one which is horrible in the extreme. If there should be a man now who would undertake their deliverance from snare, his merit in so doing is really endless.
We well know your Excellency always
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