30
view to their eventual disposal, according to their personal qualifications, either among foreigners here as kept women, or among Chinese residents as their concubines, or to be sold for export to Singapore, San Francisco or Australia. Those protected women, moreover, generally act as protectors to a few other Tán-ká women who live by sly prostitution. The latter, again, used to be preyed upon till quite recently His Excellency Governor HENNESSY stopped this fiendish practice by informers paid with Government money, who would first debauch such women and then turn round against them charging them before the Magistrate as keepers of unlicensed brothels; in which case a heavy fine would be inflicted to pay which these women used to sell their own child or sell themselves into bondage, worse than slavery, to the keepers of the brothels licensed by Government. Whenever a sly brothel was broken up these keepers would crowd the shroff's office of the Police Court or the visiting room of the Government Lock Hospital to drive their heartless bargains which were invariably enforced with the weighty support of the Inspectors of brothels appointed by Government under the Contagious Diseases Ordinance. The more this Ordinance was enforced the more of this buying and selling of human flesh went on at the very doors of Government offices.
It is amongst these outcasts of Chinese society that the worst abuses of the Chinese system of domestic servitude exist, because that system is here unrestrained by the powers of traditional custom or popular opinion. This class of people mustering perhaps here in Hongkong not more than two thousand persons, are entirely beyond the argument of this essay. They form a class of their own, readily recognized at a glance. They are disowned by Chinese society whilst they are but parasites on foreign society. The system of buying and selling female children and of domestic servitude with which they must be identified is so glaring an abuse of legitimate Chinese domestic servitude, that it calls for corrective measures entirely apart from any considerations connected with the general body of Chinese society.
As regards the peculiarly patriarchal features of the general body of Chinese society in Hongkong no interference has hitherto been ventured upon either by the Legislature or by the Executive, whilst the common Law of England proved utterly inapplicable to the peculiar social systems of the Chinese living here. That prominent feature of patriarchal society, that fountain source of female domestic servitude, polygamy, has never yet been interfered with by the Executive. Even monogamic marriage is neither registered nor recognized by the English Courts of Hongkong as distinct from concubinage in the case of Chinese non-christian families. Although a local Marriage Ordinance has been passed which applies to the fifteen hundred Chinese Christians in Hongkong, it does not apply to one of the 134,000 non-christian Chinese residents here. Under these circumstances it seems to me inconsistent to single out the peculiar form of legitimate female domestic servitude practised by the Chinese here in accordance with the time-honoured custom of their native country, the frontiers of which are conterminous with those of Hongkong. Hongkong is indeed but a dot in the ocean, but the Chinese social life of Hongkong is also but a dot in the ocean of that vast social life which covers a country peopled by four hundred millions of people. Whilst having no social intercourse with the foreigners of Hongkong, the pulse of Chinese social life in Hongkong beats in unison with that of patriarchal China and its arteries are constantly supplied with new life blood from the same source.
It is one of the lessons which modern Sociology has taught, that police prosecutions or legislative enactments must of necessity prove inefficient when intended to cope with any deep-seated social custom, because social reforms cannot be effected by any means except by the accumulated effects of habit on character. I have no doubt whatever that, apart from the abuses which naturally attach to every social custom like that of domestic servitude, any direct interference with the system itself on the part of the Executive or Legislature would do more harm than good. The domestic servant girls of Hongkong know that they are free. If badly treated they have no hesitation in applying to the Police and bringing a charge of assault against master or mistress. But suppose the Police were instructed that every Chinese house-father, who has in his family a purchased servant girl, should be dragged into the Police Court and punished, the consequence would be, in the first instance, that every well-to-do house-father would send his family over to the mainland to reside there, and in the second instance all worthless servant girls would be thrown upon the hands of the Government. Homes would have to be built for them, work would have to be provided for them, yet Chinese social custom would, in secret, retain its habit of domestic servitude quietly as before, under another name perhaps, but side by side with the share which the Government, in dealing with all the homeless servant girls thrown upon its hands, would have to take in it. I cannot imagine what permanent good could reasonably be expected to result from such direct interference.
It will be seen from the above that, peculiar as Roman and American slavery was, Chinese slavery and Chinese domestic servitude have some essentially different features entirely their own. It should be noted, moreover, that whilst the slavery of Europe and America was such that the moral sense at all times revolted from it, and constantly required to be pacified by new modes of justification, Chinese slavery and Chinese domestic servitude never required any special pleading to justify it before the tribunal of natural law or moral sense. Indeed, the moment we examine closely into Chinese slavery and servitude from the standpoint of history and sociology, we find that slavery and servitude have, with the exception of the system of eunuchs, lost all barbaric and revolting features, and are but the natural phenomena of a social organism held in the bondage of patriarchalism. As this organism has had its certain natural evolution, it will as certainly undergo, in due time, a natural dissolution, which in fact has in more than one point already set in. But no legislative or executive measures taken in Hongkong will hasten this process, which follows its own course and its own laws, laid down by that Providence which happily overrules for the good all that is evil in this world.
1 To sum up this somewhat too elaborate argument, and to point its conclusions with special reference to the question of Chinese domestic servitude in Hongkong as practised by the general body of the Chinese inhabitants, I venture to say that the foregoing essay, if it proves anything at all, proves the truth of the following propositions:
1. Chinese domestic servitude is so peculiar and differs so widely in its essential characteristics from negro slavery that it cannot be logically brought under the provisions of any English enactment regarding that form of slavery. Police prosecution of Chinese domestic servitude under any law made with reference to negro slavery would therefore constitute an act of very doubtful legality.
2. Chinese domestic servitude appears to be a low form of social development when judged by the advanced standard of European civilization, but when judged by the relative standard of Chinese civilization, founded on entirely different principles, it has its legitimation as the best possible form of social development under the circumstances. Absolute condemnation of Chinese domestic servitude would therefore be an act of moral injustice.
3. Chinese domestic servitude is not an excrescence on but a necessary part of the patriarchal order of things which characterizes the social life of the Chinese residents of Hongkong. To prohibit Chinese domestic servitude in toto, would therefore constitute an act of violence, as striking at the very roots of the social organism, the results of which would, in all probability, be harmful to the Chinese and embarrassing to the Government.
4. Chinese domestic servitude, hitherto upheld in Hongkong by the conservative tendencies of the patriarchal organism in China, is bound by the laws of nature to yield eventually to the progressive tendencies of modern society. Undue interference with this process would therefore be an act of injudicious intolerance.
Hongkong, 25th October, 1879.
E. J. EITEL.