are
to which we firmly and irreconcilably opposed; and, though this was not done with the active concurrence of Her Majesty's Government, such, it was certainly not done in opposition to it, for Mr Stanfeld's motion was supported by the great majority of the
Ministers in the House of Commons, including the Prime Minister. Unless, therefore the representative character of the House of Commons be challenged, which it scarcely will be, we anticipate, by the party which forms majority of it — we must respectfully submit that the work which
your
Lordship
gave us to do has been done.
And, if your
Lordship will refer to the description by the Premier, in the House of Commons on the 7th ult of the way in which this hateful system was initiated,
you see how marked is the contrast between the
in which that system was introduced and the way in which it has been condemned.
But, in the letter of Mr. Herbert, another criterion of the tenability of the system, the Colonies of Great Britain seems to have been adopted - Mr Herbert writes — "The regulation of all brothels and their supervision by Government is approved by the general Chinese population of the Colony, and is considered to be a valuable means of checking the general practice of kidnapping girls and what is known
as brothel slavery; and, so far as these laws attain that end, the Society will not concur in thinking they should be maintained: We much regret that any misapprehension should exist as to what our Association would approve, and still more that your Lordship appears to have been misinformed, not only as to the principles of our Association, but also as to the feelings of the Chinese towards the system of licensed prostitution which has been forced upon them by the British Government. Were all the facts above stated — which we most respectfully decline to admit — we should still not hesitate for a moment in our condemnation of the system — Laws fundamentally bad from a moral point of view are not to be upheld because of some incidental and unpremeditated advantage which may be shown, or may be supposed to have accrued from their operation. There is possibly no law which has ever existed, however bad, which might not be defended in this way — for instance, had licensed and regulated it, it is probable that many of the horrors of the middle passage would have been mitigated, and some of the worst forms of the general practice of kidnapping might have been checked. But we venture to express the opinion that your Lordship would not esteem such advantages