Europeans, of the most complete and rigorous description
738
to
Every keeper of a licenced brothel pays the Government a fee of 44 dollars a month, whether that brothel be inspected or not, and the nett profit of this arrangement amounts to 50,000 dollars a year.
The Registrar General, whose office is supposed to have been constituted for the protection of the Chinese inhabitants of the Colony, grants these licences and superintends the police employed to detect and prosecute unlicenced brothels, and is the judge in the first instance, from whom there is practically no appeal, of all complaints against officers.
Lord Kimberley refers in his letter to the original intentions of the British Government expressed by Mr Labouchere in 1856, that the then-proposed ordinance should operate for the protection of Chinese women.