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men and women to the low. By those Act women's are liable to be called upon to prove themselves innocent of an undefined offence on the uncorroborated charge of a policeman drawing an inference on to character from fact he need not give in evidence, and which may in no wise justify his suspicions; such women, being further deprived of the right to trial by Jury accorded to those accused of the worst of crimes, while the accusers, however unworthy, are virtually secured against any kind of punishment or disgrace or liability to make amends.
Four Memorialists, however, desire to lay before your Lordship the following considerations bearing more especially upon the system of licensed prostitution which has been enacted and enforced in Hong Kong under the sanction of your Lordship's predecessors in office since the alteration in that system in the year 1857 to ... Arrere or improvement in its administration can in the least disarm our opposition to its existence, which we base upon the principle that what is morally wrong cannot be politically right, any more than it can ultimately be beneficial as a sanitary measure.
The Contagious Diseases Ordinance in that Colony provides for the issue of licenses on payment of four dollars per month to the Colonial Treasury, to carry on with the sanction of law the vile traffic of prostitution. The houses licensed by our Government are forced to distinguish themselves by lamps of a well understood character placed outside their doors. This outrage upon public decency has been a scandal to our professed Christianity, and a bar to the success of those who endeavour to make the Gospel known to the Chinese.
We observe, however, that there are some in the Administrative Departments of the Government, as well as in our Legislative, who consider that religious and moral considerations must give way before questions affecting the health of her Majesty's military and naval servicemen. But we know that, as a matter of fact, the original object of these systems were professedly for the better prevention of "Contagious Diseases" (see preamble Hong Kong Ordinance).
We, however, beg to call the attention of your Lordship to the important fact that more than two-thirds of the immoral houses holding the Government licenses are frequented solely by Chinese and inhabited solely by Chinese women, owing to the instinctive horror which these poor women have to the radical examination to which they are by the Ordinance subjected - a horror which is also shared by their fellow countrymen - the Governor of Hong Kong has ventured to disregard the law on this point, and for years only forced the prostitutes for the use of Europeans to undergo the medical inspection. This abandonment of the original intention of the Ordinance has been approved by Lord Kimberley in a letter addressed by him to the late Governor of Hong Kong, Sir John Pope Hennessey in July 1881. In that letter Lord Kimberley says:
"Upon the second question the medical inspections of women looking to the practice in the past and to the recommendations of yourself and of the three commissioners on this head, I concur in thinking that the inmates of houses for the sole use of the Chinese may be exempted from all liability to medical inspection."
We cannot disguise the painful impression which is created by maintaining this obnoxious system in Hong Kong and raising a revenue upon the professed plea of counteracting disease, while abandoning in a large majority the medical inspection which has over and over again been declared to be the keystone of every such system.
As a proof that periodical medical inspection is unable to effect diminution of disease, we will draw your Lordship's attention to the report of the Commission appointed by Sir John Pope Hennessey in 1878 to investigate the working and results of the system in Hong Kong. That Report says: "That licensed brothels for foreigners (i.e., the houses where the periodical medical inspection is enforced) are in themselves sources of infection and that the evidence before us points to these establishments rather than unlicensed houses, as the causes of disease to soldiers and sailors." The Report further states "that there is no sufficient evidence to show that the ...