not only for China but in the interests
of
this
Colony.
Charity requires a
value
For
safety the port up and unused labour-power of the many thousands among her seeming population who
are
starving for want of remunerative employment. Hongkong with its abundant shipping, affords wonderful
facilities
for
greatly
increased emigration, beneficial alike to the emigrants, to the countries to which they take their labour power, and to the
Colony itself.
But Chinese emigration requires proper regulation. The Chinese Passengers Act 1855 and the numerous local
Ordinances passed since that date are
witnesses to the urgent desire upon the part of the Home and Colonial
authorities to stamp out the abuses and evils which cling like limpets
to the trade.
There
can be little doubt
that
many
of the old abuses have
almost ceased to exist.
213
Part I of the Women and Girls Protection Ordinance (No. 11 of 1890)
as amended
by
an
Ordinance
deals, however, with one
specially
offensive form of emigration evil,
which
may
be
roughly described as
wrongful import
and export of
unmarried
women
and
girls for immoral purposes, and
the Ordinance incorporates a
Society to
fight against that evil. This pernicious traffic might be readily detected if poor women and girls spoke English and understood European ways.
In China the purchase of a girl for adoption,
or concubine, is a transaction so strange and foreign to all our notions that it is, at first,
difficult to understand how it can
appear a right and proper transaction
to the Chinese; so much so that it is
that
part