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The connivance at the sale and purchase of human beings also encourages the indolent and pernicious characters in the Colony to exploit as an easy livelihood.
The owners and advocates of the Mui Tsai system invariably think that they are doing the poor a good turn to buy the slave girls, but unwittingly they have betrayed their true colours in the way that they have tried to drive a hard bargain with the poor parents who sell their daughters. In nine cases out of ten, in the light of the experience of this Society, the owners insist on getting a bargain
As an example, if a slave girl is sold for $ 60, the owner can and will force the poor mother or seller to insert in the sale note or "presentation card", as it is called in Chinese, the sum of $ 120.00
S$ 120.00 especially if the terms are on the basis of being able to redeem the girl in the future.
There is certainly very little kindness shown in such Shylock- like method of exacting the pound of flesh.
In the last analysis, the sale and purchse of girls is not due to pressure of poverty so much as because it is a custom in China to think more of boys than of girls. The advocates of the Mui Tsai System also not infrequently use the stock argument that if poor girls were not bought as Mui Tsai they would be drowned or starved to death. Does it follow then that the poor in China only give birth to girls and not to boys ? If not, why is there no selling and buying of boys to stave off starvation ? Or is it because the poor can only rear the boys and not girls ?
Therefore, it does not need much insight to see the various fallacies lying at the root of reasoning under the cloak of philanthropy. It is a travesty with which even thinking men in the Colony are often content. Enough has been said to suggest that the selling and buying of Mui Tsai is traceable mainly to t the fact that girls in China have been held in lower estimation than boys.
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5 Again, the argument has been sedulously urged that people who punish Mui Tsai would also punish their own children. It is indeed, true enough, if you spare the rod you spoil the child, and therefore it is just as essential to exercise discipline ove one's own children as well as the Mui Tsai. But a little reflec- tion on the manner of chastising the Mui Tsai and one's own children will soon make one realise that there is an essential difference between the two, and a very fundamental, psychological difference at that.
Let us not forget that the chastisement of the Mui Tsai may be endless during the day, because she, being a bond slave, at the tender mercy of every member of the Chinese family.
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