same time, he also modified the authorized scale of remissions of sentences, by directing that there should be no remissions unless the prisoners consented to be marked permanently on the lobe of the left ear and deported, and to this, in a few months, he added the further condition that they should be flogged if found again in the Colony.
44. Under this new system, five hundred and twenty-nine prisoners were branded, and one hundred and ten flogged, when Mr. May, the Police Magistrate, expressed the opinion that "there was not any legal power by which branding could be inflicted, or for flogging branded men simply for being within the Colony after deportation," and he requested that the opinion of the Attorney General might be taken on the subject. Sir Julian Pauncefote thereupon wrote:-"Since my return to Hongkong in December 1868, I have heard of criminals being liberated upon certain conditions as to Branding, Deportation and Flogging, but I never was consulted until now as to the legality of these proceedings," and he concludes a clear and well-drawn opinion by stating that the proceedings in question were illegal.
45. This unauthorized branding and flogging was at once stopped by an Executive order, and a disposition was shown to return to Sir Hercules Robinson's system. Thereupon, some highly respectable and very influential European residents held an indignation meeting and memorialized the Government in favour of branding and flogging Chinese criminals instead of returning to Sir Hercules Robinson's system, which, they pointed out, would involve the cost of a new gaol, and was, in their opinion, unsuited to the Chinese race, a race that they conceived to be incorrigibly bad. They pointed out the economy in prison expenditure of branding and deporting the Chinese, and, if they returned, flogging and deporting them, and again flogging and deporting them if they came back, and so on ad infinitum, instead of feeding them in gaol and only liberating them on certain authorized conditions.
46. This led to the passing of Ordinance 4 of 1872, which is described in the statute book of Hongkong as "The Branding and Flogging Ordinance."
47. Under this Ordinance, a printed form was used, "Return of Prisoners in Victoria Gaol, Hong Kong, who are eligible for remission of sentences in accordance with Ordinance 4 of 1872," the heading of one column being "Date of completion of half sentence and willing to be marked." Sometimes this form was altered so as to provide for the branding and deportation of prisoners who had only served one-third of their sentences. Occasionally, prisoners have been deported who had served from one-fifth to one-tenth only of their sentences. Thus, legislative sanction was formally given to a system of remission of sentences entirely different from that established by Sir Hercules Robinson.
48. As the new system admitted of reducing the number of prisoners in the gaol at any moment, it also appeared to render his idea of a new gaol unnecessary.
49. I soon found that this experiment in the treatment of criminals had not been entirely successful, and that I could not comply with Lord Carnarvon's instructions, to submit proposals for placing the system of prison discipline on a sound basis in future, if the experiment were to be continued.
50. I called for returns showing the real effect of the experiment on the criminal population. I found that those returns justified a statement made in October 1872 by Mr. Douglas, the late Superintendent of the Hongkong Gaol, in a report on branding, to the effect that when a prisoner is deported with a gaol mark on his neck, which cannot be concealed, and not removed without mutilation, it prevents him from getting an honest livelihood in his own country, or being taken as an emigrant, so that such a man is tempted to become a pirate or a robber near the shores of this Colony, upon which he is thus driven back. I sent to Lord Carnarvon a list of thirty-nine prisoners branded and deported on one day, a short time before my arrival, which showed that long-sentenced prisoners, short-sentenced prisoners, prisoners whose character in gaol was described as "very bad," and those whose character was described as "very good," had all been treated in the same way, and sent in a batch to the mainland of China when one-third of their sentences had been worked out.
51. Sir Brooke Robertson, Her Majesty's Consul at Canton, told me that he thought the system was not quite fair to the Chinese Authorities nor to the Chinese villagers near Hongkong. The Chief Justice of Hongkong, in giving judgment in a case in which a Chinaman had been deported on an illegal warrant, publicly expressed the opinion that the system was hardly consistent with our Treaty with China, and that the Government of China might justly complain of it. On this latter point, the Governor who had started the experiment had officially recorded his opinion that "it suits this Government very well, in a selfish point of view, to get all its criminals exported to other countries."
52. But even taking, as the guardian of the peace and good order of the Colony, a purely selfish view of it, I felt unable to sanction the continuance of the system. A police report, from the frontier of British Kau-lung, that was submitted to me in the ordinary course of official business, said:---