This is a very hopeful indication, that public discussion of those enormities has tended to educate Chinese public opinion, at least in this Colony, to a great sense of the evils of kidnapping and of the worst evils arising out of domestic servitude. I venture to hope that the repeated denunciations of all these crimes from this Bench, have given birth to and fostered this awakening of the Chinese conscience here, to the wrongs arising from institutions in the midst of which Chinese men and women have grown up. I give credit to a large proportion of the Chinese Community, for an earnest desire to improve the tone of social thought in China.
The duties of the administrators of justice in this Colony, are confined to enforcing within the narrow limits of its insular jurisdiction, the laws of England, and those principles, religious, moral and social, on which they are based, which constitute the essentials of our civilization. I have always during my tenure of the office I have held for more than fifteen years endeavoured to attain this as my main object.
I have held, as being light as thistle-down, contemporaneous praise or blame, each of which has been meted out to me in unmeasured exuberance. Praise and blame have not affected me; I have accepted each with an equal mind. There is one, and but one tribunal before which a true man will bow. If he can feel free from reproach before that tribunal he is content, whatever either the present or future may award him of praise or of blame. I have in this spirit held on in my career as an administrator of Criminal Justice in this Colony; it is in this spirit that I would close it.
It has been my fortune to feel bound in conscience to open up questions which cannot cease to be agitated till they shall have arrived at their only possible solution. Slavery of every kind, under whatever euphonious name some of its phases may be cloaked, is doomed in this Colony; it is merely a question of education through discussion of time. I hope and believe that I shall live, not a mere idle on-looker, to see that become an accomplished fact which is now a mere theory, that the status of slavery cannot exist in Hongkong, or even in this little eastern Ultima Thule of the British Empire.
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This is a very hopeful indication, that public discussion of those cnomnities has tended to educate Chinese public opinion, at least in this Colony, to a great sense of the evils of kidnapping and of the worst evils arising out of domestic servitude. I venture to hope that the repented denunciations of all these crimes from this Bench, have given birth to and fostered this awakening of the Chinese conscience here, to the wrongs arising from institutions in the midst of which Chinese men and women have grown up. I give credit to a large proportion of the Chinese Community, for an earnest de- sire to improve the tone of social thought in China. The duties of the administra- tors of justice in this Colony, are con- fined to enforcing within the narrow limits of its insular jurisdiction, the laws of England, and those principles, religious moral and social, on which they are based, which constitute the essentials of our civi- lizatiou, I have always during my tenure of the office I have held for more than fifteen years endeavoured to attain this as my main object. I have held, as being light as thistle-down, contemporaneous praise or blame, each of which has been meted ont to me in unmeasured exuberance. Praise and blame have not affected me; I have accepted each with an equal mind. There is one, and but one tribunal before which a true man will bow. If he can feel free from reproach before that tribunal he is content, whatever either the present or future may award him of praise or of blame. I have in this spirit held on in my career as an administrator of Criminal Justice in this Colony; it is in this spirit that I would close it. It has been my fortune to feel bound in conscience to open up questions which cannot cease to be agitated till they shall have arrived at their only possible solution. Slavery of every kind, under whatever eupho- nious name some of its phases may be cloaked, is doomed in this Colony; it is merely a question of education through discussion of time. I hope and believe that I shall live, not a mere idle on-looker, to see that become an accomplished fact which is now a mere theory,-that the status of slavery cannot exist in Hongkong, or even in this little eastern Ultima-Thule of the British Empire.
12
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