CO129-473 - Individuals - 1921 — Page 220

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circumstances, and by the same transaction to ameliorate their own condition for the time being.

Parents take as a rule such precautions as may be possible to secure proper treatment of the girls they have parted with: the question of protection for boys does not arise in the same degree. The proper custom is to keep in some kind of touch with the girls and to have a voice, or at least an interest, in their ultimate marriage, for which the new family becomes partly responsible: but the cir-

cumstances distances, difficulties of travel,

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have

inability to write, want of postal facilities

all combined to thin down the custom to vanishing

point. In the widespread disasters and troubles

of the last few years, parents would commonly send

their children even boys,- away in the hope of

better things : in the absence of someone from the

district to take them and dispose of them, it was

not difficult to find an outsider. In either

case, there was little possibility of keeping in touch;

the children had to be taken far away to districts

which were rich enough to take them and support them;

but even this was preferable to the certain death

that awaited them at home. The trend of the migration

adjacent

after the big cities and richer districts have been

supplied is South, to the nearer countries where emigrant Chinese have done so well; and on this journey Hong Kong is almost bound to come into the picture, as a port of call if not as the home of many prosperous and charitable Chinese.

The