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to produce a girl or account for her absence, I do not see how such cases could be prevented, owing to the ease with which anybody can leave the Colony for China by rail, road or water, and by the time that any system of registration could be put into effective operation, every girl whom it was intended to send away would have been sent.
I do not, however, believe that the danger is serious. The main object of keeping mui-tsai is to provide for domestic service.
If the employer is no longer allowed to keep these girls as unpaid servants he must employ paid servants to do the work and it seems to me to stand to reason that
he will prefer to keep on as a paid servant a former inmate
of his household than to replace her by a stranger to whom he would almost certainly have to pay higher wages.
I submit therefore that my scheme for the
conversion of mui-tsai into paid servants practically
settles the question so far at least as it affects Chinese
of the respectable classes, who would, in any case, almost
certainly be restrained by their om good feelings and by popular opinion from taking action detrimental to the inter- ests of girls who have been their protégées and members of
their households.
It is possible that persons of the poorer
classes who have paid comparatively large sums to the parents of mui-tsai and who will not be in a position to keep them as paid servants may desire to recover their initial outlay by selling girls to persons in China but I doubt whether the
market would be open to them.
Owing to the disturbances with which China
has been afflicted for years past there is widely-spread
poverty in the neighbouring provinces and anybody there who
desires to obtain a mui-tsai could undoubtedly obtain one
at
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