CO129-478 - Public Offices & Others - 1922 — Page 314

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economic reasons as necessitated child labour, but is not the cause of it. Child labour would exist in China with or without the mui tsai system. Own children have to work, bearing burdens or taking charge of still younger ones, from the earliest possible moment. Even before that moment the child's place, directly it can leave the mother'sny back and can stand on its own feet, is necessarily at the mother's side, finding its play in imitating her work-a training of which the mother is ready to avail herself (indeed, is almost forced to avail herself) from the instant the child's strength is equal to the carrying of two bricks. Broadly, the mui tsai is the domestic servant. The child seen working at the mother's side in the streets or on the fields is the natural-born child-a responsibility which the mother would often be too glad to escape for the child's sake as well as her own, by finding it a home as a mui tsai. The child must work in either case, and perhaps the mui tsai has the better part.

November, 1921.

Sir J. Marteflow Smitte

1 ... 310

I submit a revised draft telegram prepared

after our interview with the Secretary of State this morning. I understand that Mr. Churchill is not opposed to adoption or to money payments to natural parents but that he insists on the legal freedom of the adult mui- teal to change her employer being asserted in law and

in fact and secured by all possible administrative means- such for instance, as the system of discs or go which the Secretary of State wished to be put tentatively to

the Hong Kong Government.

There seems to be no special difficulty about

the adult mui-tsai but we have to be careful to avoid

conferring on adoptive parents or employers any greater power of control than they now have over infants.

Here it is of course not a question of law so much as of

practical measures to prevent ill treatment or abuse of

the necessary authority of the adoptive parent or

guardian The matter seems therefore appropriate for

investigation by a local commission.

G.B.

22

Febru

5.15.

For considerat com.

the draft Melyn pies effect ligan

rebel duction of

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21. L.