683461-1880-Domestic-Servitude-in-Hongkong- — Page 19

THE HONGKONG GOVERNMENT GAZETTE, 4TH FEBRUARY, 1880.

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I cannot understand why such classes should as classes increase in this Colony at all, unless it be that (in alition to the Chinese demand for domestic servants and brothels) there be an increased Design element increasing the demand.

I fear that a high preinium is obtained by persons who kidnap girls in the high prices which they gvaliar on sale to foreigners as kept women.

No one can walk through some of the bye-streets in this Colony without seeing well dressed into girls in great numbers whose occupations are self proclaimed, or pass those streets, or go theclls in this Colony, without counting beautiful children by the hundred whose Eurasian origin if declared. If the Government would enquire into the present condition of these classes, and, still , into what has become of these women and their children of the past, I believe that it will be Ye that in the great majority of cases the women have sunk into misery, and that of the children the girls that have survived have been sold to the profession of their mothers, and that if boys they ave been lost sight of or have sunk into the condition of the mean whites of the late slave holding States of America.

The more I penetrate below the polished surface of our civilization, the more convinced am.I that the broad undercurrent of life here is more like that in the Southern States of America when slavery #28 dominant, than it resembles the all pervading civilization of England.

Nothing less powerful than a commission with legislative powers to investigate and to examine ath will ever lay bare the evil which, from suggestions I have received, I believe to underlie our seemly fair surface.

My suggestion that the mild intervention of the Law should be invoked was ignored. It was also ext by the assertion that custom has so sanctioned the evils in this Colony as that they are above the reach of Law, and that by custom the slavery was mild.

I have been driven to denounce the whole evil from the Bench in a way I do not now regret. Having been driven to speak out, I now suggest to His Excellency the Governor an important addi- tim, not convenient to be particularly alluded to from the Bench, to the matters which I have already. declared require as I think investigation.

I must leave it to the Government to decide, whether there shall or shall not be investigation, and whether the status in quo of public morals in this Colony in these particulars shall be allowed to con- tinue na one of the many evils which neither law nor a legislation can cope with.

That is a question which fortunately is not within the provice of the Judge, it is for the Statesman cely to decide.

In the meantime, and apart from that large important question, I would suggest that it would be ': irable that the police should be instructed to bring every person known to hold a purchased (so albal) servant before the Magistrate to be dealt with mildly; and, morcover, that all placards in Chinese should be interpreted to the head department in the police. Such placards advertising rewards be runaway purchased slaves as were produced in Court would then cease, and other announcements would then be suppressed if they should prove to be as I incline to think obnoxious.

I am not so blind to consequences as not to see that an attempt to interfere with the present tem will entail public outlay to provide temporarily for the victims of that system till better posi- as can be secured for them; but if prisons up to the wants of a community are provided of necessity, is would be of equal duty to provide for putting down a system that by debasing all moral tone tends

* crime.

I have the honour to be,

.Sir,

Your most obedient Servant,

JOHN SMALE,

Chief Justice.

MINUTE BY DR. EITEL.

Having been directed to report on tliose points to which His Lordship the Chief Justice refers as Convenient to mention on the Bench, I have the honour to forward herewith replies to the following questions which, I think, are raised by the Chief Justice's remarks :—

1. Do the high prices realized by sales of Chinese girls to foreigners, whose kept women they one, contribute to raise that demand which is supplied by kidnapping?

The demand which is supplied by kidnapping, or by the kindred trick of inducing women through representations to leave their homes, originates in the first instance in the high prices paid for faxtitutes or concubines in places where Chinese women are rare, i.e. in Singapore and the Straits gene-