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(2) Mui-tsai are slaves, because they are deprived of their rights and liberty,

are not paid for their labour, and can be re-sold at any time.

(3) There have been innumerable cases of ill-treatment and neglect of mui- tsai. There have also been some cases of employers seducing their mui- tsai, or selling them for immoral purposes. In all such cases it is very difficult for these girls, owing to their ignorance, to defy their employers. (4) Child-drowning bears no relationship to the mui-tsai system inasmuch as in child-drowning the victim is invariably one or two days old, while girls sold as mui-tsai have generally attained the age of five or six years, an age at which they can be useful to their purchasers.

(5) The argument that the abolition of the system would lead to the starva- tion of a large number of poor children can be met by the argument that when employers lose the services of their mui-tsai they would have to em- ploy paid servant-girls to take their place; and so the daughters of the poor, instead of being sold as chattels, would become paid servants. (6) Mui-tsai keeping is not charity but, on the contrary, tends to encourage selfish and mercenary men to part with their children in order to enable themselves to be more self-indulgent.

(7) To pass a law with the object of merely preventing cruelty would mean the preservation of the poison in the system by neglecting the source of the disease.

(8) Registration should not cause undue inconvenience and trouble. At pre- sent, schools, companies, births and deaths, and medical practitioners have. to be registered, and no inconvenience has been experienced by the parties concerned.

(9) The system was abolished by law in China towards the end of the Manchu regime, and again at the beginning of the Republic; and if such could be done in so vast a country as China, there is no reason why it should not be done in this small Colony.

(10) Even if there were some flaws in the draft Bill, the proper way would be to point them out in order to have them remedied, instead of asking that the whole Bill be withdrawn.

The arguments of the other side for the withdrawal of the Bill are, roughly, as follows:

(1) Mui-tsai are not slaves, and have never been so regarded in China either by law or by custom. When a mui-tsai is married, she is allowed to look upon the home of her former employer as her own home and is treated as a member of the family.

(2) The lot of the majority of the mui-tsai in Hong Kong is far better than that of the children of poor families in the interior of China, the former being much better fed and clothed. Their parents, if they so wish, are allowed to see them at regular intervals.

(3) Mui-tsai are not always sold; some poor people, having too many children and being unable to support them all, may present some to well-to-do families in order to enable them to be properly brought up and married off.

(4) It can truthfully be said that about ninety or even ninety-five per cent. of the mui-tsai in Hong Kong are well-treated. Those employers who overwork or otherwise ill-treat their mui-tsai would not be deterred by re- gistration, and the only remedy would seem to be imprisonment without the option of a fine in case of gross cruelty. If there are cases of ill- treatment of mui-tsai there are also cases of ill-treatment of one's own children; a cruel hearted person in a rage loses the sense of discrimina- tion. Ill-treatment of children is not the fault of a system, but of in- dividuals. The illustration that to take measure merely for preventing cruelty to mui-tsai, without abolishing the system, resembles leaving the