esent day the same old practice prevails in these licensed
brothels, and has never been forbidden or abolished?"

This was a center shot, and calculated to weaken the hands of at
least the guilty officials. What could they say? Were the officials
prepared, since the report of the Commission a few months before had
made public the scandals connected with the licensing and inspection
of brothels, to set about reforming the abuses by radical measures?
Certainly the Chief Justice was. He did everything in his power to
abolish slavery _as slavery_, not simply to abolish slavery when
unconnected with brothels. But subsequent history seems to indicate
that, from this point on, the British officials were ready to
compromise with the Chinese merchants, and the testimony from this
time forward was well-nigh universal in Hong Kong circles that
domestic slavery, or "domestic servitude," as Dr. Eitel recommended
that it should be called instead (since a weed by another name
may help the imagination to think it a rose), was very "mild" and
"harmless," and that the adoption of purchased boys was a "religious"
duty, or at least, had a religious flavor about it, as practiced by
the Chinese. But as we have already said, that adoption in order to be
lawful in China must be the adoption of one of the same surname.

On October 27th, 1879, the Chief Justice, at an adjourned sitting
of the Court for the purpose, sentenced two more offenders, one for
kidnaping a boy, and the other for detaining a girl with intent to
sell her. In the first case the Judge said:

"Received as you had been into the father's house in charity, you
availed yourself of the opportunity to steal his child, and tried
to sell the child openly, probably having hawked him from door to
door. The sentence of the Court on you, Tang Atim, is that you be
imprisoned and kept to hard labor for two years, and that you be
kept in solitary confinement for a period of one week in every two
months of your imprisonment."

Chan Achit, an old woman, convicted of having unlawfully detained a
female child of 11 years of age, with intent to sell her, was next
placed in the dock. His Lordship said:

"The evidence in this case has shown the extraordinary extent to
which, under cloak of China custom, the iniquity of dealing in
children has extended. From the evidence, I have no doubt that a
vagabond clansman to whom the father had occasionall