modified the
practice to merely paying a monthly stipend. All slavery throughout
British possessions had been prohibited only a few years before the
settlement of Hong Kong, in 1833, when 20,000,000 pounds had been
distributed by England as a boon to slave-holders.

Hong Kong's first Legislative Council was held in 1844, and its first
ordinance was an anti-slavery measure in the form of an attempt to
define the law relating to slavery. It was a long process in those
days for the Colony to get the Queen's approval of its legislative
measures, so that a year had elapsed before a dispatch was returned
from the Home Government disallowing the Ordinance as superfluous,
slavery being already forbidden, and slave-dealing indictable by law.
On the same day, January 24th, 1845, the following proclamation was
made: "Whereas, the Acts of the British Parliament for the abolition
of the slave trade, and for the abolition of slavery, extend by their
own proper force and authority to Hong Kong: This is to apprise all
persons of the same, and to give notice that these Acts will be
enforced by all Her Majesty's officers, civil and military, within
this Colony."

The "foreigners," by which name, according to a custom which prevails
to this day in the East, we shall call persons of British, European or
American birth,--called a native mistress a "protected woman," and her
"protector" set her up in an establishment by herself, apart from
his abode, and here children were born to the foreigner, some to be
educated in missionary schools and elsewhere by their illegitimate
fathers and afterwards become useful men and women, but probably the
majority, more neglected, to become useless and profligate,--if girls,
mistresses to foreigners, or, as the large number of half-castes in
the immoral houses at Hong Kong at the present time demonstrates, to
fall to the lowest depths of degradation.

These "protected women," enriched beyond anything they had even known
before the foreigner came to that part of the world, with the usual
thrift of the Chinese temperament, sought for a way to invest their
earnings, and quite naturally, could think of nothing so profitable
as securing women and girls to meet the demands of the foreigners.
Marriage having always been, to the Oriental mind, scarcely anything
beyond the mere trade in the persons of women, it was but a step from
that attitude of mind to the selling of girls to the foreigner, and
the rearing o