as no son is to take another
wife, not to buy a boy for a son,--hence such buying of boys is
for servitude and for ransom, at Hong Kong." "Girls are not bought
and sold in Hong Kong for domestic servitude under Chinese custom.
They are bought and sold for the purpose of prostitution, here and
elsewhere, and instead of being apprenticed to the domesticities,
and of being brought up to be good wives and mothers, they
are bought and sold,--brought up and trained for a life of
prostitution, a life of the most abject and degrading slavery....
By the last census [this was written in 1880], there were in Hong
Kong 24,387 Chinese women to 81,025 men. Of these 24,387 women
the late Mr. May [Superintendent of Police] was of opinion that
20,000, or five-sixths, come under the denomination of prostitutes
... A Chinese doctor of large experience fixed the number of
quasi-respectable women at one-fourth the whole number, or say
6,000, leaving 18,000 prostitutes. These opinions were taken and
adopted by the Commission of 1877-1879 ... Who and what are these
prostitutes who form by far the greater bulk of the Chinese female
population of Hong Kong? The Report of the Commission answers the
question: 'The great majority of them are owned by professional
brothel-keepers or traders in women in Canton or Macao; they
have been brought up for the profession, and trained in various
accomplishments suited to their life ... They frequently
know neither father nor mother, except what they call a
pocket-mother,--that is, the woman who bought them from others ...
They are owned in Macao and Canton. They are bought as infants.
They come to Hong Kong at 13 or 14, and are deflowered at a
special price which goes to the owners. The owner gets the whole
of their earnings, and even gets presents given to the girls, who
are allowed three or four dollars a month pocket-money. When some
of the girls are sent away on account of age, new ones are got
from Canton. If these girls are not slaves in every sense of the
word, there is no such thing as slavery in existence. If this
buying and selling for the purpose of training female children up
for this life is not slave-dealing, then never was such a thing
as slave-dealing in this world. There are 18,000 to 20,000
prostitutes in Hong Kong to 4,000 or 5,000 respectable Chin