more
overrun the country, and why is this relation of "protector" still
claimed? Why, to protect woman from rudeness, and insult and sometimes
even worse. But from whence comes that danger of rudeness and insult
or worse from which man is to protect woman? From man, of course.
Man is, then, woman's natural protector to protect her from man, her
natural protector. He is to set himself the task of defending her
from his injury of her, and he is charmed with the avocation. He will
protect her as Abraham protected Sarah when he took her into Egypt.
"Do so-and-so," said Abraham to Sarah, "that it may be well with
me,--for thy sake." The history of the Chinese slave woman as she came
in contact with the foreigner at Hong Kong and at Singapore proceeds
all along a pathway labelled "protection," down to the last ditch of
human degradation. "Well with me," was the motive in the mind of the
"protector." "For thy sake," the argument for the thing as put before
the woman and before the world.

CHAPTER 2.

TREACHEROUS LEGISLATION.

In 1849 a man whose name is known the world over as a writer of
Christian hymns, went to Canton as British Consul and Superintendent
of trade. After a few years he returned to England, and in 1854 was
knighted and sent out to govern the new colony of Hong Kong. It is he
who wrote that beautiful hymn, among others, "Watchman, tell us of
the night." He also wrote, "In the Cross of Christ I Glory." One is
tempted to ask, in which Cross?--the kind made of gilded tin which
holds itself aloft in pride on the top of the church steeple, or
the Cross proclaimed in the challenge of the great Cross-bearer,
"Whosoever doth not bear his Cross, and come after Me, cannot be my
disciple"? The Cross is the emblem of self-sacrifice for the salvation
of the world. Oh, that men really gloried in such self-sacrifice, and
held it forth as the worthiest principle of life! Did Sir John Bowring
hold aloft such a Cross as this, and, with his Master, recommend it
to the world as the means of its elevation and emancipation from the
blight of sin? We shall not judge him individually. His example should
be a warning to the fact that even the most religious men can too
often hold very different views of life according to whether they are
embodied in religious sentiments or in one's politics. But nowhere are
right moral conceptions more needed (not in hymn-book nor in church),
as in the enactments by which one's fellow-bein