SLAVERY IN HONG KONG.
THE social questions which come up before the Colonial Office, as the ultimate referee from forty States in all degrees of civilisation, are naturally endless ; but few can be more perplexing than the one now coming up from Hong Kong. A system of slavery exists in that Colony of the most disgust- ing character ; it has been denounced both by the Governor and the Chief Justice, and the Colonial Office must, therefore, under pain of Parliamentary opprobrium, put it down. They are not unwilling, and do not deny, though they extenuate, the facts ; but to do it, evidently taxes all their experience in tentative legislation. About the facts, there is practically no dispute. Those who advise reform assert, and those who de- precate reform admit, that Chinese fathers and guardians do constantly sell their children, for money and by formal deed, into bondage,— the boys to be hereditary domestic servants, and the girls to be prostitutes, in houses so poor and low that their inmates cannot be recruited from among women really free. The lads and girls thus sold are, as is natural, frequently ill-used, always robbed of their wages, and sometimes, there is the gravest reason to believe, seriously assaulted by their pur- chasers, who are supported in retaining their slaves by the public opinion, not only of their own class, but of respectable Chinese. The native traders of Hong Kong, for example, are alarmed to the utmost by the prospect of a local Statute making the pur- chase of human beings an offence ; and in their petition declare that the practice is in accordance with Chinese law, is indispensable to society, and is most useful in checking infanticide, which otherwise would attain even larger
proportions than at present. In many cases, the girls sold profess the utmost unwillingness to enter on such a life, and in all there is reason to believe that they submit most unwillingly to some of the conditions of their slavery, as, for example, the absorption of their wages by their em- ployers. The Chief Justice, Sir John Smale, believes that their position is substantially that of slaves ; and no one who reads the Blue-book on the subject can doubt that he is in the right, though the word " slavery " is concealed under that of " adoption," and that an abuse exists which it is essential to the credit of Great Britain to suppress.
So far all is clear ; but when we come to the method of suppression, the perplexities are endless. That slavery exists in Hong Kong—true slavery, the sale from hand to hand of un- willing British subjects, intended to labour for life with- out wages—is past question, but it is also past question that the only sanction of the system is Chinese opinion. There is no law in the colony justifying slavery. Not only will no Court take cognizance of it, but the Chief Justice is a determined and even enthusiastic opponent of the system, and will, whenever he gets the chance, even strain the law to punish avowed or convicted purchasers of slaves. The lads in service and the girls in the brothels aro as absolutely by law free to depart or to complain as in England, and, moreover, it is specially admitted on all hands that they know this, and are quite aware of their own legal freedom. They are in bondage not to law, but to Chinese opjnion, which holds, first, that the patria potestas is divine and absolute, and transferable for money ; secondly, that a person so transferred may lawfully be compelled to obedience by pain ; and thirdly, that it is infamous for a slave to enfranchise himself or herself, without repaying the whole purchase-money. No one who reads the most able summary by the American Consul-General, Mr. Bailey, of the slave laws of China—laws almost as horrible as those formerly existing in the Southern States—can doubt that these are fixed prin- ciples; and as the Chinese of Hong Kong take all their ideas from the Chinese within the Empire, the whole weight of opinion, an opinion which is effective within their own minds also, operates to crush down the 10,000 slaves of Hong Kong. It is impossible to convince the purchasers that they are wrong in obeying an immemorial system, strongly sanctioned by their own Code—which makes it death by the slow torture of gradual slicing into little pieces, to strike a master or his relations— nearly impossible to convince the bought that they are right in declaring themselves free, an action, moreover, which would bring on them the terrorism by which the Chinese everywhere support their domestic system.
The non-recognition of slavery by the law is therefore of no use, and the question before the colony and the Colonial Office is what further step to take. The sales are already invalid ; the persons sold are already free; and yet so powerful is opinion, so rigid are Chinese ideas, and so effective, as we believe, is the secret terrorism, that slavery in a bad form undeniably exists. The difficulty is to devise some form of pressure which shall make freedom as real as slavery now is ; and it is so great that, as Lord Kimberley complains, Sir T. Pope Hennessy, while denouncing the system, has no remedy to suggest ; that Sir J. Smale, though enthusiastic to indiscre- tion on the right side, only proposes to extend inspection, which would be useless, and lead, probably, to gross abuses, such as are described in the horrible Report on the Con- tagious Diseases Ordinance presented to Sir J. Pope Hennessy in 1879 ; and that the Police Magistrate, Mr. Elliott, describes the power of punishment for the forcible detention of slaves as practically useless, except for purposes of extortion. He wants to punish, but can get no evi- dence. And finally, it is so great that Lord Kimberley, though assisted by his whole office, is obviously at his wit's end, and in a despatch of March 18th, for which the colony has been waiting for months, after recapitu- lating the facts with a clearness which shows him fully
informed, calls for more information still. He says :— 44 Still, I cannot avoid the conviction that the position of the children now under consideration is one of peril which may require safeguards. It would be possible to provide that entering into any agreement, written or oral, by which the right of possession of a child purported to pass for a valuable consideration, should be a misdemeanour ; but this would probably brand and punish as offences many transactions, advantageous to the child, both immediately and in after- life, and it would not reach such transactions when effected, as appears frequently to be the case, in the Empire of China, the child being subsequently brought into the colony. Another coarse would be to make all such transactions mis- demeanours, unless they conformed to certain specified con- ditions, prescribed so as to secure, as far as possible, that they should be for the welfare of the child. A third course would be to require all the children taken into adoption to be registered, and thereafter subject to visitation, such as is voluntarily undertaken in the case of what has been called the gutter children ' of this city, who have been conveyed
by charitable agencies to the Dominion of Canada and there apprenticed. But I am checked in the consideration of these and other propositions by my uncertainty as to the facts of the system." In other words, he postpones the whole matter almost indefi- nitely. The question cannot be left in that position, if only be- cause the moment this Blue-book is read, the anti-slavery leaders will be in arms ; and we strongly recommend the Colonial Office to issue a supplementary despatch, ordering the adoption of further remedies. One, the very first, we should have said, is to pass an Act making the payment of money for any child highly penal,—thus distinguishing finally between purchase and adoption, and destroying, so far as possible, the interest of the parents in such sales ; and the other, and probably much more efficacious one, is to authorise suits for a fixed rate of wages, to be instituted by any person held in bondage against the purchasers. Slavery has been defended on a hundred grounds, but in Hong Kong, as in the Carolinas, it has but one motive,—that it pays the owners. Make it certain that, whatever else happens, slave-labour shall be un- profitable labour, or labour involving great pecuniary risk, and slavery will cease. Slavery may be sanctioned by Chinese opinion to any extent, but if it were unprofitable, the purchase of slaves would very soon be regarded as a counsel of perfection, only to be obeyed in lands where the British flag did not fly. Insist that a slave shall be paid like a free man, and the able arguments for slavery are found to be either false, or too inapplicable to circumstances to be repeated. The " patriarchal" system is only divine while it fills the pocket. Slavery, first of all, is theft dignified by another name.
Previous page
