Part 8 (2/2)
Francis of necessity studied ... the whole law on the subject of slavery or bondage in every form here.”
Mr. Francis first reviews all the legislative measures existent at Hong Kong concerning slavery, in the clearest manner possible, leaving no doubts in the mind of any fair-minded person that laws were not wanting to put down slavery:
First: Hong Kong, being a Crown Colony, ”the power of the Sovereign in respect of legislation is absolute.”
Second: The proclamation of Sir Charles Elliott, of tolerance of native customs was ”pending Her Majesty's pleasure,” and no longer.
Third: Her Majesty's pleasure was declared at Hong Kong: (a) By the Proclamation of 1845; (b) ”By Ordinance 6 of 1845, 2 of 1846, and 12 of 1873, by the combined operation of which the law of England, common and statute, as it existed on the 5th day of April, 1843, became the law of Hong Kong.”
Says Mr. Francis of Ordinance 6 of 1845, ”The relations of husband and wife, parent and child, guardian and ward, master and servant, whatever they may have been when Hong Kong was Chinese, became from the date of that Ordinance what English law made them, and nothing more or less.”
”But in addition to the declarations of the Common Law,” declares Mr. Francis, the following are in full force at Hong Kong: ”The Act of the 5th George IV. c. 113, the Act of the 3rd and 4th William IV. c. 73, and the Act 6th and 7th Victoria c. 98, which have in the widest terms abolished slavery throughout the British dominions.” ”These Acts declare it unlawful for anyone owing allegiance to the British Crown, whether within or without the dominions of the Crown, to hold or in any way deal in slaves, or to partic.i.p.ate in any way in such dealing, or to do any act which would contribute in any way to enable others to hold or deal in slaves. This simple declaration, if it stood alone, would make every act of slave-holding a misdemeanour, but the Acts themselves make it piracy, felony, or misdemeanour, as the case may be, to do any of the acts declared to be unlawful. These Acts further declare that persons holden in servitude as pledges or p.a.w.ns for debt shall, for the purpose of the Slave Trade Acts, be deemed and construed to be slaves, or persons intended to be dealt with as slaves. Hundreds of persons are held in such servitude as pledged or p.a.w.ned in Hong Kong, and not one of the parties to such transactions has ever been proceeded against under these Acts.”
”In addition to the above-mentioned Acts of George, William and Victoria, there is also the Imperial Act, ent.i.tled The Slave Trade Act, 1873, which consolidates the laws for the suppression of the Slave Trade, and which is in force in Hong Kong by its own authority. We have also the provisions of the Local Ordinance 4 of 1865, sections 50 and 51, and 2 of 1875.”
”Offenses against the provisions of these Ordinances, so far as they relate to women or children, are still very common, and are growing more numerous every day, and until the system of prost.i.tution which prevails in this Colony, and the system of breeding up young girls from their infancy to supply the brothels of Hong Kong, Singapore, and San Francisco, _is declared to be slavery_, and is treated and punished as such in Hong Kong, no stop will ever be put to the kidnaping of women and the buying and selling of female children in Hong Kong. This buying and selling is only an effect of which the existing system of Chinese prost.i.tution is the cause. Get rid of that, and there is an end of kidnaping.”
Again the nail had been struck on the head. _Licensed brothel slavery_, as it exists at Hong Kong, was put forward by the Chinese merchants as something to be dealt with before British officials could consistently lay violent hands on the more trivial offenses of _domestic slavery and so-called ”adoption.” Brothel slavery_, says Mr. Francis, must be dealt with _as slavery_ before the practice of _kidnaping_ can be put under control. This lesson was learned long ago. What did all the laws against man-stealing and slave-trading ever accomplish so long as the slave owner was allowed to keep his slave?
As soon as slave-holding was declared impossible in the United States, there was no more trouble with slave-traders. Traders go to a market where they can dispose of their goods, not to a place where their kind of goods are a drug on the market.
Says Mr. Francis bluntly: ”The Chinese custom of adoption, whether of boys for continuing the family and wors.h.i.+p of ancestors, or of girls for the ordinary purposes of domestic service, is not the foundation of all this buying and selling of women and girls; it is only the pretext and excuse.” Mr. Francis states that the buying and selling of boys is rare as compared with the buying and selling of girls. That there are few Chinese families in Hong Kong.
”The better cla.s.s Chinese leave their wives in China. The transaction of purchase of these boys takes place at the home of the fathers of them in China. Seldom is it necessary to buy a son, as the usual custom when a wife has 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 prost.i.tution, 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 prost.i.tution, 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 prost.i.tutes ... 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 prost.i.tutes. These opinions were taken and adopted by the Commission of 1877-1879 ... Who and what are these prost.i.tutes 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 prost.i.tutes in Hong Kong to 4,000 or 5,000 respectable Chinese women.... Once in five years the stock has to be renewed. It is for this purpose, and not for the legitimate or quasi-legitimate purposes of Chinese adoption and Chinese family life, that children and women are kidnaped and bought and sold ... Until this slave-holding and slave-dealing are entirely suppressed, the grosser abuses arising out of it and incidental to it (kidnaping of women and children) can never be put an end to.”
It was on May 20th, 1880, that the Secretary of State asked for the first statement of Sir John Smale's views as to kidnaping and domestic slavery. His reply is dated August 26th, and in it he refers to reasons for his delay in replying, of which the Governor is ”well aware.” His supplementary letter enclosing the Memorandum of slavery by Mr. Francis, was dated Nov. 24th, 1880. On April 2nd, 1881, he wrote a third time to the Colonial Secretary, from which we gather that even up to that time his explanations had not been forwarded to Lord Kimberley, Secretary of State. Said he:
”I had hoped that these letters would have been forwarded last year, in the belief that they might have induced a less unfavorable view by Lord Kimberley of my judicial action as to these matters, and with the more important object of presenting what appears to me to be the great gravity of the evils I have denounced, as they affect the moral status of the Colony, in order that some remedy may be applied to them.... I am informed that His Excellency the Governor has been unable to obtain the opinion of the Attorney-General on the points raised.” ...
It is impossible not to feel that this neglect on the part of someone at Hong Kong to forward the Chief Justice's letters until the first of these was a year old (for they were actually sent in August, 1881), was a designed obstruction of his endeavors to set himself in the correct light, and to enlighten the Christian public of Great Britain as to the abuses existing at Hong Kong.
In this letter expressing regret at the delay of his letters, he speaks of convictions of eight more cases of kidnaping, and ”almost unprecedented brutal a.s.saults on bought children.” ”Considering the special waste of life in brothel life, and the general want of new importations to keep up the bondage cla.s.s of 20,000 in this Colony, the cases of kidnaping detected cannot be one-half of one per cent of the children and women kidnaped.”
”Two cases of brutal treatment of young girls by purchasers, their pocket-mothers, one little girl having had her leg broken by beating her, and the other having been shockingly and indecently burnt,--both probably weakened for life,--ill.u.s.trate the cruel pa.s.sions which owners.h.i.+p in human beings engenders here, as it ever has done elsewhere. In a case now before the magistrate, the evidence tends to show that a girl thirteen years old was bought by a brothel-keeper for $200, and forced, by beating and ill-treatment, into that course of life in a brothel licensed by law. Subject to such surveillance as these houses are by law, it seems to me such slavery is easy of suppression.”
At this time the official career of Sir John Smale at Hong Kong terminated.
CHAPTER 13.
THE EXTENSION OF SLAVERY TO THE STRAITS SETTLEMENT.
We have traced the development of slavery from State-protected brothel slavery to State-tolerated domestic slavery and ”adoption” of boys.
Now we turn to Singapore, to find that all these forms of slavery exist there under the British flag, with the addition of a coolie-traffic dangerously like slavery, also, and they are all under the management of the Registrar General, or ”Protector of the Chinese,” as he is always called at the Straits. For the general description of conditions in the Straits Settlements, more especially at Singapore, we give in full a paper read by an Englishman, a resident of Singapore for many years, at the Annual Conference of American Methodist Missionaries, held in Singapore in 1894,--a paper which was endorsed by that body:
It has come to be almost universally acknowledged that Singapore is indebted as much to Chinese as to British enterprise for its present commercial prosperity, and therefore the subject of Chinese labour which is vexing America and Australia, a.s.sumes a very different aspect in the Straits Settlements, and the fact that Chinese immigration has increased 50 per cent in the last ten years is looked upon as an unmitigated blessing. The magnitude of the Singapore labour trade will be understood when it is known that the number of Chinese who came to this port last year, either as genuine immigrants or for transs.h.i.+pment to other ports, was 122,029, which is actually more than the entire Chinese population of the town. In connection with the immigration of this mult.i.tude of men and women, speaking many dialects of a language which is wholly unknown to the officials of the British Government in the Straits, with the exception of perhaps half a dozen persons, it cannot be wondered at that many abuses arise, and the suspicion has gained ground and is frequently given expression to, in the public press and elsewhere, that many of the immigrants do not come to Singapore of their free will. Moreover, it cannot be denied that the circ.u.mstances under which the Chinese come to Singapore and are forwarded to their destination lend colour to this suspicion, so that it may fairly be inquired whether the efforts made by the Government of the Straits Settlements to control the Chinese coolie traffic and to prevent a secret form of slavery have been attended with any success, or are at all adequate to the requirements of the case.
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