Re: KK Hovercraft Service in Borneo launched
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send a letter, he will be rewarded with four full weight dollars,
and the person detaining the slave will be rewarded with fifteen
full weight dollars.' These words are subsequently added:--'This
is firm, and the words will not be eaten.' I recently spoke in
reprobation of slavery from this Bench, and in consequence of my
remarks a gentleman who tore down this placard gave it to the
editor of the _Daily Press_, and in a letter in that paper he
stated that such placards are common, and that he had torn down a
hundred such placards. Has Cuba or has Peru ever exhibited more
palpable, more public evidence of the existence of generally
recognized slavery in these hotbeds of slavery, than such placards
as the one I now hold in my hand, to prove that slavery exists
in this Colony? The notices have been posted in a most populous
neighborhood, and have been in all probability read--they ought
to have been, they must have been read--by scores of our Chinese
policemen.
"Important as this Colony is, politically and commercially, it is
but a dot in the ocean; its area is about half that of the county
of Rutland; the circumference of this island is calculated at
about 27 miles, whilst that of the Isle of Wight is about 56
miles. The cultivated land on this island may be to the barren
waste about one-half per cent, and there is no agrarian slavery
here
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manipulated to make such a showing. This is not a medical book, and
any extended treatment of figures as to disease would be entirely out
of place in it, so we will content ourselves by saying that during
late years physicians of prominence from every part of the world have
assembled twice at Brussels for Conferences in regard to this matter.
These physicians are in large numbers Continental doctors, the very
ones who have had most to do in enforcing such measures. Each time
the number of opponents to the Contagious Diseases Acts has rapidly
increased, after listening to the testimony from all sides as to
their inutility; in fact, the whole force of opinion at each of these
Conferences, in 1899 and 1902, was against State Regulation, though
there was a division of opinion as to the substitute for it.
In 1903, the Minister of the Interior of France, the country where
these Acts originated, nominated an extra-Parliamentary Commission to
go thoroughly into these questions. This Commission held its numerous
sittings in 1905, and in the end by almost a two-thirds' majority
condemned the existing system of regulation in France, and furthermore
rejected the alternative proposal of notification with compulsory
treatment, by sixteen votes to one. In reporting on the Conferences
held in Brussels, the _Independence Belge_ said, in a leading article:
"Regulation is visibly decaying, and the fact is the more striking
because the country that instituted it (France) is at present the one
that meets it with the most ardent hostility."
CHAPTER 4.
MORE POWER DEMANDED AND OBTAINED.
In 1866 the Governor of Hong Kong, Sir Richard Graves MacDonnell,
determined upon the repeal of Ordinance 12, 1857, in order to
inaugurate "a more vigorous policy of coercion," (says the
Commission's report): "The key note of the new regime was struck by
the Governor's first minute on the subject, dated 20th
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universal testimony of all the girls who have been rescued, so we have
been told, by those who have been engaged in this rescue work for many
years--that every slave in Chinatown plans and dreams of nothing else
but of the day when, having served long enough to buy her freedom,
she will be granted it by her master or mistress, and then she can be
honorably married. But unless her freedom is purchased for her by some
lover, the cases are rare, indeed, that a girl is allowed to earn her
own freedom, though they are kept submissive by constant promises that
the goal is just ahead of them. A few days after the Oakland papers
had triumphantly asserted that it had been demonstrated that there was
not a single slave girl in Chinatown--a statement that everyone
who had any intelligence on the subject, including the newspapers
themselves, knew to be false--a lady in mission work received a
cautious hint in a round-about way that one of the girls s
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residence several times, the last time being the night before the
fatal eighteenth of April. A warrant was served at ten o'clock
that night, but being forewarned, the one named in it was with
friends at some distance from the city. The warrant summoned us to
court at two o'clock next day. God disposed of that case! No court
has ever passed judgment on it. Long after the excitement of these
days was over, Kum Ping returned to our Home; country air and a
free life are working their spell. It is hard to recognize in the
round, sun-tanned, happy face we see today, the unhappy slave girl
of Woon Ha's den on Spofford alley.
CHAPTER 18.
PERILS AND REMEDIES.
It is a matter of no small importance that the Christian public of
America should realize that in the Oriental slavery of its Pacific
Coast it faces a flood. One can gaze with indifference upon a little
stream that trickles through a wall, so long as it is thought to be
merely a natural spring of water; but when one is informed that this
is the trickling of water through a dike which dams out the raging
sea, the sensations are changed to a realizing sense of imminent
peril. If some are disposed to criticise this book for leading its
readers into past history and far distant countries, to tell them
harrowing tales, let them know it is intended to take them for a view
behind the dike,--that they may understand the source of the trickling
stream of brothel slaves that, almost unobserved, flows steadily into
our fair land, and know that the stream is the precursor of a flood.
No mere wall of immigration restrictions will ever get control of the
flow so long as men are permitted to hold slaves after they have once
been landed. And for the further reason, that so soon as China and
Japan have drilled a little longer with the fire-arms furnished them
by Western nations, they will