🚀 go-pugleaf

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 assaults on bought children." "Considering the
special waste of life in brothel life, and the general want of new
importations to keep up the bondage class 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,--illustrate the cruel
    passions which ownership in human beings engenders here, as it
    ever has done elsewhere. In a case now be