🚀 go-pugleaf

at once to the lowest depths of infamy? But that is what the
attempt to localize vice in one section of a town, or to legalize it
always means. When the informer at Hong Kong had insinuated himself
into a native house and by means of the bait of "marked money" caught
a victim and sinned with her, at once he threw open the window and
summoned the Inspector, who was in waiting outside, who would rush
in and arrest all the women and girls in the house, down to children
often only 13 or 14 years old. This was not all according to law, but
it seems to have been the regular practice. Says Mr. Lister, who was
Registrar General for the first year after the Ordinance of 1867 came
into operation: "As a general rule, the first thing I knew of a case
of an unlicensed brothel coming before me was the finding of a string
of women in my office in the morning." "Almost despotic powers" had
been put into the hands of the "Registrar General," and these were
some of the results. The "marked money" that had caught the victim
would now be sanctimoniously taken away from her and restored to the
Secret Service Fund. The woman would be fined or imprisoned, and the
other inmates of the house put through trial as accused of being
"common prostitutes" and inmates of an unlicensed brothel, and if the
Registrar General so decided, the house from which they came declared
in the Government Gazette as a licensed house of prostitution. The
keepers of licensed brothels, slave-dealers, procurers and such
characters hung around the court room to help