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their apprenticeship
as domestic slaves. We are informed that fully seven-tenths of the
domestic slave girls found in Chinese homes in America--and every
well-to-do Chinese family (except Christians) keeps at least one or
two slaves--end their lives in immorality. Some of them when they
become old enough are seized by their masters as concubines, others
are sent to the brothels. Reports of conditions at Hong Kong which we
have already quoted, speak of the special celebration of the entrance
of a virgin into prostitution, and the high prices paid by patrons for
this initiation, but leave it obscure as to the nationality of the men
who initiate girls into the life of a brothel slave. But Chinese in
San Francisco do not hesitate to make the charge that Chinamen recoil,
through moral sense or superstition, from deflowering a virgin, and
that this horrible privilege is purchased at a special price by the
white, not the yellow patrons of Chinese houses of ill-fame. Baker
alley has probably been the scene of more terrible brutality of this
sort than any other part of San Francisco. Before the rubbish was
cleared away, in the oasis of a broad desert of ashes in the burned
city, we visited this region, and found carpenters busy at the work
of reconstructing brothels. The slave pen was existent again, and we
entered the gateway leading to it and gazed upon the rapidly growing
structures within. Two white men of a class called "Watch-dogs," in
the days before the fire, occupied a sort of look-out and kept guard,
more especially upon the entrance to Baker alley. This region,
so largely of American manufacture, like other sections of San
Francisco's Chinatown, was displayed, by means of Chinatown guides for
pay to tourists, who were led to believe that they we